Israeli poet, who also published short stories, novels, and plays. Yehuda Amichai was among the first to compose poems in colloquial Israeli Hebrew. His language is gently ironic, sometimes passionate or straightforward, or even emotionally dry. Many of his poems are addressed to Jerusalem. Amichai's own life was closely linked to the birth and battle for existence of the State of Israel. In 1982 he received the Israel Prize of Poetry, his country's highest honor.

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
like the air over industrial cities.
It's hard to breathe.

And from time to time a new shipment of history arrives
and the houses and towers are its packing materials.
Later these are discarded and piled up in dumps.

(from 'Ecology of Jerusalem,' A Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers, 1980; The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, newly revised and expanded edition, University of California Press, 1996, p. 136)

Yehuda Amichai was born Ludwig Pfeuffer in Würzburg, Germany, to a merchant family of Orthodox Jews. His ancestors had lived there in southern Germany since the Middle Ages. Amichai studied Hebrew from early childhood and received a religious education. After the Nazis came to power and the notorious Nuremberg Laws were adopted in the Third Reich, his parents, Friedrich Moritz Pfeuffer and Frieda Walhaus Pfeuffer, decided to emigrate to Palestine. The family settled finally in Jerusalem. Amichai's childhood love, daughter of a local rabbi, remained behind; she died in the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943. Little Ruth, Amichai's representative of the Holocaust, became the subject of some of his most intense poems; she is also alluded as "the little girl". In the poem 'Song of the Zion the Beaitiful' (Behind All This a Great Happiness Is Hiding, 1976) Amichai wrote: "My life is being blotted out behind me according to a precise map. / How much longer can those memories hold out? / They killed the little girl from my childhood and my father is dead."

During World War II Amichai served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. Later, when the War of Independence began, he fought as a commando with the Haganah underground, and took part in some of the toughest battles in the Negev. He was also in active duty in the army in 1956 and 1973. These experiences mark many of his poems. In 'Seven Laments for the War-Dead' (Behind All This a Great Happiness Is Hiding, 1976) he wrote: "Dicky was hit. / Like the water tower at Yad Mordechai. / Hit. A hole in the belly. Everything / came flooding out. // But he has remained standing like that / in the landscape of my memory / like the water tower at Yad Mordechai." Dicky became the symbol of all soldiers who died.

In another poem, 'The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner's House in Jerusalem' (Now and in Other Days, 1955), Amichai viewed bitterly the role of the international community in his country, which had been turned into a playground of peace negotiators: "And their secretaries are lipsticked and laughing, / and their sturdy chauffeurs wait below, like horses in a stable, / and the trees that shade them have their roots in no-man's land / and the illusions are children who went out to find cyclamen in the field / and do not come back".

Amichai studied at the Hebrew University, and then earned his living by teaching the Bible and Hebrew literature in secondary schools. From January 1947 to April 1948, he had a love affair with Ruth Z., who left him to move to the United States. While teaching at the Geula Elementary School, he changed his German surname, Pfeuffer, to a Hebrew one; it was suggested by Ruth Z. "Amichai" means my nation is alive. "Yehuda Amichai? Isn't it too bombastic?" was his first reaction. (Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet by Nili Scharf Gold, Brandeis University Press, 2008, p. 3)

Amichai had started to write poetry in 1949. His first collection, Akhshav uva-yamim ha-aherim (Now and in Other Days), came out in 1955. With his second collection, Be-merhak shete tikvot (1958), Amichai established himself as one of the major poets of the 'Palmach generation', writers who emerged out of Israeli's war for independence. It included such names as Nathan Zach (b. 1930), Dalia Ravikovitch, T. Carmi, and Dan Pagis. Despite Amichai's popularity, he was described by critics as heretical, even dangerous in the first two decades of Israeli statehood. A humanist, he refused to see the Palestinians as hostile "others". In a poem entitled 'Jerusalem' (Poems, 1948-1962) he said: "We have put up many flags, / they have put up many flags. / To make us think that they're happy. / To make them think that we're happy."

Much of Amichai's fiction is autobiographical. "My personal history has coincided with a larger history," he has said. "For me it's always been one and the same." His first novel, Lo me-ʻakhshaṿ lo mi-kan (1963, Not of This Time, Not of This Place) was about a young German Jew living in Israel after World War II and trying to understand the world which had created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi yitneni malon (1971), was about an Israeli poet living in New York. It was published while Amichai was a visiting poet at an American college. In 1971 and 1976 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dorot Visiting Fellowship (1983-84), and a visiting poet at New York University (1987).

In the background of Amichai's work is the biblical Hebrew, in which he incorporates colloquial expressions and language of the modern day world. Sometimes it follows the rhythms of biblical language. In 'National Thoughts' (Now in the Storm, Poems 1963-1968) Amichai wrote: "to speak now in this weary language, / a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled, / it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described / miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God." Grief, unresolved. hidden rage, and irony are elements of 'The Smell of Gasoline Ascends in My Nose' (Now and in Other Days), in which the army jet "makes peace in the heavens / upon us and upon all lovers in autumn".

Amichai's poems have often been recited on public occasions. Yitzhak Rabin read lines from his famous early work, 'God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children' (Now and in Other Days) as part of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. In the poem Amichai continues the title line with the words: "He has less pity on school children. / And on grownups he has no pity at all / he leaves them alone".

