Life
Shaul Tchernichovsky was born on 20 August 1875 in the village of Mikhaelovka, Crimea (now part of Ukraine). He started at a reformed religious primary school. At age 10 he changed to a Russian school.
He published his first poems in Odessa where he studied from 1890 to 1892. The first poem he published was "In My Dream".
From 1899 to 1906 he studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, finishing his medical studies in Lausanne. From then on, he mingled his activities as a doctor with his activities as a poet. After completing his studies he returned to Ukraine to practice in Kharkov and in Kiev. In the First World War he served as an army doctor in Minsk and in Saint Petersburg.
From 1925 to 1932 he was one of the editors of the newspaper Hatekufa. He also edited the section on medicine in the Hebrew encyclopedia Eshkol.
From 1929 to 1930 he spent time in America. In 1931 he immigrated to the Land of Israel and settled there permanently. Besides being a poet, Tchernichovsky was known as an excellent translator. His translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey particularly earned recognition. He also translated Sophocles, Horace, Shakespeare, Molière, Pushkin, Goethe, Heine, Byron, Shelley, the Kalevala, the Gilgamesh Cycle, the Icelandic Edda, etc.
Tchernichovsky served as doctor of the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv. In his later years he served as doctor for the Tel Aviv schools. He was active in writers' organizations and a member of the Committee of the Hebrew Language. He was also the editor of the Hebrew terminology manual for medicine and the natural sciences.
He was a friend of the distinguished Klausner family of Jerusalem, including the child who would grow up to become the novelist Amos Oz, to whom he was "Uncle Shaul."
Shaul Tchernichovsky died in Jerusalem on 14 October 1943.
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