Yehuda Amichai is the most distinguished Hebrew poet of our time and an internationally prominent literary figure. His poetry is part of the literature curriculum that new generations of readers are raised on, from Israeli school children to college and graduate students in Israel and the United States. His work is the subject of academic conferences and increasingly—though still insufficiently—of serious scholarship. In the hands of any other poet this poetry's steady diet of allusions, parodic midrashim, pseudo-commentary, and other forms of intertextuality would result in a dauntingly difficult body of work. Yet Amichai continues to be a phenomenally popular poet, accepted and admired as the crafter of the "easy poem."

In this essay I try to explore how, and perhaps why, Amichai's poetry maintains an accessible, transparent quality even while engaging in involved dialogues with numerous precursor texts, from the Hebrew Bible to the classics of European literature; and to outline some of the ways in which Amichai's poetic egalitarianism relates to his life-long struggle—and love affair—with textual traditions. I discuss elsewhere in some detail the philosophical and rhetorical aspects of this surface simplicity in terms of what Amichai himself describes in one of his later poems as "the wisdom of camouflage":

     But above all I learned the wisdom of camouflage,
     Not to stand out, not to be recognized,
     Not to be apart from what's around me,
     Even not from my beloved.
     Let them think I am a bush or a lamb,
     A tree, a shadow of a tree,
     A doubt, a shadow of a doubt,
     A living hedge, a dead stone,
     A house, a corner of a house.
     If I were a prophet I would have dimmed the glow of vision
     And darkened my faith with black paper
     And covered the magic with nets.

Veiling the poet's intricate artistry under the camouflage net of artlessness is as necessary as covering the windows with black paper during an air-raid or as dimming the brilliance of prophetic vision during the precarious moments of divine revelation. Yet the evocative density of "ma'asey merkava" in the last line above (an untranslatable expression interestingly rendered here by the Harshavs as the common but multivalent "magic") affords a glimpse of the allusive depths, indeed the plenitude, beneath the poet's (literally) self-effacing rhetoric ("A tree, a shadow of a tree, / A doubt, a shadow of a doubt"). Amichai's self-imposed minimalism, his project of "dimming the glow" which tradition associates with poetic/prophetic vision is articulated in terms which are anything but minimalist: they go to the center of the complex and often arcane intertextual web that constitutes the rabbinic genre of merkaba literature, a genre whose originary moment and locus classicusis Ezekiel's uninhibited depiction of "the lineaments of the divine chariot-throne and its angelic bearers," in Joel Rosenberg's vivid terms. Idiomatically, the expression "ma'asey merkava" invokes the secrets of both divine and artistic wisdom. Yet at the same time it can be taken literally here as an implicit elaboration of the image of war, which—given a role of mock-teacher throughout—deflates and demystifies the traditional discourse of poetic and divine wisdom. The concrete experiences of war are described in the poem's title and first half as hands-on tutorials in the art, theory, or wisdom of camouflage, for "chokhmat hahasva'a" could mean all three; and the mock-divine chariots (merkavot) of our time may simply be tanks hidden under camouflage nets.

In a poem from the late fifties, "La'em" ["To the Mother"], Amichai provides one of the earliest thematizations of the tensions inherent in his intertextual camouflage, a thematization that is itself carefully camouflaged, as we see in this section of the poem.

     Like an old windmill,
     Always two arms raised to yell at the heavens
     And two lowered to make sandwiches.
 
     Her eyes clean and polished
     Like Passover eve.
 
     At night she lines up all the letters
     And the photographs in a row,
 
     To measure with them
     The length of God's finger.

