[In the following essay, Ramras-Rauch comments on the varied character of modern Hebrew poetry and principally considers the verse of Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach, and Avot Yeshuruh.]

What characterizes modern Hebrew poetry as a whole is the absence of a common characteristic (other than the basic fact of its being written in Hebrew). Among its practitioners are writers born in Europe and others born in Israel; there are poets who have been influenced by traditionally Jewish or biblical themes, and others whose work was shaped by Russian, French, or English literary elements, as well as those who have partaken of both worlds; and there are those who have sought a continuity with the styles and motifs of the past, and others who have set out on paths of their own, seeking their individual voices. The rubric "modern Hebrew poet" must be applied first to figures such as Nathan Alterman (1910-TI), Abraham Shlonsky (1900-73), Uri Zvi Greenberg (1895-1981), and Leah Goldberg (1911-70). They were the first to identify themselves as modernists, they wrote manifestos on modernism, and they gave Hebrew poetry its modern voice.

Most articles and anthologies begin the "modern" category with Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), undoubtedly the greatest Hebrew poet in the modern era, yet his status as a "modern" is open to conjecture. He released Hebrew from the shackles of nineteenth-century neoclassicism, expanding the boundaries of poetic expression beyond the stilted imitation of quasi-biblical verse. Without him, modern Hebrew poetry would not be what it is. In Bialik's own lifetime, however, Shlonsky and Greenberg had rejected him for being a classicist, not a "modern" poet. (It is of some significance that several of the youngest poets of the "postmodern" era have turned to Bialik with renewed interest.)

Obviously, a poet can be living in the modern age and not be truly modern. Shimon Halkin (b. 1898), thoroughly acquainted with the entire range of poetry in English, has written as though it ended with Keats and as though Eliot and Pound never existed. At a still further extreme, Yonathan Ratosh (1908-81) sought inspiration in pre-Hebraic civilization and is thus identified with the "Canaanite" movement in Hebrew poetry. Among the older generation there are other interesting anomalies: Zelda (1914-84) did not publish her first collection of poetry until 1967; Gabriel Preil (b. 1911 in Estonia) has lived in New York since 1922 and qualifies as a modern Hebrew poet because he writes in that language; Amir Gilboa (1917-84) began writing Hebrew poetry in the Ukraine before he came to Palestine in 1937; and Avot Yeshurun (b. 1904), who settled in Palestine in 1925, has expressed a sensitivity to the Arab milieu quite unusual in the Hebrew poetry of his time.

In more recent years there has been a large and impressive group of poets who began their creative activity at a time nearer to 1948, the year of Israel's founding as a state: Haim Guri (b. 1922), Nathan Yonathan (b. 1923), Tu via Rivner (b. 1924), Yehuda Amichai (b. 1924), T. Carmi (b. 1925), Avner Treinin (b. 1928), Dan Pagis (b. 1930), Natan Zach (b. 1930), Moshe Dor (b. 1932), and others. In addition, there is a still-younger generation of active and interesting poets such as Daliah Rabikovitch (b. 1936), Asher Reich (b. 1937), Aharon Shabtai (b. 1939), Yair Hurvitz (b. 1941), Meir Wieseltier (b. 1941), and Yona Wallach (1944-85). These poets vary as widely as can be imagined in their linguistic innovation, in the range of their subject matter, and in their individual poetic outlooks.¹

Modern Hebrew poetry is thus a heterogeneous totality—if it is a "totality" at all, there being no one "school" prevailing, let alone a uniform mode or mood. Predominant, however, is the element of modernity: verbal embellishments are not to be found, any more than soulful longing or other romantic trappings. Ranging from the direct statement to the allusive, from the explicit to the implicit, or from the colloquial to the elliptic, contemporary Hebrew poets will strive for simplicity: adopting a personal idiom yet recasting everything in a recognizably modern mold.

In order to understand modern Hebrew poetry, there are two facts about it that one must keep in view: a) as modern poetry it participates in everything that can be said to characterize modern Western poetry; and b) it is written in the language of the Bible, a text that can be read with comprehension by any seven-year-old child in Israel. These two facts constitute the armature of contemporary Hebrew verse. Its language is loaded with allusion, laid down through the centuries like geological strata, and it therefore provides the poet with a wide array of motifs and diction immediately recognizable by the reading public as linked to the tradition, although the modern struggle for poetic voice and form is (as elsewhere) linked to modern experience, which is global.

