AMICHAI: THE TOLERANT IRONY OF ISRAEL’S NATIONAL POET

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

A ‘wonderful’ new collection of Yehuda Amichai’s verse shows the poet’s profound resilience—and the weight of his ghosts

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine   

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.

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