The mother of the title is never directly addressed by the speaker. Though it is clear from later sections of the poem that she is the speaker's mother, she is never referred to as ima or imi but addressed in the title with the formal and universal la-em, "to/for the mother." It is indeed only in the title that she is identified explicitly as the mother. The text itself introduces her through the mediation of the speaker's highly unconventional expanded simile: "Like an old windmill, / always two arms raised to yell at the heavens / and two lowered to make sandwiches." [kemo tachanat ru'ach yeshana, / tamid shtey yadayim muramot lits'ok el raki'a / u-shtayim muradot le-hakhin prusot]. With her body as reference point, the mother becomes the dialogic site of cross-cultural linguistic and visual puns. The initial simile of the old windmill grafts the Hebrew and Yiddish colloquial hyperbole, "a mother needs four hands" (both "hand" and "arm" are yad in Hebrew), onto the literary cliché of fighting with windmills taken from the western canon. The quixotic human struggle is rewritten as the protest of a feisty and combative feminine windmill who does not give up her right to raise a voice—and a hand—against the heavens, even as she continues to care for her family. The windmill, and the mother along with her, turn from object to subject and become the focus of redoubled agency—two and two—fighting and care giving. Amichai's simile divides the textual image-schema so that the upward, heaven-bound orientation is identified with protest and the lower, earth-bound one with nurturing. In the process he also radically humanizes the theological emblem of "yad" (hand, arm), a lexicalized metaphor in biblical Hebrew for divine power, providence, or inspiration.

The mother, like Amichai's critically engaged human agent, occupies the privileged crossings of cultural categories, between the sacred and the secular, the Judaic and the western. By placing her between heaven and earth, and between the ironic pathos of Jewish slang and the parodic bathos of Cervantes, Amichai both undercuts and redoubles her empowerment. While God's power in the Bible is always described as a singular yad (hand), Amichai's version of the proverbial Jewish mother is a mock-heroic yet powerful four-armed heroine. And in Cervantes it is the windmills who in the most direct sense win.

This figure of the mother (and elsewhere the wife or lover) becomes the metonymy in Amichai's poetry for the human and poetic subject, a metonymy that is not accidentally female. Amichai is the only mainstream Hebrew poet to present repeatedly his own poetic lineage, at least in part, as a matrilineage. He acknowledges his poetry's debt both to the German Expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler and to the Hebrew poet of modernism Leah Goldberg. What the speaker inherits from his biological mother in the poem is also what Amichai as poet adopts from the tradition of women's writing: the right, indeed the necessity, to personalize, domesticate, and transpose to the first person singular both history and theology, and to use overtly simple, concrete and familiar modes of discourse to confront the most universal and anonymous formations of authority.

Thus, the mother in the third stanza of the poem lines up all the letters and photographs in a row, "to measure with them / the length of God's finger." The larger context of this series of poems suggests that these might be letters and pictures of loved ones who died, perhaps "in one of the wars," in the words of the last line. In her silent act of protest, the mother uses the photos and letters, these personal traces of visual and textual memory as a homemade yardstick to measure the length of God's finger. The biblically and rabbinically privileged notion of etsba elohim (miraculous divine intervention or providence; see, for example Exodus 8:15) is itself a derivation by synecdoche from yad elohim (God's hand) in a Judaic context, or yad ha-goral (the hand of fate) in a western cultural context. In the course of this maternal anatomy of the divine it becomes merely a literalized single finger of divine power, as opposed to the mother's four hands or arms. In the process of her personal assessment of God's achievements in the world, the mother—and Amichai with her—call into question both the Judaic notion of justified fate (tsiduk ha'din) which is associated with etsba elohim, and the western visual emblematics of a life-giving, healing divine finger, from Michelangelo to E.T. The mother appropriates the clichés of transcendent justification for human suffering, and in the process calls to task both the Jewish God and western humanism: when lined up against the row of family pictures and letters, God's finger may not measure up.

A Jewish mother who measures the length of God's finger is not exactly the paradigmatic example of intertextuality in current critical theory. I would like to suggest that it may be a mistake to ignore such examples and the type of personal intertextual engagement which they model.

