בנימין) and Gabi Daniel (Hebrew: גבי דניאל)), and an Israeli translator and editor.

)[10][11] His parents were both educators: Dr Abraham Hrushovski (Hebrew surname Agasi, Hebrew: אגסי), his father, was a history teacher who taught in various gymnasiums In Vilnius and later in Haifa[12] (died in 1973);[13] Dvora Freidkes-Hrushovski (1896–1985), his mother, was a mathematics teacher and school headmistress in Vilnius.

[14] He had a younger sister, Eta Hrushovski (Hebrew: אטה הרושובסקי), born 1934, who died in 1968 during a trip in Turkey.

In September 1939, under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Vilnius was captured by the Red Army, then handed over to Lithuania; but again taken and annexed to the Soviet Union in August 1940.

In 1941, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, his family fled Eastward to the Ural Mountains.

[16] He finished his senior exams in a Russian school in 1945, and in 1945–46 studied mathematics and physics at Orenburg, where he won the first prize for first-year students.

[21][22] His life in these years, in the shadow of the Holocaust, is reflected in his Yiddish poetry book, "שטויבן (Dusts)", published in Munich in 1948.

[26] Meanwhile, he also founded and edited the literary journal "Likrat" (Hebrew: לקראת) with Aryeh Sivan, Moshe Dor, and Natan Zach.

[21] In 1968, he founded Hasifrut, a scientific Hebrew literature magazine published by the University of Tel Aviv.

[30] After the publication was shut down, he founded Poetics Today, a quarterly journal published by Duke University Press.

[31] In 1974, he founded the series Literature, Meaning, Culture (Hebrew: ספרות, משמעות, תרבות)[32] and served as editor-in-chief until 1986.

In the autumn of 1980 he was a guest professor of classical and modern Hebrew and Jewish literature at Harvard University.