Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet by Nili Scharf Gold

Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century’s (and Israel’s) leading poets. In this remarkable book, Nili Scharf Gold offers a profound reinterpretation of Amichai’s early works and reconstructs his poetic biography. Her close reading of his oeuvre, untapped notebooks, and a cache of unpublished letters to a woman identified as Ruth Z. that Gold discovered convincingly demonstrates how the poet’s German past infused his work, despite his attempts to conceal it as he adopted an Israeli identity.

NILI SCHARF GOLD is a professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Not Like a Cypress (Hebrew) and Haifa: City of Steps.