In his discussion of Casablanca as a cinematic archetype, Umberto Eco articulates with almost poetic sensitivity a model for a postmodernist conception of intertextuality (as well as for his own novelistic practice): "Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion." When in later films the dialogue of cinematic clichés becomes a self-conscious act of quotation, it creates an aesthetic marked by what Eco has aptly termed intertextual collage: "what Casablanca does unconsciously, later movies will do with extreme intertextual awareness." These, he concludes, "are 'postmodern' movies, where the quotation of the topos is recognized as the only way to cope with the burden of our filmic encyclopedic expertise."

Whether Yehuda Amichai's poetry is construed as postmodernist, modernist, or anti-modernist—and I have argued elsewhere, within a model of partial yet plural literary affiliations, for all three—it provides one of the most sustained examples of intertextual collage in contemporary poetry. Yet it does this while rejecting—ideologically and rhetorically—the alienated, elitist view of intertextuality as the burden of encyclopedic expertise. Amichai's intertextual practice and his meta-poetic thematization of this practice serves me then to call into question current postmodern conceptions of intertextual relations as totalizing conditions.

What seems to be behind Eco's position is the trivially correct view that anonymous tissues of citations encompass all textuality. The extra step which Eco, and other poststructuralist critics before him have taken, though, is that the general intertextuality of all texts renders meaningless any selective, purposeful and critical engagement with any particular one. It is interesting that Israeli theories of allusion and intertextuality developed by Ziva Ben-Porat on the model of modern Hebrew poetry and by Daniel Boyarin on the model of midrash avoid—each in its own way—this totalizing trap. That they can do so is made possible to a large extent by what the late Amos Funkenstein described as a text-oriented, interpretive Jewish tradition in which engaging in intertextual activities such as exegesis and commentary constitutes "a primary religious command and value." In Eco's account, by contrast, a generalized "we"—the universal consumers of the cinematic text—are presented as agentless by-standers, eavesdropping as the reified, personified clichés are having their reunion, even with respect to a cult movie like Casablanca.

In focusing on Amichai's critical-interpretive subject I argue tendentiously and directly—and I believe it's important to state one's own assumptions as clearly as possible—for the need to reinscribe agency into our understanding of intertextuality. In the process I also wish to underscore the need for a historicized, culturally specific view of the ways poets and readers activate not only allusions but also parodies, pastiches, quotations, etc., and to describe these not as closed encounters between fragments but as the cultural and ideological practices of human beings. What I am advocating is not a simplistic return to the biographical poetic "I" as was common in traditional influence studies but a new understanding of what it means for a human agent, be it a reader, a poet, or a poetic persona within a text, to activate, interpret, critique, and rewrite the collective clichés and stereotypes of a culture.

The intertextual reunion Amichai's poetry celebrates is infinitely more complex than Eco's model suggests, and not because it isn't cinematic clichés but sacred texts that typically talk among themselves in the pages of his poetry. In fact, Amichai often applies the same strategies which he uses for critiquing the topos of the Binding of Isaac or the Yom Kippur liturgy to quotations from popular songs or, indeed, to the intertextual practices of old movies. What makes things complex, and yet forces them to appear rhetorically simple is, instead, Amichai's commitment to reinvest intertextuality with agency, rejecting its authority as an "impersonal field of crossing texts." He does this in a literary age when, for a variety of reasons, both the dominant Hebrew trends and the western modernist/postmodernist models typically advocate an agentless and ahistorical view of the appropriation of textual traditions. Amichai's re-inscription of intertextuality as the practice of a historicized, ordinary human subject focuses around this subject's doubly critical—yet overtly naive—engagement with "the words that accompany [his] life." (See the poem "Summer Rest and Words," below.) His is a personal, critical gesture aimed both inward, toward the Hebraic intertextual traditions of a mosaic of quotations (shibbutz) or ornate stock phrases (melitza), textual commentary, and midrash, and outward, toward Euro-American views of the poetic text as a fragmented, unharmonized tissue of citations. Both Judaic and Western intertextual practices are experienced as vital layers in the unstable geology or archaeology of the self, the verbal spare parts (Amichai's pun is chelkey chalof) which the poet needs to keep fixing and changing in order to survive.