All the phases and movements of twentieth-century poetry are to be found in Hebrew verse, from futuristic attempts to shatter all symbols of culture, to imagism, acmeism, symbolism, surrealism, and every other movement that has come and gone in Europe and America. Among the older poets, Uri Zvi Greenberg was powerfully influenced by German expressionism, Nathan Alterman by French poetry, Abraham Shlonsky by Russian symbolism, and Shimon Halkin by English romanticism. In later generations there are those who follow and those who reject those key figures. Haim Guri and Nathan Yonathan have been heavily influenced by them, especially by Alterman, assimilating in their own work the rhythms and other poetic elements deflected from languages they themselves do not know (e.g., Russian). Each generation is rocked by waves that originate elsewhere in the world. A huge mass of contemporary fiction and poetry is steadily being translated into Hebrew, and Israeli poets are frequent travelers abroad, so that exposure to heterogeneous experience contributes to the many-sided nature of contemporary Hebrew poetry.

It is significant also that many of the major poets who have shaped modern Hebrew verse were not born in Palestine or Israel and had to adopt Hebrew as a second language. The older generation (Alterman, Shlonsky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Leah Goldberg) were all born in Eastern Europe (Warsaw, the Ukraine, Austria-Poland, and Lithuania, respectively), and much the same is to be said for Yeshurun, Preil, and Gilboa, as we have seen. It is also true for Amichai (Germany), Rivner (Czechoslovakia), Carmi (New York), Pagis (Romania), Zach (Berlin), and Wieseltier (Moscow), and of course there have been subsequent influences derived from concrete experience with other languages: Amichai, whose native language was German, came to Palestine in 1936 and served in the British army in World War II. Undoubtedly, it was this experience that provided the English component of his poetic language, and he has been influenced by poets as different as Eliot, Auden, and Ted Hughes.

Modern Hebrew poetry can also be seen as a struggle between "fathers" and "sons": Bialik was attacked by Shlonsky and Greenberg, as noted, Alterman was attacked by Zach, and Zach's poetry and his poetics have been attacked in turn by the generation of Wieseltier. The older generation, coming to prominence between the two world wars, continued to write into the 1970s. The generation associated with 1948 had been nurtured by the "fathers" yet found its own way and in the last three decades has taken broad steps in new directions. One of the main reasons was the separation of the earlier poetry from the ideological dimension. Indeed, it is only in the 1980s, with the continuing war in Lebanon, that Hebrew poets—formerly remote from political issues—have begun to voice their political attitudes in poetry. This is not to say that their ideological tenets have issued in anything like propaganda verse. On the contrary, it has been a poetry of personal revelation of new landscapes.

. . . . .

In the last three decades of modern Hebrew poetry, the two major figures have been Yehuda Amichai and Natan Zach. Amichai has created a new rhythm, introducing a new mood born of his ironic outlook toward himself and his world. He expresses this as the clash between the way things seem and the way they are. By means of a figurative language, he enters into his private vision to escape the mundane, yet he escapes even the reader's expectations in regard to the figurative. In constantly remapping his life, he strips it of myth. There are repeated images, however, arranged in a cycle of changes that expand and extend verbal limits. His own existence is a source of wonderment to him; and in the unending dialogue he conducts with his existence, he weaves and unravels in turn the essences that constitute his "life."

I have referred to Amichai's attempt to strip away the element of myth; actually, his poetry aims at a metaphorization of reality. Existence itself is verbalized, but only by dint of his irony and a deep sense of the incongruous in existence. Since the late 1970s, his poetry has taken on a mellower tone: the speaker is beset by a sense of time, the prison of an aging body, the joint tyrannies of memory and death. Despite the muted tones and his singing in a minor key, he does not entirely surrender the volatile voice of his young persona. In Amen (1977) he tells us:

Once a great love cut my life in two.
The first part goes on twisting
at some other place like a snake cut in two. 

The passing years have calmed me
and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes. 

And I'm like someone standing in
the Judean desert, looking at a sign:
"Sea Level."
He cannot see the sea, but he knows. 

Thus I remember your face everywhere
at your "face level."²

As indicated earlier, Amichai's ironic outlook is directed toward himself as much as toward his world, but it is also directed at his own way of reporting. What had been a voracious perception of God, world, love, Jerusalem, or his parents is now more focused, less omnivorous. He continues to map the stations in the life-journey of his speaker, who is in constant search of the right metaphor, yet he avoids the obscure, the elliptic, the opaque expression beyond communication. His poetry of the 1980s retains its process of dialogue. In Great Tranquility (1983) he states:

People in the painfully bright nall
Spoke about religion
In the life of modern man
And about God's place in it. 

