Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew: יהודה עמיחי; 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.
Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s.
(The Times, London, Oct. 2000)
He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.
After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It was about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the war of Independence in Israel, he visits his hometown in Germany, recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.
Amichai was invited in 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read from his poems at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
"God has pity on kindergarten children" was one of the poems he read. This poem is inscribed on a wall in the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv. There are Streets on his name in cities in Israel, and also one in Wurzburg.
Amichai was married twice. First to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.
He died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.
“Spy (1973)Many years ago,I was sentto spy out the land beyond the age of thirty.And I stayed thereand didn’t go back to my senders,so as not to be madeto tellabout this landand madeto lie.”
“A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.”
“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.”
“When you smile, serious ideas get exhausted. At night the mountains keep quiet beside you, in the morning the sand goes with you down to the beach. When you do nice things to me all the heavy industries shut down.”
“I know a man who photographed the view he saw from the window of the room where he made love and not the face of the woman he loved there.”
“Il diametro della bomba era di trenta centimetri e il diametro del suo raggio d'azione era di circa sette metri, con quattro morti e undici feriti... E non parliamo nemmeno del pianto degli orfani che si leva fino al trono di Dio e ben oltre, creando un creando un cerchio senza fine e senza Dio.”
“It was not an adventure; it was my life.”
“I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own. ”
“The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.”
“A man doesn't have time in his lifeto have time for everything.He doesn't have seasons enough to havea season for every purpose. EcclesiastesWas wrong about that.A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,to laugh and cry with the same eyes,with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,to make love in war and war in love.And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digestwhat history takes years and years to do.A man doesn't have time.When he loses he seeks, when he findshe forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loveshe begins to forget.And his soul is seasoned, his soulis very professional.Only his body remains foreveran amateur. It tries and it misses,gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.He will die as figs die in autumn,Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,the leaves growing dry on the ground,the bare branches pointing to the placewhere there's time for everything. ”
“And what will you do now? You'll collect lovesLike stamps. You've got doubles and no oneWill trade you and you have the damaged ones.”
“And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to belike barbed wire to keep out despair,hope must be a mine field.”