In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, "Not of This Time, Not of This Place", in 1963. It is about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the 1947–1949 Palestine war, he visits his hometown in Germany, recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, "Mi Yitneni Malon," about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.