People spoke in excited voices
Like at airports.
I left them:
I opened an iron door over which was written
"Emergency" and I entered into
A great tranquility: questions and answers.³

As a philosopher philosophizes, so Amichai's speaker poeticizes as his poems unfold. The poet's voice of the last decade is more wry, subdued, less boisterous, as though the challenges raised by the earlier voice were left unanswered. As the poet ages, so does the speaker, and tones of resignation become more evident. Still, there is no major change to be detected. Occasionally he refers to twilight experiences, where the implicit would be expected, but inevitably he returns to the mundane, despite his efforts to escape it, and responds to it with a mature whimsicality.

Amichai is a poet of images, a noncerebral poet whose metaphors are vehicles for his states of mind. Time (the title of one of his collections) is an ever-present mystery, although it is measured by observed changes in the poet's life. In his late poetry he indulges in linguistic playfulness. There is a diminished need to tame his recalcitrant experience or to go beyond experience itself. Now the aged speaker sees the world as a series of incongruities. He will take up single events or sights to weave into a new verbal constellation, sometimes as part of a language game, at other times as part of a new verbalized experience. Through random, even marginal utterances, Amichai will try to reach a more significant statement—not by speculative means but rather through metaphor. His poetry is essentially visual, his eyes giving situations their significance or vacuity. The ironic tone emphasizes his role as a craftsman working with words, as he dons the garb of Everyman. The irony works toward demythification and a sense of the absurd, the Everyman garb toward sensitivity, alertness.

A typical Amichai poem will seem to dwindle toward its closure, after having opened with a charge. There is no point in looking for the objective correlative in his verse; the raw material is the poem itself, inviting the reader to partake of the poet's revelation of the process of poesis itself. His private album, his private cosmos, or his natural voice—all address the reader. The pictoriality of his poetry, the sense of immediate presence and the absence of the merely implicit states of being, all put one in mind of an epic quality. The subsidence of the earlier bravura can be attributed to the changing function of irony: from a rhetorical device of an innovative sort, to a Weltanschauung pointing to the absurd in existence. In sum, his poetic work, now reaching its fourth decade, combines the personal voice with an epic dimension.

. . . . .

Zach shares with Amichai the fact of having been born in Germany; but whereas Amichai came to Palestine as a twelve-year-old, Zach arrived there at the age of five. In his mature work Zach undertook no less a project than the reshaping of Hebrew verse. He sought to diminish the importance of such founding poets as Alterman and Shlonsky, attacking them for their poetic excesses. He also devoted much time and effort to promoting poets whose work had been considered "marginal"—e.g., David Vogel (1891-1944) and Jacob Steinberg (1887-1947)—but who have lately been receiving new critical acclaim for their subtle personal voice. Like Amichai, Zach was deeply influenced by the work of Pound, Eliot, and Auden, and he therefore worked for a hard and undiffuse poetry without soft undulations. Strong emotions are restrained by irony, as in Amichai; and for somewhat the same reasons, Zach is interested in the poem per se, in its forms and deviations more than in its "subject matter." What he has sought to do, and has succeeded in doing, is to write a poem which is nonmimetic and anything but surface-emotive.

The differences between the two poets, however, is decisive: whereas Amichai is a highly metaphoric poet, combining the mundane and the fantastic in a richly visual world, Zach is inclined to limit his diction in a rather conscious way, using simple words, repetition, and understatement in an effort to arrive at a deep emotive level. Further, whereas Amichai, in his earlier work, had made use of biblical allusion, Zach deliberately avoids it. On the rare occasion when he does resort to such allusion, it is to a biblical echo that has been absorbed into spoken Hebrew, and thus it is to the spoken language that the poem refers.

What characterizes Zach as one of the most prominent and characteristically "modern" of modern Hebrew poets is the austerity of his language, the deceptively barren simplicity of his images—qualities that have marked his thirty years of poetic production. Moreover, he has scrupulously avoided using the collective "I" as the voice of his person a, and there is a sense of indeterminacy and hesitation throughout his writing. His self-restraint and understatement reflect a tremendous intensity, only slightly mitigated by his intellectualism and wit. One sometimes feels inclined to erase a statement of his as too bold, and there is none of the booming sonority of Shlonsky, nothing of the complex layers of Alterman.

In his attack, Zach saw Alterman as a magician tossing off words while hiding behind numerous masks, in a poetry refraining from any active rapport with the world of people and things and instead veiling itself under the foliage of figurative devices. As a result, Zach argued, Alterman's work lacked inner tension and movement. Zach not only insists on a contact with reality, but he also rejects excessive musicality and rhyme. (The fact is, however, that Alterman is still regarded as a central figure in modern Hebrew poetry, and his work has continued to draw the attention of readers and critics. In recent decades there have been more books devoted to Alterman's poetry than to the work of any other modern poet, living or dead.)

