“I am like all women:/belonging/I am like all women:/devoted. But in the corner of my lips a strange expression lies in wait/ in the corner of my eye a strange spark flashes./Many times I’ll bend my head/I, who belong, even to the smallest of my lovers./But suddenly, with the tuning of spring/I’ll shun you all/and straighten up./Hey you! Know this well!/I’ve never belonged to you/Not to any of you!/A free woman I’ve been/and always shall be!” (Yuval, 1932).

So begins one of Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir’s best known and most iconoclastic poems, representative of both her modernist form and her feminist content. While earlier critics of her verse tended to dwell on the first “womanly” lines of the poem, viewing her work as the “poetry of the devoted, belonging woman,” (Benzion Benshalom in Anda: Kovez Ma’amarim, 14), a newer generation of readers has highlighted the more subversive and formally innovative aspects of her poetry.

Anda Pinkerfeld was born in Rzeszow, Poland, on June 26, 1902. Her father Joel Pinkerfeld, who served as an officer in the Polish army, was an architect who designed buildings in Galicia. Her family was assimilated and cultured; as anti-Zionists, they did not believe in the necessity of Hebrew or Jewish education. Anda wrote her first work in Polish, a prayer for the emancipation of Poland, when she was seven years old and published her first volume of Polish poetry (Pie’sni Zycia, Song of Life, 1921) when she was eighteen. In the wake of antisemitic pogroms in Lvov, Anda came under the sway of Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir while a student at a Polish gymnasia and switched schools to the Jewish gymnasia in Lvov. A committed Zionist, Anda immigrated with Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir to Palestine in May 1920, but due to a heart ailment returned to Lvov, where she earned a bachelor’s degree. In 1924 she returned to Palestine, this time with her husband, the agriculturalist A. Krampner-Amir. After living in Bet Alfa and Tel Aviv they eventually settled in Kiryat Anavim and had a daughter named Zippor. Later, they moved to Tel Aviv where they had a son, Amos, who eventually served as a pilot in the Israel Air Force. In the aftermath of World War II, Pinkerfeld-Amir went to work in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany under the auspices of the Jewish Agency. Throughout her year and a half in Europe, Pinkerfeld-Amir kept a diary of her experiences, a literary/historical testimony, which is housed in Beit Levin Kipnis/Seminar Levinsky as part of a collection of her manuscripts. She later worked in the archives of the Ministry of Defense, assembling records of the Israeli soldiers who fell in the 1948 War of Independence.

Under the influence of the poet Uri Zevi Greenberg, Anda Pinkerfeld Amir abandoned her ambitions to be a Polish poet and undertook to write Hebrew verse. Her first Hebrew poem was published under the matronym “Bat-Hedvah,” Hedvah being a Hebraized form of her mother’s nickname “Freude” (Yaoz-Kest in Anda: Kovez Ma’amarim, 132). Upon publishing Yamim Dovevim (Whispering Days, 1929), her first volume of Hebrew verse, Anda reverted to writing under her own name.

Pinkerfeld-Amir’s early Hebrew poetry consisted mainly of short lyrics, written in free verse form. The poet Rahel wrote an admiring review of her first book, noting the spare, modernist clarity of her poetry, its confident indifference to the conventions of rhyme, meter and stanzaic form, and the lively elasticity of the language (See Anda: Kovez Ma’amarim, 9–10). Other critics such as Jacob Fichman (1881–1958) and Benzion Katz (Benshalom, 1907–1968) offered more tepid praise, taking issue with the unrestrained prosaic quality of her verse (Anda, Kovez Ma’amarim, 12, 14). More recently critics such as Ittamar Yaoz Kest and Michael Gluzman have endeavored to bring to light Pinkerfeld’s role as one of Hebrew poetry’s first modernist innovators. (Yaoz-Kest in Anda: Kovez Ma’amarim, 132; Gluzman, 130–136).

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Poetry

Yamim dovevim (Tel Aviv, 1929)

Duda’im (Jersualem: 1945)

Gadish: Shirim (Tel Aviv: 1949)

Tehiyyot: Shirim (Tel Aviv: 1967)

U-vekhol Zot (Tel Aviv: 1980).

Books for Children and Youth

Haruzim Alizim (Tel Aviv: 1944)

Sod im Ahi ha-Gadol (Tel Aviv: no date)

Kokhavim ba-Deli (Tel Aviv: 1957)

Shalom, Yeladim (Tel Aviv: 1965)

Be-Hayyeihem (Tel Aviv: year).