Ludwig Pfeuffer of Würzburg
Yehuda Amichai was born Ludwig Pfeuffer on May 3, 1924, in Würzburg, in Bavaria, into an Orthodox Jewish family. He grew up speaking German at home but learned Hebrew early, in a household where prayer and scripture were part of daily life. That religious upbringing would remain the deep current of his poetry long after he stopped being observant: the cadences of the siddur and the Bible were, he later said, as natural to him as speech.
In 1935, as Nazi persecution tightened, the family emigrated to Mandate Palestine, living briefly in Petah Tikva before settling in Jerusalem in 1936. The boy attended Ma’aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. Jerusalem would become the city of his life and of his poems, a place of stones, quarrels, prayers and lovers, which he wrote about more intimately than perhaps any modern poet. Würzburg, and the friends left behind there, would return to him in more painful ways.
A soldier’s education
Amichai’s youth was spent in uniform. During the Second World War he volunteered for the British Army and served in the Jewish Brigade. Stationed in Egypt, he came across an anthology of modern English poetry, with work by Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden; that chance find, he said, first made him think of becoming a poet. Discharged in 1946, he joined the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, and in the 1948 war fought on the southern front in the Negev. He served again in the Sinai campaign of 1956 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Around 1946 he took the Hebrew name Amichai, “my people lives.” A biography by Nili Scharf Gold claims the idea came from a girlfriend; Amichai himself said he chose it because it was socialist, Zionist and optimistic, as the names of that generation were meant to be. Between and after the wars he trained as a teacher at the David Yellin teachers’ college in Jerusalem, taught in Haifa, and then studied the Bible and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Poems in a living language
Encouraged by one of his professors, Amichai published his first collection, Now and in Other Days, in 1955. It announced something new. The dominant Hebrew poets of the pre-state generation had written in an elevated, rhetorical register suited to national myth. Amichai, with a group of younger poets sometimes called the Statehood Generation, wrote in the colloquial Hebrew of the street and the army, and mixed it, startlingly, with the language of the prayer book and the Bible, so that an ancient phrase might turn up in a love poem or a joke about tanks.
His subjects were ordinary life and its large questions: love and its endings, fathers and children, the dead of wars, Jerusalem, and a God who is often absent, comic or bewildered. In one poem God lies under the world like a mechanic under a car, trying in vain to fix it, an image some readers found sacrilegious. Critics praised his gentle irony, his surprising, concrete metaphors and what the scholar Robert Alter described as a momentum of sound in which one word seems to generate the next. Much of that wordplay, the biblical echo of an archaic term, for example, is hard to carry into translation.
Fiction, plays and the German past
Amichai also wrote prose. His novel Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963) follows a young Israeli archaeologist born in Germany who returns to his hometown, a thinly disguised Würzburg, to try to understand the world that produced the Holocaust. Woven through it is the memory of a childhood friend, Ruth Hanover, who lost a leg in a bicycle accident as a girl and was later murdered in the Holocaust. Amichai called her, in an interview, his Anne Frank, and she appears in his poems as “Little Ruth.” He insisted that the feeling she left him with was less guilt than the survivor’s burden a soldier feels when friends fall beside him.
A second novel, about an Israeli poet in New York, appeared in 1971, when he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He also wrote short stories, plays, radio plays and children’s books. For many years he taught literature at a teachers’ seminary in Israel and to overseas students at the Hebrew University, and in 1987 he was poet in residence at New York University.
A poet for the world
Amichai became the best-known Israeli poet abroad. His work appeared in the very first issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, in 1965; the next year he read at the Spoleto festival alongside Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Pablo Neruda. His first English collection, Selected Poems (1968), was translated by Assia Gutmann, and later translators included Hughes himself, Chana Bloch, Stephen Mitchell and Chana Kronfeld. Hughes called him one of the most essential poetic voices of the century.
English collections followed for three decades: Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Amen, Time, Love Poems, Great Tranquility, Poems of Jerusalem, Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers, and finally Open Closed Open (published in English in 2000), a long, searching meditation on the Bible, the body and faith that the poet Anthony Hecht compared to Eliot’s Four Quartets. His work has been translated into some 40 languages, and he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.
Israel’s people’s poet
At home Amichai achieved something rare: he was both a canonical poet and genuinely popular, read by soldiers, students and people who otherwise never opened a book of verse. His poems were set to music by Israeli and foreign composers, quoted at weddings and memorial services, and taught in schools. The critic Boaz Arpaly observed that since Natan Alterman no Israeli poet had been as widely read.
His honours included the Shlonsky Prize (1957), the Brenner Prize (1969), the Bialik Prize (1976) and the Israel Prize for Poetry (1982), and in 1986 he became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In December 1994 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited him to read at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, where Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat were honoured. Among the poems he read was “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” now inscribed on a wall of the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv.
Faith, doubt and Jewish memory
Amichai’s relationship with Judaism was the great argument of his work. Raised Orthodox, he became secular, yet his poems are filled with God, prayers, blessings and biblical characters, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, David, often turned upside down or seen from the side of the small and the forgotten. Readers have described him as a philosopher-poet in search of a humanism after theology. He kept faith less with doctrine than with the language and memory of the tradition.
He was also a poet of Jewish history as lived by one man: an immigrant child from Germany, a survivor by emigration of a community the Nazis destroyed, a soldier in four wars. He wrote against the glorification of war and the turning of the dead into symbols, consistently putting the living person before the monument. That stance, at once patriotic and deeply sceptical of national myth, made him a moral as well as a literary voice for many Israelis.
Family and final years
Amichai was married twice. With his first wife, Tamar Horn, he had a son, Ron; with his second wife, Chana Sokolov, he had a son, David, and a daughter, Emmanuella. He lived in Jerusalem for the rest of his life. He died of cancer in September 2000, at the age of 76.
Streets are named after him in Israeli cities and in his birthplace, Würzburg, a quiet reconciliation between the German boy and the Hebrew poet.
Since his death his archive has fed a lively scholarly debate. In a biography, Nili Scharf Gold argued that Amichai deliberately suppressed his German childhood and early loves in his poetry, building what she called a poetics of camouflage. Robert Alter and Boaz Arpaly pushed back, noting that his major novel dwells at length on Würzburg and that a poet is under no obligation to set down his life in full; Arpaly added that Amichai never hid that he was an immigrant and the son of immigrants. The argument itself is a measure of his stature: few modern poets have had their silences studied so closely.
Legacy
Amichai changed what Hebrew poetry could sound like. He brought the language of the street and the language of the synagogue into the same line, and showed that a modern, secular Israeli could argue with God in the words of the prayer book. He made the personal, a love affair, a quarrel, a father’s memory, stand for the experience of a whole generation, and he gave readers far beyond Israel a human, ironic and tender picture of a country usually seen only through headlines. Decades after his death his lines are still quoted in moments of grief and hope, from Israeli memorial days to, in 2025, a Christmas address in Rome.
Sources & further reading
Yehuda Amichai, Wikipedia · Yehuda Amichai, Academy of American Poets (poets.org) · Yehuda Amichai, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.