Zach's critical articles of the 1950s and early 1960s culminated in Zeman Veritmus Etzel Bergson Ubashirah Hamodernit (Time and Rhythm in Henri Bergson and Modern Poetry; 1966). Here he attempted to set up a new poetics of Hebrew verse and to assess the fundamental position of the poet in the making of poetry. The effect of Zach's poetics and verse on the young generation of poets has been immense. What characterizes the lyric work of Bialik, Alterman, Shlonsky, and Greenberg is the centrality of the speaker. Irony has now deemphasized that centrality, and in recent Hebrew poetry we see the speaker as neither a witness nor a commentator. The self is depicted as a process, without a mediator, and this is typical of the post-Zach period. As a "practitioner" of poetry, Zach avoids all reference to the acknowledged "giants," and unlike them, he limits his poetic lexicon. His poetic "self does not seek self-expression, and what he aims for is understatement and depersonalization. As an example, the influence of Eliot is evident in Against Parting (1967).

How is it that
one star, alone,
dares. How does he dare;

for heaven's sake.
One star alone. I
would not dare. And I
am, as a matter
of fact, not alone.⁴

In his early poems Zach attempts to speak colloquially, to touch the reader through the language of his own time, avoiding all embellishment and metaphor (with rare exceptions). Where Amichai aims at a broadening of the linguistic framework, Zach aims at minimalism. This Spartan self-restraint is all the more startling against the background of the opulent allusiveness of the Hebrew language itself, with its millennia of stratified associations. Thus his words are neither a mirror nor a lamp; they are an entity an sich. As a modern writer, Zach knows that the attempt to arrest the eternal through the transitory no longer rings true as a poetic enterprise. In Kol Hechalav Vehadvash (All the Milk and Honey; 1964) three lines from "The Right Poem" read: "when the emotion dwindles, the right poem speaks. / Till then the emotions spoke, the other poem. / Now the time has come for the right poem to speak" (my translation). The word for "right" here has connotations of "correct" or "true."

Zach's latest collection of poems bears the title Anti-Mechikon, which translates as "Hard to Remember" (1984). Its various cycles reveal facets of Zach's autobiographical persona hitherto unknown. A return to Haifa evokes memories of a child who had come from Germany as well as the tragedy of German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s: "a thirteen-year-old German-speaking highbrow; the best way to get into trouble." In this collection Zach has introduced the personal narrative, something that bad hardly been suggested in his prior work. His youthful memories as a refugee child coexist with sensitive poems about age, love, and the death of his mother, and there are poems as well about the war in Lebanon.

. . . . .

The new wave of contemporary Hebrew poetry is thus self-reflective, even solipsistic, stemming from the fact that the craftsman understands his tools by means of his products, so that the poem is both a process and a test: the poetic process itself becomes the primary subject of that process. In addition, the dialectic of the generations continues. I remarked earlier that Shlonsky attacked Bialik, and as Zach attacked Shlonsky's generation, so Meir Wieseltier has attacked Zach. To be sure, Wieseltier's attack is milder, an effort to show the proximity of rather than the gap between Zach and Alterman. Wieseltier's work is multifaceted and adds the element of violence in an attempt to penetrate his own thematic structure. In similar fashion, Yair Hurvitz attempts to break through the essence of substance, to create an anatomy of objects and thus escape from language. In an early poem Zach had written: "I to myself I sing. / I saw a leaf falling yesterday." Wieseltier sees this—the poet singing to himself—as coquettish, hackneyed, defeatist, an attempt to evade the world. Instead, Wieseltier, in his Hebrew collection titled "Take" (1973), urges the reader:

Take poems, and don't read
do violence to this book:
Spit on it, squash it
kick it, pinch it. 

Throw this book into the sea
to see if it knows how to swim.⁵

The poet Yona Wallach, who died in 1985 at the age of forty-one, joined Wieseltier and Hurvitz as one of the new voices of the 1960s, breaking all taboos, linguistic and thematic, and relating to the word as nature, not invention. Her poetry touched on the erotic-confessional, on the one hand, and on the religious-elliptic on the other. The array of gifted young poets is startling in its variety: there is Asher Reich, who is daring in subject matter and highly metaphorical; there is Aharon Shabtai, who has attempted to shatter the boundary between mimesis and praxis.

