Amichai: the Tolerant Irony of Israel's National Poet

In 1944, Ludwig Pfeuffer was a 20-year-old soldier stationed in Egypt with the British Army. Born in Wurzburg, Germany, to a family that had lived there for centuries, the young Ludwig had fled the Third Reich with his parents in 1935 and made a new life in British-controlled Palestine. The British were not exactly popular with the Jews of Palestine—the government had limited Jewish immigration at a crucial moment and continually put off the creation of a Jewish state. But during World War II, with Nazi armies in North Africa, many young Jews had enlisted in the British forces as a matter of self-defense. By the later stages of the war, however, the Germans had been expelled from Africa, and there was little for Pfeuffer and his fellow Jewish soldiers to do in Egypt—except to smuggle weapons and immigrants to Palestine, in preparation for the postwar struggle everyone knew was coming.

One of the amenities provided for British soldiers were mobile lending libraries, which made the latest English books available. Decades later, in an interview with the Paris Review, Pfeuffer—who was now known around the world as the poet Yehuda Amichai—recalled a day when he came across a library truck that had overturned in the desert:

Continue reading "Amichai: the Tolerant Irony of Israel's National Poet" at...