An Epistle to Hebrew Youth

The Israeli poet Yonatan Ratosh was born Uriel Shelach in Warsaw. His Hebrew-speaking Zionist family immigrated to Palestine in 1921. He attended the Hebrew University and then the Sorbonne; he published his first poem in 1926. In the mid-1930s, Ratosh edited the Revisionist movement’s newspaper and was active in right-wing underground organizations. In 1939, he founded the Canaanite movement, which rejected both religion and Jewish nationalism and promoted the theory of a shared cultural heritage for the entire Middle East. In 1950, Ratosh founded and coedited the influential literary journal Alef, which included the works of Stendhal, Camus, Shaw, and O’Neill.