Amichai's claims for agency over inherited or imported "tissues of citations" often take the form of a deliberate deflation by the speaker—and by critics who take him at his word—of intertextual practice. Rendered as the ordinary verbal baggage of a non-poetic "I," his citations aim to create the rhetorical impression of popular or intimate discourse or of a playful fiddling with words even when—or perhaps precisely when—they involve a rewriting of the most sacred texts of cultural memory. Iconoclastic biblical allusions, critical reversals of liturgy, parodies of midrash and rabbinical commentary are normalized and explained away by the speaker's state of mind, his biography, and/or the history of his personal involvement with the texts they evoke. These radical reinterpretations of the mekorot, of "the sources," are inserted alongside sub-canonical, blatantly non-literary or non-Judaic intertexts, which are subjected by the speaker to the same scrutiny as the most canonical allusions. Just as Amichai begins some poems with a biblical quotation on which the rest of the poem offers a pseudo-commentary, so does he often cite the text on bulletin boards and plaques, or quotes snippets of personal conversation as the starting point for an intertextual meditation.

I shouldn't have been surprised, therefore (but I was!), to find in his latest book of poetry (1989), a poem titled Hadera which starts out with a self-quotation from a phone conversation we had a few years earlier: "'me-olam lo hayiti bachadera' ze kmo / psak din memit mi-tsa'ar ve-kove'a uvda, kmo muvet. / rak avarti darka ve-lo shahiti ba" ("'I never was in Hadera,' is like / a verdict killing by sorrow and establishing a fact, like death. 'I just passed through and didn't stay'"). At the time I had of course no way of knowing that this innocuous phone call in which I gave Amichai directions how to get to my in-laws' house in Hadera for a weekend visit ("'near the water tower you turn left, to Heroes St.'") would end up as the subject for exegetical meditation in a poem. I cannot tell you for sure therefore whether these are the exact words Amichai used. But I think it's safe to assume that he probably said something like "af pa'am" rather than the literary "me-olam," that he didn't pronounce it ba-chaderá, but be-chadéra, and that in all likelihood he didn't actually use the verb shahiti with the high-falutin' inflected prepositional ba. But of course these stylizations are needed if this phone call is to get us thinking in terms of the philosophical discourse of life and death, love and war while preserving the lexical facade of subcanonical intertextuality (as contrasted with biblical or literary allusion, for example). In fact, however, a highly canonical intertextual dialogue is concealed by this mundane phone call, a dialogue which many other poems conduct more directly, with the great medieval Hebrew poet Shmuel Ha-Nagid.

In a recent article titled "'As in a Poem by Shmuel Ha-Nagid': Between Shmuel Ha-Nagid and Yehuda Amichai," Tova Rosen describes the discourse-structure unique to Ha-Nagid where the starting point for a meditation is in a self-quotation and in "the articulation in the first person of a personal experience (biographic or pseudo-biographic)." The stylistic elevation of self-quotation in the first two lines is therefore not merely a way to make mundane materials more literary but the first step in a carefully structured meditative discourse, modeled, as Rosen astutely observes, on Ha-Nagid's self-quoting personal meditations. Thus, for example, when be-chadéra becomes ba-chaderá, the change may enable a pseudo-etymologic midrash on chadirá (penetration), just like darka (through it/her; literally, her way or road; the femininity of place terms in Hebrew really helps here) is associated by the self-exegetical speaker with the question of how one's way or route in life is determined. The biographical background, which Amichai has since expanded on in several interviews with me, clarifies the connection between a literal passing through Hadera, the mention of love and war in the poem, and the metaphorical meditation on the ways of life. In the summer of 1942 Amichai passed through Hadera en route to enlisting in the Jewish Brigade in the British army. He had there a brief encounter with a woman. Had he "stayed in" Hadera and not just "passed through" it—his life would have been different. What we must grasp is that the effect created by this internal translation from colloquial Hebrew is precisely the same—and carries the same ideological message—as that created by Amichai's poetics as a whole: that everyday, personal conversation, even a phone call asking for directions, is every bit as important a source of intertextual engagement as any canonical cultural text.

