Hatikvah (The Hope)

Born in Złoczów in Habsburg Galicia (today Zolochiv, Ukraine) to a religious family, Naftali was a child prodigy who wrote his first Hebrew poems at age ten. He studied the Zohar, and in 1877, while working as a peripatetic tutor in Eastern Europe, he claimed to know eleven languages. In 1882, Imber moved to Palestine, residing in Haifa and Daliyat al-Karmel as the live-in secretary to the British Christian Zionist author Sir Laurence Oliphant. In Palestine, Imber was known as a drunk, a neighborly nuisance, and an accomplished poet. His most famous poem, “Tikvatenu” (Our Hope), first written in 1877/8 in Romania and later revised in Palestine, was included in his first published collection, Barkai (Morning Star, 1886) and later became (in altered and shortened form) the israeli national anthem “Hatikvah” (The Hope), with a melody adapted from a Romanian folk song by Samuel Cohen (1879–1940). Imber left Palestine in 1887, eventually settling in 1892 in America, where he obtained the beneficence of a monthly allowance from Judge Mayer Sulzberger. Imber died in New York City destitute and suffering from alcoholism.