Dvora Amir was born in Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence. Her parents came to Israel from Poland: her father was active in the Workers of Zion movement and her mother was an avid follower of A.D. Gordon, an advocate of Jewish agricultural labor. Following the 1967 Six Day War she studied Hebrew literature, Jewish philosophy and Kabbala at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During 1975 and 1976 she studied English Literature at the University of Illinois. Today she works at the Centre for Educational Technology in Tel Aviv where she writes educational programs on language and literature.
In Dvora Amir’s own words, “It is difficult to describe the poems. They write themselves and are simple, I hope.” Yet while she is interested “foremost in content,” her poems are skillful, revealing an imaginative world in which the past is woven into the present. Sometimes her poems are like “whispers against forgetfulness”, a way to “dull the pain of separation.” Often her focus is loved ones who have died; gathering precise and personal details, the “paraphernalia” of their lives, she brings alive the vanished world of her mother and the Polish-Russian immigration to Israel. Each poem is a question, an examining organism, with the bone and flesh of a human being suffering life and loss in quiet amazement.
Poems
Under the Sun
How Many Windows Does a Person Need
After the Fall of 1956
Geography Lesson
What Sinks In
Also on this site
As if I knew the world before the creation of humankind
Review by Maya Bejerano
The courage to touch the coals
Review by Yitzhak Laor
“Whoever uproots the house of another, in the end his soul will be uprooted”
Article by Omri Herzog
Life is a question we are the answer to
Essay by Rami Saari
Bibliography
In Hebrew:
Shirim doqumentariyim (Documentary Poems), Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 2003.
Be'ira itit (Slow Burning), Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 1994.