According to a story by Chana Bloch, "some Israeli students were called up in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As soon as they were notified, they went back to their rooms at the University, and each packed his gear, a rifle, and a book of Yehuda Amichai's poems." (from the 'Foreword' to The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, 1996, p. xi) However, similar stories have been told about young Russian, French, German etc. soldiers who take a book by their favorite poet to the front. In the 1970s the English poet Ted Hughes made Amichai's work known to English and American readers. Amichai died in Jerusalem on September 22, 2000. He was married twice: first to Tamar Horn; they had one son, and then to Chang Sokolov from 1964; they had one son and one daughter. From Akshav ba-ra'ash, all the dedications in his poetry books were either to his wife or to his children.

Amichai's works have been translated into some thirty languages and appeared in a number of anthologies. "He should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last 20 years," said the writer Jonathan Wilson in his review of Amichai's collection of poems, Open Closed Open, "but he knew that as far as the Scandinavian judges were concerned, and whatever his personal politics, which were indubitably on the dovish side, he came from the wrong side of the stockade." (The New York Times, December 10, 2000)

For further reading: The Doubts and Loves of Yehuda Amichai: Israeli, European, and International Poet by Ido Bassok; translated from Hebrew by Mark Joseph (2024); The Sound of Whisper: When Yehuda Amichai Wrote Hebrew Poetry, and Later by Yair Mazor (2022); The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl (2020); The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai by Chana Kronfeld (2015); Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet by Nili Scharf Gold (2008); 'Amichai, Yehudah' by Noam Flinker, in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 1, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Experienced Soul: Studies in Amichai, ed. Glenda Abramson and David Patterson (1997); 'Yehuda Amichai' in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, edited by Maynard Mack (1995); 'Amichai, Yehuda' by Daniel Weissbort, in Contemporary World Writers, edited Tracy Chevalier 1993); Voices of Israel by Joseph Cohen (1990); The Writing of Yehudah Amichai: A Thematic Approach by Glenda Abramson (1989)

Selected works:

• Akhshav uva-yamim ha-aherim, 1955 
  - Now and in Other Days (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Be-merhak shete tikvot, 1958
  - Two Hopes Away (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Be-merhak ha-tsiburit, 1959
• Be-ruah ha-nora’ah ha-zot, 1961
  - The World is a Room and Other Stories (translated by Elinor Grumet et al., 1984)
• Shirim: 1948-1962, 1962 (rev. ed. 1977)
  - Poems 1948-1962 (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Lo me-ʻakhshaṿ lo mi-kan, 1963
  - Not of This Time, Not of This Place (translated by Shlomo Katz, 1973)
• 'Akshav ba-ra'ash, Shirim 1963-1968, 1968
  - Now in the Uproar: Poems 1963-1968 (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Masa le-Ninveh, 1964 (play, prod. Tel Aviv)
• Pa ‘amonim ve-rakavot, 1968
• Mah she-karah le-Roni bi-Nyu York, 1968
• Selected Poems, 1968 (as Poems in 1969, translated by Assia Gutmann)
• Poems, 1969 (translated from the Hebrew by Assia Gutmann; with an introd. by Michael Hamburger)
• Mi yitneni malon, 1971
• Ve-lo 'al menat li-zekor, 1971
  - Now for the Sake of Remembering (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Selected Poems, 1971 (translated by Ted Hughes, Assia Gutmann, and Harold Schimmel)
• Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, 1973 (translated by Harold Schimmel)
• Me-ahore kol zeh mistater osher gadol, 1974
• Mas'ot binyamin ha-aharon mitudela, 1976
  - Travels of a Latter-Day Benjamin of Tudela (translated by Ruth Nevo, 1977) / Travels (translated by Ruth Nevo, 1986)
• Zeman, 1977
  - Time (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Amen, 1977 (translated by the author and Ted Hughes)
• On New Year's Day, Next to a House Being Built, 1979
• Shalvah gedolah: Sheelot u-teshuvot, 1980
  - Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers (translated by Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt, 1983 / selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Love Poems, 1981 (bilingual ed.)
• She'at hahesed, 1982
  - The Hour of Grace (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
  
• Me-adam atah ve-el adam tashuv, 1985
  - From Man You Are And To Man You Shall Return (selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, 1986 (edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell and Chana Bloch; as Selected Poems, 1988)
• Shirei Yerushalayim / Poems of Jerusalem, 1987 (bilingual ed.)
• Sefer ha-laylah ha-gadol, 1988
• The Early Books of Yehuda Amichai, 1988
  
• Gam ha-egrof hayah paam yad petuhah ve-etsbaot, 1989
  - Even a Fist Was Once Open Palm with Fingers (translated by Barbara Benjamin Harshav, 1991 / selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Ani yoshev ʻakhshaṿ kan / I Am Sitting Here Now, 1994 (bilingual edition)
• Yehuda Amichai, a Life of Poetry, 1948-1994, 1994 (selected and translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav)
  
• The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai: Newly Revised and Expanded Edition, 1996 (translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)
• Exile at Home, 1998  (photographs by Frederic Brenner; poems by Yehuda Amichai = Galut bayit)
• Patuah sagur patuah, 1998
  - Open Closed Open: Poems (translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, 2000 / selections in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai  (edited by Robert Alter, 2015)
• Hedpes veha-shir=The Print and the Poem, 2000
• Mi yitneni malon, 2001
  
• The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, 2015 (edited by Robert Alter)
  
• Ḥalanot 'Amiḥai = The Amchai Windows: 18 Poems of Yehuda Amichai, 2017 (translated by Rick Black; introduction by Robert Alter)