Biography
Uriel Heilperin (אוריאל הלפרין) was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1908 to a Zionist family. His father, Yechiel, was a Hebraist educator who raised Uriel and his siblings in Hebrew. In 1921, the family immigrated to Mandate Palestine. Uriel changed his last name from Heilperin to Halperin, then to Shelakh. Later he used the pseudonym Yonatan Ratosh in poetic and political writing. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Sorbonne, and published his first poem in 1926. In the mid-1930s, he edited the Revisionist movement's newspaper and was active in right-wing underground organizations.
Ratosh was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize. His son Saharon Shelah, a mathematician, won the Israel Prize. Another son, Hamman Shelah, was killed along with wife and daughter in the Ras Burqa massacre. One of his brothers was linguist Uzzi Ornan. Ratosh died in 1981.
Read more about this topic: Yonatan Ratosh
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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