Amichai, Yehuda - Vernon Young (essay date 1979)
Vernon Young (essay date 1979)
SOURCE: Young, Vernon. A review of Time: Poems by Yehuda Amichai. New York Review of Books 22 (November 22, 1979): 40-41.
[In the following review of Time, Young addresses Amichai's use of language, his religious themes, and the historical context of his poetry. Young concludes that Amichai's poetry “fills the reader with wonder.”]
That “a poet without a sense of history is a deprived child” is an aphorism of Stanley Kunitz to which Yehuda Amichai would readily assent, while finding it too self-evident to bear underlining. He lives in history as a fish does in water. Born in Würzburg, 1924, Amichai emigrated with his family to Israel in 1936. Würzburg, one of the rococo showcases of Central Europe, was on March 16, 1945, “eighty-five percent” demolished by Allied bombers in, if I recall, thirty-five minutes. I spent two weeks in that town in 1963 and never encountered anyone who...
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