Aharon Amir

Aharon Amir was born in 1923 in Kaunas

Amir was born in 1923 in Kaunas, Lithuania, with the family name Lipec. In 1933 he moved with his family to the Land of Israel and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father later directed the publishing house Am Oved.

He studied at Gymnasia Herzliya. From 1940 he studied literature and Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, finishing in 1950 after several breaks. He belonged to the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds and helped found the Canaanite movement.

In 1948 he helped found the journal Alef and edited it until 1953. In 1958 he founded the literary magazine Keshet, which published young writers such as Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, and he closed it in 1976. It returned in 2000 as The New Keshet.

He translated works by Melville, Dickens, Camus, Hemingway and others into Hebrew. After the Six-Day War he was among the founders of the Movement for Greater Israel, and in 1976 he set up a public committee to aid Lebanon.

He was married to the poet and painter Bettine and had 3 children from an earlier marriage. He died of cancer in 2008 and left his body to science.