Stephen Fredman
“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.”
Robert A. Caro
"The integrity of Nili Gold's research shines out of every page of this book. She has spent many years trying to find new sources that would lead to a better understanding of the life and work of Yehuda Amichai--and she has found them, caches of marvelously revealing letters and manuscripts. But Yehuda Amichai is more than a monument of scrupulous research, it is filled with brilliant insights into Amichai's interior world and into his poetry. In this book, Nili Gold sheds new light not only on the life and work of this great poet but on the very nature of poetry itself."
— Robert A. Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Yigal Schwartz
“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.”
Arnold Band
“Her book will be indispensable for all future studies of Amichai's poetry.”
Yael S. Feldman
“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.”