I have chosen, however, to conclude this article by going back to an earlier generation, to discuss Avot Yeshurun, who was born in 1904, came to Palestine in 1925, and is still one of the most interesting figures on the poetic scene in Israel. He builds his poetry out of broken fragments. One of his collections is titled The Syrian-African Rift (1974; Eng. 1980), echoing the Hebrew name for the Great Rift Valley formed by plate tectonics and extending some three thousand miles from East Africa through the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan and Al Biqa valleys. The rift can therefore be seen as a human metaphor: its destructiveness opens fresh possibilities. In this light, Yeshurun's freedom with language is refreshing; he creates neologisms, alters existing words, uses Arabic and Yiddish words and Hebrew slang, and gleefully breaks the laws of syntax. In a prose piece he says:

You ask how does one become Avot Yeshurun? The answer is through breakage. I broke my mother and my father. I broke the house for them. I broke their peaceful nights. I broke their holidays and I broke their sabbaths. I broke their own self-esteem. . . . I broke their language. I rejected their Yiddish; and their Holy Language I took for everyday.⁶

He is haunted by his breaking away from his home in Europe and the death of his family in the Holocaust. The broken language refers also to the broken state of man. The colloquial language is a reflection of the way people speak who were uprooted and were thrown into the Hebrew language (and the shock of using the Holy Language for everyday purposes). In his unfinished sentences, his broken verse, Yeshurun is indirectly rejecting earlier contemporaries such as Alterman and Shlonsky, who courted the language. However that may be, he, as poet, is compelled to shape his final product by means of the distortion of language and the abandonment of what the language once was.

Most of the key figures in the early and middle generations of Hebrew poets were (as I have said) not born in the Land of Israel, and this is perhaps the most significant single fact binding them together. Many were, like Leah Goldberg, poets of two landscapes. Every one of these poets, even those who had had previous schooling in the Hebrew language, had to acquire Hebrew as a spoken tongue and to master it as spoken. This need to master the language can perhaps be seen as a compensation for not being native-born. Many of the major poets now in their forties or fifties have foreign accents—German, Polish, Russian—which makes their achievements in Hebrew poetry all the more impressive.

From the time Avot Yeshurun came to Palestine in 1925, at the age of twenty-one, he insisted on pronouncing words as they were commonly heard. In Hebrew the word for "Poland" is Polin, yet he will pronounce it "Poilin,"as Yiddish-speaking Jews do, thus maintaining the ring of the spoken language which is being inexorably devoured by modern spoken Hebrew. With his planted "mistakes" and neologisms, he aims at expressing the ephemeral sound; and along with his use of Yiddish and Arabic, this signifies not only his breaking away from home but also the breakup of the Tel Aviv he had known and loved. He is not a master of the language in the sense that Shlonsky and Alterman were: his language is not musical, its syntax is often faulty, and he even misspells words (as an Arabic or Yiddish speaker might do in using Hebrew).

The unevenness of mode, tone, manner, matter is only multiplied in the new collections of poetry now appearing in Israel. Holocaust poetry, more and more poetry by women, poetry by young Arabs writing in Hebrew—all are interesting fields calling for separate discussion. Recent Hebrew verse is marked by its variety and vitality, a burgeoning field.

¹ Among the many BA/WLT essays on Israeli poetry and on individual Israeli poets who are mentioned in this article, the reader is referred especially to the entries by Gillon, Silberschlag, Lewis, Mazor, and Riggan in this issue's "Selected Bibliography of Articles on Near Eastern Literature." I would also point out the following four anthologies, the first three of which are bilingual editions: The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, S. Burnshaw, T. Carmi, E. Spicehandler, eds., New York, Holt, Rinehart& Winston, 1965; The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, T. Carmi, ed., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981; Modern Hebrew Poetry, R. Finer Mintz, ed., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966; Modern Hebrew Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1980.

² Yehuda Amichai, Amen, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 46. The translation is by Amichai himself.

³ Yehuda Amichai, Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers, Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt, trs., New York, Harper & Row, 1983, p. 90. Other available collections by the poet include: Selected Poems, London, Cape Goliard, 1968; Poems, Harper & Row, 1969; Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Harper & Row, 1973; Time, Harper& Row, 1979; and Love Poems, Harper & Row, 1981.

⁴ Natan Zach, Against Parting, John Silkin, tr., Newcastle upon Tyne, Northern House, 1967, p. 16. Also available in English is The Static Element, Peter Everwine and Shulamit Yasny-Starkman, trs., New York, Atheneum, 1982.

⁵ Meir Wieseltier, Kach (Take), Tel Aviv, University Publishers, 1973. The translation is my own.

⁶ Avot Yeshurun, The Syrian-African Rift and Other Poems, Harold Schimmel, tr., Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1980. This edition does not contain the passage cited, and the translation is my own.