Reading Yehuda Amichai: Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld in Conversation

Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is the author of twenty-six books and has received numerous awards, including the Robert Kirsch Award of the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American literature, the Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies, and honorary degrees from Yale, the Hebrew University, the University of Haifa, and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, which he edited, contributing the translation of 115 poems, has been praised in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and theNew York Times Book Review, which described it as an “expansive, magnificent new book.”

Chana Kronfeld is Professor of Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies) and the co-translator (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open: Poems (winner of the PEN Translation Prize). Kronfeld is the recipient of the Akavyahu Lifetime Achievement Award for her studies of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry.

Review of The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai 

“I am not exaggerating when I say that this is a book a whole generation—on two continents—has been waiting for. It is the only study of its kind in English, and it resolves and transcends decades of controversy and misguided readings of Amichai’s poetry in Israel and elsewhere.”—Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.