Nathan Zach
Born in Berlin to a German-Jewish officer and an Italian Catholic mother, the Seitelbach family fled to the Land of Israel in 1936 following the rise of the Nazi regime.[6] The literary scholar Nili Rachel Scharf Gold has pointed to Zach as an exemplar illustrating the role of "Mother Tongue" culture, in his case vis-a-vis German, on modern Hebrew literature.[7] Zach's essay, “Thoughts on Alterman’s Poetry,” which was published in the magazine Achshav (Now) in 1959 was an important manifesto for the rebellion of the Likrat (Towards) group against the lyrical pathos of the Zionist poets, as it included an unusual attack on Nathan Alterman, who was one of the most important and esteemed poets in the country.[9] In his final years, Zach struggled with a worsening Alzheimer's disease, forcing him to reside in an assisted living facility.[11] Internationally acclaimed, Zach has been called "the most articulate and insistent spokesman of the modernist movement in Hebrew poetry".