David Shimoni

David Shimoni was born in 1886 in Babruysk

David Shimoni was born Shimonovitch in 1886 in Babruysk, then part of the Russian Empire, to Nissim Shimonovitch and Malka Fridland. He studied in a cheder and with Hebrew teachers, and began publishing Hebrew poems as a youth. For a few years he also wrote poems in Yiddish.

In 1908 he finished high school but was not admitted to university because of the quota on Jewish students. In 1909 he went to the Land of Israel for about a year, working as a guard in the vineyards of Rehovot and picking oranges in Petah Tikva. There he worked alongside A. D. Gordon and became close to the writer Yosef Haim Brenner.

He left in 1910, and that year his first book of poems, Yeshimon, appeared. From 1912 to 1914 he studied Semitic linguistics and philosophy in Berlin, Heidelberg and Würzburg. World War I forced him back to Russia, and after the October Revolution he worked for the Stybel publishing house in Moscow.

In 1920 he settled in the Land of Israel, first in Rehovot, and in 1925 moved to Tel Aviv to teach at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium. He taught Bible and Hebrew literature for the rest of his life and translated works by Tolstoy, Heine and Lermontov. He joined the Hebrew Language Committee in 1926, was a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and chaired the Hebrew Writers Association.

He won the Bialik Prize in 1936 and 1949 and the Israel Prize in 1954. He died in 1956, and the Tchernichovsky Prize for his Lermontov translation was given to his family in 1957. Streets in Jerusalem and Beersheba bear his name.