Yehuda Amichai

Nili Scharf Gold is an impressive scholar, and her reading of Amichai’s poems is enormously valuable. ... There is genuinely new and useful material is this book. ... He was always Israel’s best ambassador, whether on a public stage or in a social gathering, and that is the memory that will endure. But Nili Scharf Gold has given us fresh look and an important book. Anyone interested in Amichai will be grateful for it.

The complexities of the Hebrew revival are at the center of Gold’s exhaustively researched, passionately argued and highly persuasive study of Yehuda Amichai, Israel's 'beloved unofficial national poet.'

Groundbreaking. ... Gold’s skillful efforts have yielded an achievement of serious scholarship and academic significance.

This is a persuasive, unique book that is strongly supported by sources and poetry, a book that presents a new poet — more complex and fascinating than ever, and a faithful representative of his people. Not only does the new side of Amichai revealed in Gold’s book enrich his marvelous poetry, it depicts Israel as a multicultural society, gathered from all ends of the earth, bearing numerous and varied traditions.

Gold sheds new light not only on the life and work of this great poet but on the very nature of poetry itself.

An impassioned and insightful reading that seamlessly merges the story of one individual — a budding poet — with the story of a people during a decisive chapter in their national history. This book is a must for scholars of literature.

Her book will be indispensable for all future studies of Amichai’s poetry.

With the help of a treasure trove of retrieved love letters, Nili Scharf Gold has changed the landscape for understanding the poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Gold demonstrates in exquisite detail the extent to which “Israel’s national poet” camouflaged the German childhood that continued to haunt him.

Nili Gold’s exciting book offers a surprisingly fresh look into the creative laboratory of Israel’s beloved poetic spokesman, Yehuda Amichi. Combining meticulous research of untapped sources with superb intuition, Gold’s detective work uncovers the landscape of German childhood and mother tongue, both well hidden in plain sight — between and behind the Hebrew verses of Israel’s “national” poet. Using her startling findings to great effect, the author charts a unique roadmap of the life and verse of Amichai, raising, along the way, questions about other 'Minoan' layers similarly hiding in the literary corpus of every immigrant culture.