Amichai, Yehuda | Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (review date 2000)
Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (review date 2000)
SOURCE: Bloch, Chana, and Chana Kronfeld. “Amichai's Counter-Theology: Opening Open Closed Open.” Judaism 49, No. 2 (Spring, 2000): 153-67.
[In the following review, Bloch and Kronfeld discuss Amichai's perspective on God and Judaism, as expressed in his poetry.]
On the cover of Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichai's new collection of poems, there is a fragment of a broken gravestone with the word “Amen” carved on it. The stone, from a Jewish cemetery destroyed nearly a thousand years ago in his birthplace, Wirzburg, Germany, was given to Amichai by a German professor of theology who has devoted himself to reassembling the broken pieces and reconstructing the gravestones. That “toy of history and fate” is now a decorative object on his writing desk, “a thing of beauty, weighing down papers so they won't fly away.” Five poems referring to the Amen stone are...
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