Amichai, Gilboa Share Israel Prize for Poetry
April 28, 1982
Yehuda Amichai receives the Israel Prize for poetry jointly with Amir Gilboa. The other winners are architect Avraham Yaski, chemist Yehoshua Yertner, former Agriculture Minister Haim Gvati, archaeologist Ruth Amiran, economist Roberto Bachi, and educators Ze’ev Vilnay and David Benvenisti.
Born Ludwig Pfeuffer in Würzburg, Germany, on May 3, 1924, Yehuda Amichai became one of Israel’s foremost poets. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family that moved from Germany to Palestine in 1935 after the rise of the Nazi party to power. In 1936, the family settled in Jerusalem. The city became a central theme and setting in many of his poems. He adopted the Hebrew surname Amichai, meaning “my people live,” and began using his given Hebrew name, Yehuda, around 1946.
Amichai was drafted into the Jewish Brigade of the British army during World War II. He served in Egypt, where he found an anthology of British poetry that included works by poets Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. After the war, Amichai became a teacher. He then fought in Israel’s War of Independence as a commando with the Palmach, an underground strike force of the Haganah. He also participated in the 1956 and 1973 wars.
Amichai is considered by many to be Israel’s greatest poet. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages. Amichai’s work is distinctively modern, using stark language to find the transcendent in everyday objects, such as airplanes and bombs, and to depict erotic intimacy while alluding to the Bible. He often connects his personal experiences of family, religion and war to themes of love and loss. In his later years, his poems focus more on aging and mortality. On the day after Amichai’s death in September 2000, Robert Alter, a scholar of Hebrew literature who publishes an English language collection of 550 Amichai poems in 2016, says, “There is a tension between personal experience and the violent pressures of history. Writing about himself, [Amichai] is also writing about Everyman.”
Amichai published 19 collections of poetry, two novels, several short stories, a series of plays and countless articles. At the Israel Prize ceremony on April 28, 1982, his poetry is cited for “its combination of lyrical and everyday themes express the world of a disillusioned generation.”
The archive of Amichai’s work and correspondence is housed at Yale University in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Contained therein is Amichai’s personal diary, which he maintained for 40 years. There are 1,500 letters written to Amichai from the early 1960s through 1990, and Israeli correspondence from politicians, authors, poets and intellectuals. Overseas correspondence includes letters from the likes of Ted Hughes, Arthur Miller, Erica Jong and Paul Celan. In addition to the letters, the archives hold Amichai’s numerous unpublished poems, stories and plays and 50 of Amichai’s notebooks and notepads.