| Robert Whitehall "Born in 1947 in North Carolina, Whitehill moved as a child to Lubbock, Texas, where he stayed through his college years. His parents, both of them children of Jewish immigrants, were themselves extremely assimilated. . . . As an undergraduate at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Whitehill found his first Hebrew conversational partner in an Israeli Arab fellow student. At the age of twnety-one, he took his first trip to Israel, spending two months in an intensive language school at the University of Texas in Austin. While working toward his law degree, he also sat in on Hebrew classes and completed an MA in English literature. A few years later, to relieve the tedium of an appellate hearing—by now he was working in a civil court—he picked up a pen and wrote his first Hebrew poem. It was accepted for publication by Hadoar." [Michael Weingrad, The Last of the (Hebrew) Mohicans, 121 (3) Commentary 45 (2006)] |
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