Yonatan Naim (1981-2011) a musician, author and poet grew up in Nahariya, a small town in north-west Israel, before moving to Tel Aviv in 2002. Yonatan wrote and drew from a very young age. He majored in drama studies in high school but was a Bible and Islam graduate at university. However, Yonatan never really left the stage and held different roles as a composer, percussionist, stage manager, puppeteer and dubbing actor. In his writing, music, prose and poetry, Yonatan used various genres. In addition, he played a number of musical instruments including, the drums (specialized in African drumming), piano, flute, santur, D. J. and trumpet.
From 2001 on he cooperated with various artists from different disciplines and played with a number of bands, like FUN, HAKA, Band That Never Was and Spiral Group. All along he continued to focus on musical compositions for the theatre. He worked with director Tubi H. Dikman on the musical plays Doli City (2006), Kidma (2005) and Terrible Deed (2004).
Yonatan left behind hundreds of poems and stories that are being published posthumously by Sifrei Yonatan Publications.
Our goal in Sifrei Yonatan Publications is to celebrate Yonatan's life and work. We aim to focus on the person he was, his personality, and not his death.
We believe that the most important date in our lives is the day we were born which is the day that marks the beginning of our work and creativity. We strongly felt that others also have the right to meet Yonatan's unique and complex approach to life. A further aspect in this project is creating a dialogue between Yonatan and other artists thus making a connection between the written word, art and music.
So far, we have published three books in Hebrew in addition to
a poetry book, The Time I Became It in English.
A Poetic Birthday Calendar (in Hebrew and English)
Happy BirthMonth (an anthology of 30 poetic greeting and reflections)
Poetic Cards
© 2015 by Sifrey Yonatan