Nathan Zach

Nathan Zach was born on December 13, 1930, in Berlin, under the name Harry Zeitelbach.[5] His father was German-Jewish and his mother was Italian, and he was an only child.[5]

A retrospective account describes the family fleeing to Paris in 1935 after a death sentence was reportedly issued against Zach's father, then moving to Eretz Israel the following year.[6] Sources differ on the chronology: Encyclopedia.com says his parents brought him to Palestine in 1935, while ynet reports that he was seven when he immigrated.[1][5] The family settled in Haifa, where Zach grew up among German-Jewish immigrants.[6]

His parents struggled to adjust to life in Israel while seeking a strong education for their son.[2] Retrospective accounts describe the gap between his European background and his new surroundings as formative, producing a sense of displacement and cultural alienation that remained present in his poetry.[2][6]

At seventeen, while still in secondary school, Zach was recruited to serve in the 1948 War of Independence.[5] He served as an Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer until 1951.[5] After demobilization he enrolled to study philosophy and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, though financial difficulties interrupted his studies there.[5] He later completed undergraduate work in Hebrew and comparative literature at Tel Aviv University; a separate source records a bachelor's degree in philosophy and political science from the Hebrew University.[5][4] The discrepancy reflects conflicting biographical accounts.

Zach began publishing poetry in the early 1950s in the journal Likrat ("Towards"), which he edited alongside Benjamin Hrushovski, later known as Benjamin Harshav.[4][2] The Likrat circle brought together young poets including Aryeh Sivan and Moshe Dor; later associates included Yehuda Amichai, David Avidan, and Daliah Ravikovitch.[2] The group published alternative literary journals, among them Likrat and Akhshav, and challenged literary frameworks associated with the established journals edited by Nathan Alterman and Avraham Shlonsky.[2] Zach also edited Yokhani with Ori Bernstein in the early 1960s and was active in founding Akhshav.[4]

His first appearance in book form came through the collaborative collection Bishlosha ("With Three"), published by the Likrat group in 1953 with Moshe Dor and Aryeh Sivan.[7] His first solo collection, Shirim Rishonim ("First Poems"), appeared in 1955 and was warmly received. Shirim Shonim ("Different Poems") followed in 1960.[5]

Over subsequent decades Zach published more than thirty books spanning poetry, essays, prose, translations, and plays.[2] Poetry collections include Kol Ha-Ḥalav Ve-ha-Devash ("All the Milk and Honey," 1966), Ẓefonit Mizraḥit (1979), Anti-Meḥikon (1984), Keivan She-ani Ba-sviva (1996), and Ha-Zamir Kevar Lo Gar Po (2004).[4][2] His 1997 work Mot Imi ("The Death of My Mother") combines prose and poetry in a meditation on his mother's physical and mental decline and her experience as an Italian-born stranger in the country that became her home.[4]

Zach's work as a translator was extensive and wide-ranging. He translated Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle and plays by Max Frisch, and he produced a Hebrew edition of Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish and Other Poems, published by Am Oved in Tel Aviv in 1988, in a facing-page Hebrew-English format with his own annotations and editorial apparatus.[8][2] He translated Arabic folk songs with Rashed Hussein in Dekalim u-Temarim (1967) and published essays in Kavei Avir (1983).[4] He edited Ya'akov Steinberg's selected works and co-edited The Burning Bush: Poems from Modern Israel with Moshe Dor.[4] Together with literary scholar Dan Miron, he also edited the literary and arts almanac Agra during the 1980s.[7]

Many of Zach's poems were set to music and entered the repertoire of popular Israeli song. His most prominent musical collaborator was his close friend Matti Caspi.[2] Songs drawn from his verse include "A Second Bird," "How Is It That a Star," "When God First Said," "When You Called, Your Voice Trembled," "It Is Not Good for Man to Be Alone," and "For Man Is a Tree of the Field."[2] The National Library's catalog records his contribution to the album Shirim Ba-emtza Ha-laila ("Songs in the Middle of the Night"), performed by Nurit Galron and first issued in 1981, with songs including "Ki Ha-adam Etz Ha-sadeh" and "Kulanu Zekukim La-ḥesed."[9]

