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October 2000 Issue

Yehuda Amichai's Life of Poetry

By Judith Bolton-Fasman

Yehuda Amichai, Israel's eminent poet, died on September 22 at the age of 76. Frequently touted as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, Amichai's poetry was a synthesis of the public and personal, of politics and religion. His extraordinary body of work epitomized Ezra Pound's famous dictum that "literature is news that stays news."

Chief among Amichai's many literary feats was his remarkable ability to be an essentially autobiographical poet while imparting larger truths about the history and the fate of the Jewish people. He was a modern-day prophet who downplayed the role by claiming to be "a poor prophet. Like a poor boy with only/Two colors: I paint my life in war/And in love, in clamor and in silence".

Much of Amichai's poetry centered on the anguish brought on by the four wars in which he fought. In a sequence of poems entitled "Jerusalem 1967," he reflected on Israeli children "growing up half in the ethics of their fathers/And half in the teaching of war".

Amichai also revealed the calamitous transition he made from a close knit, religiously observant childhood to a turbulent, secular adulthood in the long autobiographical narrative "The Travel of Benjamin the Last, of Tudela."

In the poem the speaker looks back on his life from perspective of middle age. He frequently quarrels with "the sweet invented God of my childhood whose responses to his prayers Now return and fall from above/Like bullets that didn't hit and return/To earth after a long time."

Born in Warzburg, Germany, in 1924, Amichai emigrated to Palestine with his family in 1936. While fighting with the British army during World War II, he happened upon an anthology of modern English and American poetry.

W.H. Auden's poetry influenced him to write poems in a modern idiom. The result was a unique poetic voice that masterfully blended modern spoken Hebrew with its biblical ancestor and gave rise to astonishing metaphors and analogies.

While Amichai noted that Hebrew was rich in irony and allusion, he also cautioned that it could be diluted when "caught in a homeland trap:/To talk now in this tired tongue,/Torn out of its sleep in the Bible: blinded,/It totters from mouth to mouth. In a tongue that described/Miracles and God, now to say: automobile, bomb, God".

Throughout his work Amichai addressed the topic of war. In "Autobiography in the Year 1952," the poet declares that "the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,/Blood that wanted to go out to many wars".

"Elegies on the War Dead," showcases the death of Dicky, his commanding officer during the Israel's War of Independence. "Like the water tower in Yad Mordekay./Hurt. A hole in his belly. Everything/Flowed out of him".

Love, however, was this poet's consolation; his love poems were paeans to the Psalms. Memory, on the other hand, is a hardship, a responsibility from which the poet begs to be released. In his masterpiece "Land of Zion and Jerusalem," he exhorts, "Let Memory Mountain remember instead of me,/That's its job. Let the Garden-In-Memory-Of remember,/Let the Street-In-The-Name of Remember,/Let the famous building remember,/Let the rolling Torah Scroll remember,/Let the memorial remember. Let the flags remember..."

Jerusalem, Amichai's home for over sixty years, was a living entity in his work. "Jerusalem stone is the only stone/That feels pain. It has a nervous system". Amichai sifted through Jerusalem's archeology for metaphors to reinterpret public and private history, for "Cornices and fragments of pillars strewn like chess pieces/In a game of abandoned rage..."

Although contemporary life and ancient history are layered upon Jerusalem's landscape, nothing was totally submerged for Amichai. In "Jerusalem 1967," the poet sees "On top of the houses-houses with houses on top of them. This is/All of history./Learning like this in schools with no roof/And no walls and no bench and no teachers. Learning/Like this in the absolute outside,/Learning brief as one heartbeat. Everything."

Amichai spoke to the larger fantasy of a Jewish homeland "Where I can dream without falling,/Misbehave without getting annihilated". He lived quietly in the Yemin Moshe section of Jerusalem, a no man's land of cheap housing when he first settled there in the 1960s. It grew into an exclusive community, a change that had little effect on Amichai who was first and foremost a poet of his people, a poet of international stature with the apt last name that literally meant "my people's lives."

Jerusalem Ecology

by Yehuda Amichai

The air above Jerusalem is filled with prayers and dreams Like the air above cities with heavy industry. Hard to breathe.

From time to time a new shipment of history arrives And the buildings and towers are packing material, Later discarded and piled up.

Sometimes candles arrive instead of people, Then it's quiet. And sometimes people instead of candles, Then a commotion.

And in closed gardens, among jasmine bushes Filled with fragrance, foreign consulates, Like bad brides, jilted, Waiting for their time.

Judith Bolton-Fasman is an associate editor at Jewish Family & Life! and is the editor of JBooks.com. She lives in Newton, MA. Her column, "On The Shelf," appears biweekly on JewishFamily.com and JBooks.com.

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