Yehuda Amichai's novel faced his German childhood

Person: Yehuda Amichai
Lived: 1924–2000
Field: Poetry
From: German-born Israeli

The story

Yehuda Amichai was born Ludwig Pfeuffer in Würzburg, Germany, in 1924, into an Orthodox Jewish family, and grew up speaking both German and Hebrew. In 1935, when he was eleven, the family left Nazi Germany for Mandate Palestine, eventually settling in Jerusalem. Many of the Jews who stayed behind in Würzburg, including children he had known, were later murdered in the Holocaust.

Although he is best known as a poet, Amichai also wrote short stories, plays, radio plays, children's literature and two novels. In his poetry he touched on his German childhood only in fragments. In prose he confronted it at length. His first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, published in Hebrew in 1963, follows a young Israeli born in Germany who, after the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence, returns to his home town and recalls his childhood there, trying to make sense of the world that produced the Holocaust.

The book is openly autobiographical. The home town, given the fictional name Weinburg, is closely modelled on Würzburg, and the story draws on Amichai's own return visit and on his memories of a childhood friend, a girl he called Little Ruth, who was deported and killed in 1944. Amichai once described her as his Anne Frank. The literary scholar Robert Alter has noted how much elaborate attention the novel devotes to Würzburg.

An English translation by Shlomo Katz was published in New York in 1968. Amichai's second novel, about an Israeli poet living in New York, followed in 1971, while he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The novel remains essential for readers who want to understand where the poet came from, and his ties with his birthplace were eventually restored. In 1981 Würzburg awarded him its prize for culture, a street in the city now bears his name, and a German study published in Würzburg in 2004 examines the novel as a work about remembering and forgetting.