29 Facts About Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times.

Yehuda Amichai won international poetry prizes, and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.

Yehuda Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of eleven to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936.

Yehuda Amichai attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem.

Yehuda Amichai was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine.

In 1956, Yehuda Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War.

Yehuda Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963.

Yehuda Amichai's 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.

Yehuda Amichai was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987.

Yehuda 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.

Yehuda Amichai's work is characterized by gentle irony and original, often surprising imagery.

Yehuda Amichai's poems are full of references to God and the religious experience.

Yehuda Amichai was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism.

Many of Yehuda Amichai's poems were set to music in Israel and in other countries.

Yehuda Amichai's work was popular in English translation, but admirers of his poetry in the original Hebrew claim his innovative use of the language is lost in translation.

Yehuda Amichai traced his beginnings as a poetry lover to when he was stationed with the British army in Egypt.

Yehuda Amichai routinely conflates biographical details from different times into one poetic framework, and exploits drafts and poetic ideas that were recorded in different periods, for a poem that would be written years later.

Yehuda Amichai changed his name to Yehuda Amichai around 1946.

Ruth was caught in a traffic accident, as a result of which she had to have a leg amputated, and Gold claims that Yehuda Amichai felt guilt and responsibility.

Yehuda Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth".

Yehuda Amichai wrote many plays and radio plays, a book of short stories, and a second novel.

Yehuda Amichai is one of the great joyful lamenters of all time, endlessly documenting his anguish, throbbing pains, mistaken dreams, shortages of faith, abundances of ecstatic loves, and humiliations.

Yehuda Amichai received an Honor Citation from Assiut University, Egypt, and numerous honorary doctorates.

Yehuda Amichai became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Yehuda Amichai's work is included in the "100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature", and in international anthologies Poems for the Millennium by J Rothenberg and P Joris, and 100 Great Poems of the 20th Century by Mark Strand.

Yehuda Amichai was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but never won.

Yehuda Amichai sold his archive for over $200,000 to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.

Many of Yehuda Amichai's poems have been translated into Nepali by Suman Pokhrel, and some are collected in an anthology titled Manpareka Kehi Kavita.