Anda Pinkerfeld Amir

Anda Pinkerfeld Amir was born in 1902 in Rzeszów

Anda Pinkerfeld was born in 1902 in Rzeszów, in Galicia, to a secular family. Her father was an architect for the Austrian government, and she received no Jewish education as a child. After a pogrom in Lviv in 1918, she moved to a Jewish high school and joined Hashomer Hatzair.

She studied natural sciences at the universities of Lviv and Leipzig. In 1920 she went to the Land of Israel with Hashomer Hatzair and drained swamps, but returned to Poland after falling ill. There she published her first poetry book in Polish in 1921.

She came back with her husband, Arieh Amir, and they lived in Kiryat Anavim and Tel Aviv, where she worked as a microbiologist. Encouraged by Uri Zvi Greenberg, she began writing in Hebrew, and her first Hebrew poems appeared in 1928 under the pen name Bat-Hedva. In 1941 she founded the publishing house Adi.

In 1946 and 1947 the Jewish Agency sent her to refugee camps in Germany, where she taught child survivors of the Holocaust. From 1948 she collected writings of fallen soldiers, work later used in the memorial volume Yizkor. From 1960 to 1963 she and her husband served the state in Kenya.

She later helped immigrant writers and artists and headed Beit Mania Bialik for women artists. She died in Tel Aviv in 1981.