Shlomo Zemach

Shlomo Zemach was born in 1886 in Płońsk

Zemach was born in 1886 in Płońsk, then part of the Russian Empire, to a wealthy family descended from rabbis. He studied at cheder and beit midrash. As a boy he was a friend of David Ben-Gurion, and together they founded the Ezra Association, a Zionist youth group whose members spoke only Hebrew.

In 1904 he moved to Ottoman Palestine and worked for 5 years as a farm laborer in the Jewish colonies. He helped found Hapoel Hatzair in 1905 and HaHoresh in 1907. From 1909 to 1914 he studied agriculture, literature and philosophy in France and qualified as an agricultural engineer.

The First World War kept him in Poland, and he did literary work in Warsaw and Odessa. He returned in 1921, taught at Mikveh Israel and later headed a guidance department at the Zionist agricultural research station. In 1933 he helped found the Kadoorie Agricultural High School and became its first headmaster.

He wrote books on agriculture and worked as a literary critic. He was a key figure on the editorial board of the journal Moznayim and edited the journal Behinot from 1952 until he resigned in 1956. He won the Bialik Prize, the Brenner Prize in 1955 and the Israel Prize for literature in 1965.

Zemach died in 1974. A street in Jerusalem's Yefe Nof neighborhood is named after him. His daughter was the literary scholar and translator Ada Zemach.