Amir Gilboa

Born Berl Feldman in Radziwillow, Poland, where he attended a Tarbut school and also received a Polish state education, Amir Gilboa began as a Yiddish Expressionist poet, and attended a Zionist training camp, preparing for life on a kibbutz. Not long after his arrival in Palestine in 1937, Gilboa joined the British Army’s Jewish Brigade, participating in the illegal transfer of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. Gilboa also fought in Israel’s War of Independence. His early poetry was heavily influenced by his wartime experience, as well as by the loss of his family in the Holocaust. Gilboa’s poems were groundbreaking in their experimentalism and heavily influenced Israeli poets of both his own and later generations.