In the academic sphere, Zach moved to England in either 1967 or 1968 and remained there until 1978 or 1979, completing doctoral work in English literature at the University of Essex.[4][5] He was awarded his PhD in 1970.[4] After returning to Israel he lectured at Tel Aviv University and eventually joined the University of Haifa as a professor of comparative literature, a position he held from 1993.[4][1]

Zach emerged in the mid-1950s as a leader of what has been called the Hebrew Modernistic Revolution, a sustained effort to reshape the language, tone, and subject matter of Israeli verse.[1] Alongside contemporaries including Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, T. Carmi, and David Avidan, he represented a generation that favored understatement, close attention to everyday reality, colloquial diction, and a withdrawal from collective and ideological poetry.[3] Where earlier Hebrew poets had looked to Pushkin and Schiller, this generation turned toward modern English and American poetry, breaking with the Alterman-Shlonsky tradition of classical structures and ordered rhyme.[3]

Zach's poetry has been characterized as minimalist, incisive, and concentrated on small, everyday, personal matters. His style inspired other writers and marked him as a leading figure of a new Israeli lyricism capable of moving readers without theatrical excess.[7] His verse avoids sentimentality, deploying simple imagery, humor, irony, wordplay, and repetition, with subjects ranging across love, death, human folly, and the transience of relationships.[4] His works have also been described as drawing "innovative near-liturgical and musical qualities from everyday spoken Hebrew."[3]

Critically, Zach's influence extended from what he advocated as much as from what he wrote. His poetic ideal has been described as a "poetics of modesty": simpler themes, syntax, and diction; understated rhetoric; flexible rhyme and rhythms shaped by conversational language; and subtle irony.[1] Influenced by Anglo-American Imagism, his critical writings emphasized the object over the subjective presence of the speaker, a position examined in a 2024 academic study from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.[10] The study argues that Zach's ideal of concreteness emerged in the 1950s but was not yet fully realized in the poetry of that decade, and that later Hebrew Imagist poetry could more fully achieve it in the 1970s.[10] It also challenges accounts of the Statehood Generation as a straightforward poetic rebellion, proposing a social-economic interpretation linking the pursuit of autonomy in Imagist poetry to the development of capitalist society.[10]

Literary scholar Dan Miron assessed Shirim Shonim as a foundational book of new Israeli literature and described Zach as a dominant figure in Hebrew letters by 1966.[2] Miron identified specific elements of Zach's influence on later poets: rhythmic line organization, enjambment, unexpected rhyme, and the poetic use of contemporary spoken language.[2] Israeli Ministry of Education teaching materials discuss "The Right Song" from Kol Ha-Ḥalav Ve-ha-Devash and "One Moment," the opening poem of Shirim Shonim, alongside themes including wonder, nature, and biblical or Talmudic sources.[11]

A major episode in Zach's career was his 1959 essay Hirhurim al Shirat Alterman ("Reflections on Alterman's Poetry"), published in the literary journal Akhshav ("Now").[7] In it, Zach subjected Nathan Alterman, then a leading Israeli poet and cultural figure, to a systematic critique of his language, style, meter, rhyme, and way of engaging with the world.[7] He criticized other prominent writers of the older generation as well, including Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg.[7]

The essay's attack was pointed and personal. Zach called one of Alterman's poems "an assemblage of fireworks" and wrote that "his ability to be a person participating in the world and giving expression to it is flawed."[7] He argued that Alterman's use of rigid meter and rhyme made the poetry insensitive to language and weakened its capacity to convey emotion.[2] Some literary figures received the essay's forceful tone as an act of "patricide" — an assault not merely on one poet's technique but on an established literary inheritance.[2]

A reported confrontation followed at Tel Aviv's Café Kassit, a gathering place for the city's literary community. When an Alterman supporter reportedly called Zach an "idiot," Alterman silenced him with the reply: "Hush. If only he were an idiot."[7] The National Library's account says Alterman was deeply hurt by the criticism.[7]

The affair did not end the relationship between the two men. Zach later apologized to Alterman for the sharpness of his wording while maintaining his intellectual position, and he expressed admiration for Alterman privately.[2] After Alterman's death, Zach wrote poems expressing mixed feelings about having wounded him.[7] In the 1980s, while editing the literary almanac Agra with Dan Miron, Zach included Heinrich Heine's poem "Donna Clara" in Alterman's translation, an acknowledgment of Alterman's craft that contrasted with the earlier polemic.[7]

