Background

Robert Friend was born on November 25, 1913, into a family of poor Jewish immigrants in a Brownsville slum in New York shortly before the First World War. He was the eldest of five children. His mother, abandoned by her husband, often could not even feed her children.

Education

Friend received his education at Brooklyn College, graduating from it in 1934. He also studied at Harvard University, Cambridge University and received his doctorate from Hebrew University in Israel.

Career

Friend started his career, spending seven years in Puerto Rico and Panama where he worked as a payroll typist, as an inspector of fire-extinguishers and as a censor during the Second World War. He also taught English literature and writing in the U.S., France, England, and Germany.

Friend settled in Israel in 1950 and taught English and American literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for more than 30 years. He was also an authority on the work of E.M. Forster, though his thesis on Forster was never published.

As for his career as a poet and translator, Friend's first published volume of verse was Shadow on the Sun (1941). His last collection of poetry, Dancing with a Tiger: Poems 1941-1998, was published posthumously in 2003. During his career, he also translated around 800 works from Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic.

Achievements

• Robert Friend was best known as a poet and outstanding translator of modern Hebrew poets. His most memorable books of verse were Shadow on the Sun (1941), Salt Gifts (1964), and Dancing with a Tiger (1990). His other poetry books include Now (1964), The Practice of Absence (1971), Selected Poems (1975), Somewhere Lower Down (1980), and Abbreviations (1994).
  
  He also contributed poems and translations to the poetry anthologies A Treasury of Jewish Poetry (1957), The Modern Hebrew Poem (1965), Anthology of Modern Hebrew Poetry (1966), Working with Poetry (1968), The New Yorker Book of Poems (1969), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (1969), The New York Times Book of Verse (1970), Writer’s Journal (1972), Who Ever Loves (1972), Nature of Life and Death (1973), Poems from the Hebrew (1973), Fourteen Israeli Poets (1976), Contemporary Israeli Literature (1977), The Burning Bush: Poems from Modern Israel (1977), New Writing from the Middle East (1978), A Geography of Poets (1979), Voices Within the Ark (1980), Sunset Possibilities, by Gabriel Preil (1985), and Flowers of Perhaps, Selected Poems of Ra'hel (1995).
  
  Friend also contributed poetry and articles to Poetry, Jewish Frontier, Saturday Review, New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Jerusalem Post and New Republic.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems (JPS Poetry)

    (Gabriel Preil’s poetry has been recognized in Israel, in ...)

    1985
  • Found in Translation: Modern Hebrew Poets (English and Hebrew Edition)

    (The American-born Robert Friend, who died in Jerusalem in...)

    2006
  • Dancing with a Tiger: Poems 1941-1998

    (Poetry. Robert Friend was born in Brooklyn in 1913 and di...)

    1990
  • Somewhere Lower Down 1980
  • The practice of absence 1971
  • Shadow on the Sun: Poems 1941

Politics

Friend was a cultural Zionist in the tradition of Ahad Ha'am.

Personality

Friend was a very generous, affectionate and supportive person, though he had a stubborn, even mildly authoritarian streak, and could be very touchy.

Robert Friend was gay, and his sexuality found expression in his poetry well before the Stonewall era.