Nathan Alterman was born on August 14, 1910 in Warsaw - then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Yitzhak Alterman, was a central figure in the modern Hebrew education movement. In 1912 the family moved to Moscow, and later to Kyiv—migrations prompted by the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and political instability. In 1919, as violence in Ukraine escalated, the family relocated to Kishinev in Bessarabia. There, Nathan attended the Zionist Magen David Hebrew high school, where instruction was in Hebrew. He absorbed biblical, linguistic, and literary foundations and began writing poetry at a young age. His first poem was published in a school paper at age ten.

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In 1925, the family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, settling in Tel Aviv. Fourteen-year-old Nathan enrolled in high school at Gymnasia Herzliya where he encountered Modern Hebrew literary inf luences. In 1929, he traveled to France to study agronomy at the University of Nancy but spent much of his time reading French and Symbolist literature, which greatly inf luenced his style.

 

Returning to Palestine in the early 1930s, he began publishing poetry. His 1931 poem “In the Rush of the City” appeared in the literary journal Ketuvim, marking his public literary debut. He joined the Yachdav circle of modernist poets led by Avraham Shlonsky and Eliezer Steinman who distanced themselves from the earlier generation of Bialik and Tchernichovsky. His first poetry book, Stars Outside (1938), electrified the Hebrew literary world. At the same time, he had already established himself as a political poet in Davar and Haaretz. Following internal rifts in the Labor movement in the 1960s, Alterman felt isolated at Davar and moved in 1967 to Maariv, where he worked until his death in 1970—shortly before his 60th birthday.