The physical record of that struggle later became part of the public cultural inheritance. In 2022, the National Library of Israel received a copy of Alterman's collection Kokhavim Ba-Ḥutz ("Stars Outside") that had belonged to Zach, purchased and donated by Uri and Mirit Eisen.[12] Zach had filled the margins with handwritten judgments: beside a stanza of "Zavit shel Parvar" he wrote "theatrical," and in notes on "Yare'aḥ" he wrote "monotonous."[12] The Library also received Zach's annotated copy of Alterman's Ḥagigat Kayitz ("Summer Celebration"), donated by Zach's widow, Sarah Avital. Some notes in that volume were described as showing Zach's satisfaction at what he interpreted as evidence of Alterman absorbing his criticism.[12]

Zach's legacy rests on two interconnected achievements: a body of poetry that reshaped the emotional register of modern Hebrew verse and a critical intervention that helped redirect Israeli literary culture. His poems — spare, ironic, and attentive to ordinary life — found new audiences as songs performed by Israeli artists across multiple generations.[2]

The Jewish Review of Books described his poetry as "brilliant, stripped-down existentialist verse" and argued that it revolutionized Hebrew poetry in the 1960s.[13] Writing in 2014, when Zach was eighty-three, the publication identified him as a contender for the unofficial status of Israel's "national poet," but argued that his distance from the Zionist enterprise and the limited public reach of his later work kept him from fully occupying that role.[13]

His honors reflect the depth of his standing in Israeli cultural life. He received the Bialik Prize for Literature in 1982, the Israel Prize for Hebrew poetry in 1995, and the ACUM lifetime-achievement award in Hebrew song in 2003.[2] He received an Italian international poetry prize in 2009 and was named a Knight of the Italian Republic, connecting him to the country of his mother's origin.[2] The University of Geneva awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2004 for his contribution to renovating poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.[4]

On his death in November 2020, President Reuven Rivlin asked: "Who will now encapsulate for us the essence of pain? Who will knead the Hebrew language with such an original, precise hand?" Rivlin concluded by calling Zach "poet of day-to-day life, poet of the now."[14] At Zach's request, his burial at Kibbutz Einat cemetery was secular, without eulogies, and included three of his poems: "I Saw a Bird of Great Beauty," "For Man Is a Tree of the Field," and "I Have Not Yet Said Everything."[14]

Zach was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2009, and his condition worsened significantly in 2016, after which he lived in the nursing-care department of Mish'an in Ramat Ef'al.[14] He died at age 89 at Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer.[14]

Zach's public political positions generated sustained controversy through the final decades of his career. In 1988 he and literary critic Nissim Calderon resigned from leadership of an advisory committee for an International Poetry Festival planned to mark Israel's fortieth anniversary, stating that the festival could not be separated from the government's military actions in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria. Their letter prompted controversy, other contributors also resigned or announced boycotts, and the festival was ultimately cancelled.[1]

In 2010, remarks Zach made in a radio interview comparing European and Middle Eastern Jewish communities drew sharp public criticism. He said: "The one lot comes from the highest culture there is — Western European culture — and the other lot comes from the caves." Hundreds of people signed a petition calling for his writings to be removed from the national education curriculum.[15] In 2014 he took out a newspaper advertisement defending Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's use of the term "genocide" to describe Israel's military operation in Gaza.[16] In January 2015, Zach placed a further advertisement wishing Abbas "blessings on the way to the Hague court" as the International Criminal Court opened a preliminary investigation into alleged Israeli actions during that conflict.[16]

The Jewish Review of Books characterized Zach as having long distanced himself from the Zionist enterprise, an attributed critical assessment rather than a settled biographical verdict.[13] Zach also said that violence on Israeli roads and in schools had "seeped from the occupation" and stated that he would not set foot in occupied territory.[5]

Some biographical details remain difficult to pin down. Sources offer differing accounts of when the family arrived in Palestine, of which university granted Zach his undergraduate degree, and of the precise dates of his English sojourn. A reported encounter at Allen Ginsberg's New York apartment — in which Zach allegedly met Keith Haring and Bob Dylan, declined a drawing from Haring, and received an inscribed Beatles record from Dylan — is presented in a retrospective account as a story Zach himself told, without independent corroboration.[6]