Yehuda Amichai (; born Ludwig Pfeuffer 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times. Amichai was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes, and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Biography Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. His German name was Ludwig Pfeuffer. Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of eleven to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a soldier in the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the 1947–1949 Palestine war. After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Amichai studied the Torah and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955. In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It is about a young Israeli who was born in Germany; after World War II, and the 1947–1949 Palestine war, he visits his hometown in Germany and recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His 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. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad. Amichai was invited in 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read from his poems at the