Nathan Zach

Nathan Zach (1930–2020) was an Israeli poet, translator, editor, critic, prose writer, songwriter, and playwright whose work helped reshape Hebrew poetry after the establishment of the State of Israel. His importance rests not only on the poems he wrote, but also on the arguments he made about poetry, the writers he edited and introduced, the students he taught, and the way his words entered the country’s musical and cultural memory.

Zach was born Harry Seitelbach in Berlin on December 13, 1930, to a Jewish father born in Przemyśl and a mother from Turin. His family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1936, after the Nazis came to power. The passage from Europe to the emerging Hebrew-speaking society formed part of the historical and cultural background of a writer whose work repeatedly examined language, belonging, memory, and the fragile individual.

During Israel’s War of Independence, Zach served in the Israel Defense Forces and later worked as an intelligence and security officer in the 8th Brigade. He remained in the army until 1951 and was discharged with the rank of captain. At the same time, he was already turning toward literature. As a teenager he adapted stories and wrote material for children’s newspapers; in adulthood he became one of the most influential Hebrew poets of his generation.

A new rhythm for Hebrew poetry

Zach’s first book appeared in 1953, in the joint volume At Three, published with Moshe Dor and Aryeh Sivan by the Likrat group. He published First Poems in 1955, followed by Other Poems in 1960, a collection widely regarded as one of the defining achievements of his early career. His later poetry books included All the Milk and Honey, Instead of a Dream, Northeasterly, Anti-Erasure, Dog and Bitch Poems, Because I’m Around, Because Man Is the Tree of the Field, The Nightingale No Longer Lives Here, All the Poems and New Poems, From the Place Where We Were Not to the Place Where We Will Not Be, and They Say It’s Really Beautiful There, published in 2016.

His achievement was simultaneously literary and cultural. In the 1950s he belonged to the Likrat circle, alongside poets including Yehuda Amichai, David Avidan, Moshe Dor, Aryeh Sivan, Israel Pinkas, and Benjamin Harshav. His 1959 essay Thoughts on Alterman’s Poetry, published in the journal Now, became a forceful manifesto for a new poetic sensibility. It challenged the pathos, regular meter, and formal symmetry associated with important earlier Hebrew poets, particularly Nathan Alterman.

Zach did not reject every rhyme or rhythm. He argued instead that poetic form should grow from the experience being described rather than impose an artificial structure upon it. He favored flexible meter, precise language, and a Hebrew that could move naturally between everyday speech and literary expression. His approach helped make free verse and conversational diction central possibilities in modern Hebrew poetry.

At the center of Zach’s poetry stands the individual voice. His speakers often encounter strangers, loneliness, love, loss, and the unstable realities of modern life. Rather than speaking primarily in the collective voice associated with earlier national poetry, Zach gave prominence to the singular “I”—vulnerable, questioning, and attentive to ordinary experience. His poems also draw on the Bible, the New Testament, and Greek mythology, but use those cultural inheritances to illuminate contemporary human situations.

From the page into Israeli music

Zach’s poems became part of Israeli life through music as well as books. Texts such as “Because Man Is the Tree of the Field,” “A Second Bird,” “How Is It That a Star,” “Refrain,” “Her Beauty Is Unknown,” “Alone,” “When God First Said,” and “I Haven’t Said Everything Yet” were set to music and performed by major Israeli artists, including Mati Caspi, Shlomo Artzi, Nurit Galron, Shalom Hanoch, Arik Einstein, Hava Alberstein, and Yoni Rechter.

This movement from the printed page to the stage, radio, and recording studio gave Zach’s work an unusually broad public life. In 1981 Nurit Galron released Songs in the Middle of the Night, an album based entirely on his poems. Zach wrote the album’s introduction, and his poetry reached listeners who might never have encountered it in a literary volume. Other musicians later recorded albums devoted to his work, while Zach himself participated in recordings in which he read his poems over music by Shlomi Frig.

He was also an important cultural translator. His translations included works by Bertolt Brecht, Allen Ginsberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and other poets and playwrights. By bringing these voices into Hebrew, he connected Israeli readers and theater audiences with European and American literary traditions. Translation, for Zach, was not a secondary activity: it was one of the ways Hebrew culture could remain open, alert, and in conversation with the wider world.

Editor, teacher, and public literary figure

Zach treated poetry as a cultural conversation, not only as a private act. Between 1995 and 1998 he edited and published 25 booklets under the title Here, presenting poets to a broad readership. The project created space for writers and translations and encouraged readers to encounter poetry beyond the limited circles of literary specialists. He also wrote essays and studies on poetry, modernism, romanticism, and Israeli literature, including Time and Rhythm in Bergson and in Modern Poetry and Poetry Beyond Words: Theory and Criticism.

His influence also operated through education. After earning a degree in philosophy and political science from the Hebrew University, he taught at Israeli institutions of higher education from 1960 to 1967. He lived in England from 1968 to 1978 and completed a doctorate at the University of Essex. After returning to Israel, he taught at Tel Aviv University and became a professor in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Through his teaching and criticism, generations of students encountered both his poetry and his demanding understanding of what literary language could do.

Zach wrote prose and children’s books as well, including My Mother’s Death, The Needle Monkey, The Bee Dvora, The Great Eagle, and The Little Story About the Big People. His only play, Dance School, was staged at the Cameri Theatre in 1984, directed by Shmuel Bunim with music by Sasha Argov. His work with the repertoire boards of the Ohel and Cameri theaters further connected him with Israel’s principal cultural institutions.

Recognition and lasting presence

Zach received the Bialik Prize for Literature in 1982, the Feronia International Poetry Prize in Italy in 1993, and the Israel Prize for Hebrew Poetry in 1995. He also received the Akaviahu Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry from Bar-Ilan University and the ACUM Prize for lifetime achievement in Hebrew song in 2003. These honors reflected the breadth of his contribution: he was not simply a successful poet, but an institution-builder within literary culture, a translator of world literature, and a creator whose words moved into music, theater, classrooms, and public memory.

After being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2009, Zach continued to publish and give interviews for several years. He died in Ramat Gan on November 6, 2020, at the age of 89, and was buried at Einat Cemetery. At his request, three of his poems were played at his funeral: “Because Man Is the Tree of the Field,” “I Haven’t Said Everything Yet,” and “A Second Bird.” The choice captured the unusual afterlife of his work: poems that began as literary texts had become part of the shared emotional vocabulary of Israeli society.

Why this legacy belongs in Moreshet

Nathan Zach merits a place in the archive because his influence reaches far beyond a bibliography. He helped change the assumptions governing Hebrew poetry: the relationship between meter and meaning, the legitimacy of spoken language, the place of the individual, and the ability of a poem to describe Israeli experience without surrendering intellectual or cultural depth. His work also connected poetry with criticism, teaching, translation, music, and theater, allowing it to affect creators and audiences well beyond the literary page.

His legacy brings together several dimensions of Jewish and Israeli cultural history: a Hebrew language continually remade in its modern homeland, memories of Europe and immigration, dialogue with biblical and international traditions, and the search for a personal voice within a rapidly changing society. His poems became songs heard in homes and public spaces, while his criticism helped define the conversation about modern Hebrew verse. For these reasons, Nathan Zach belongs in Moreshet and on Moreshet.com: his life shows how one writer can alter the language through which a society understands itself, and how literature can continue shaping communal memory long after its author is gone.