Netiva ben yehuda autobiography

Netiva Ben Yehuda was an Israeli author, editor and media personality.
Ben Yehuda's other books include Autobiography in Shir va-Zemer (1990).
Netiva Ben-Yehuda (1928-2011) was born in Tel Aviv.

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Netiva Ben-Yehuda

Netiva Ben-Yehuda was an Israeli military officer, author and scholar of spoken Hebrew. She embodied the heroic voluntarism and utter loyalty to the "Jewish national rebirth in its homeland" that was the hallmark of the Palmach.

Ben-Yehuda (born July 1928; died February 28, 2011) was born in Tel Aviv during the British Mandate. She was educated at the Herzlia Hebrew Gymnasium, where her father, Baruch (1894–1990), served as teacher and principal (he later became the first director general of Israel's Ministry of Education and Culture), Ben Yehuda volunteered for the Palmach at age 19 and later served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces. Her fearlessness, physical prowess and total devotion were some of the features that distinguished this young officer, whose military specialties included topography, reconnaissance, and demolition.

In 1950, Ben-Yehuda married and gave birth to a daughter, Amal, in 1953. Ben Yehuda and her husband separated in 1962 and later divorced.

Ben Yehuda's lifelong devotion to the cause of spoken Hebrew began a

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July 26, 1928

Netiva Ben Yehuda, a Palmach member, early Israeli feminist, acclaimed writer and media personality, is born in Tel Aviv to a father from Lithuania and a mother from Ukraine. She has two younger sisters.

In 1947, Ben Yehuda joins the Haganah’s elite Palmach, which defends Jews in the Yishuv and smuggles in thousands of immigrants from Europe against British law. She fights in the War of Independence and becomes an officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

Much of her public fighting, however, occurs over the Hebrew language. As a freelance editor, she advocates the written use of the spoken language and the funny, inventive slang from her Palmach days. She and fellow Palmach veteran Dahn Ben Amotz publish the irreverent “The World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang” in 1972. Ben Yehuda returns to her military experiences and between 1981 and 1991 publishes her Palmach trilogy: “1948: Between the Calendars”; “Through the Binding Ropes”; and “When the War Broke Out.” The trilogy is neither fiction nor history, she says, but

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Netiva Ben Yehuda

Traces of this early work can be found in her later Palmah trilogy, published between 1981 and 1991. As indicated by the title of the first of these books, 1948—Bein ha-Sefirot, she still perceived 1948 as a momentous breach in history, a transition of tremendous magnitude (which the English translation, Between the Calendars, unfortunately fails to convey). She chose to express this traumatic experience through an idiosyncratic language, colloquially repetitious and associative, at times preserving slang and idiomatic Hebrew of days gone by—all of which makes her writing difficult to digest. The same applies to its generic hybridity: “This book is not history,” she maintained in the brief preface, not fiction, not even memoirs. It is “a report from the field,” she argued in her next book, Through the Binding Ropes (1985), a “worm’s-eye view” of a low-ranking soldier. “And I speak this report ...”

Those readers who were willing to ignore the author’s disclaimers (and many other masks woven into the narration itse