The poem "Menuchat kayits u-milim" ("Summer Rest and Words") is a recent example of the anti-elitist impact of Amichai's reinscription of personal agency into intertextual practice; it is also a carefully wrought thematization of this practice, a meta-poetics of intertextuality that, like the other meta-poetic poems in Amichai's latest volume carefully veils its own radical artfulness.

      The sprinklers calm summer's wrath.
      The sound of the sprinkler twirling
      And the swish of the water on leaves and grass
      Are enough for me. My wrath
      Spent and calm and my melancholy full and quiet.
      The newspaper drops from my hand and turns back into
      Passing times and paper wings.
      I shut my eyes.
      And return to the words of the rabbi in my childhood
      On the bimah of the synagogue: "And give eternal salvation
      To those who go off to their world." He changed
      The words of the prayer a little, he did not
      Sing and did not trill and did not sob
      And did not flatter his God like a cantor
      But said his words with quiet confidence, demanded of God
      In a calm voice that accompanied me all my life.
      What did he mean by these words,
      Is there salvation only for those who go to their rest?
      And what about our world and what about mine?
      Is rest salvation or is there any other?
      And why did he add eternity to salvation?
      Words accompany me. Words accompany my life
      Like a melody. Words accompany my life
      As at the bottom of a movie screen, subtitles
      Translating their language into mine.
 
      I remember, in my youth the translation sometimes
      Lagged behind the words, or came before them,
      The face on the screen was sad, or even crying,
      And words below were joyful, or things lit up
      And laughed and the words spelled great sadness.
      Words accompany my life.
      But the words I say myself
      Are now like stones I fling
      Into a well in the field, to test
      If it is full or empty,
      And its depth.

In a series of deliberate self-referential deflations which mimic the secularization of the sacred in Amichai's earlier allusive poetry, the poem reduces the intertextual heritage with which the speaker struggles to a bunch of words that follow him around throughout his life, or to verbal associations that pass through his mind as he dozes off on a summer day. Radical reversals of liturgical texts are subversively presented as pseudo-tradition, as the sleepy nostalgic return to "the words of my childhood rabbi," a rabbi who liked to change the text of the prayer just a little bit, and who modeled for the speaker both an aesthetic and a theology of change through valorized simplicity: his calm voice and unadorned style as well as his practice of changing "ever so slightly" the words of the prayer, have accompanied the speaker throughout his life.

Towards the end of the poem, the rupture which the poet reveals within the intertextual baggage of the culture, the anachronistic inappropriateness of the sacred intertexts to his personal modern condition, is deliberately trivialized through a simile, which is itself presented as drawn from personal memory and not from the stock of literary figures: the words which accompany the speaker lag behind their referents just like the handwritten subtitles in old movies in Israel in the 1940s and 50s, which could never keep up with the picture. The intertextual baggage that follows him around is hopelessly out of synch with the expressive needs of his reality, the sad or happy human faces on the screen. Yet the speaker "forgives" or "excuses" this as the malfunctioning of an old subtitles projector, most likely of the kind that had the translation "from their language into mine" on the side, ba-shulayim, "in the margins," as the original Hebrew has it. Only after the speaker has asserted his agency over the mistranslations and misquotations which he has inherited can the words reach beyond soporific nostalgia, background music or mere verbal accompaniment. In the final lines of the poem they become, instead, personal touchstones, projectiles that actively, aggressively test the waters, question the plenitude or depth of tradition, and appropriate for the agent the right to assess for himself whether there is anything in it for him, any water left in the well to quench his thirst. It is, therefore, precisely into the well of traditional sources from which he has been drinking all his life that the speaker now assertively throws stones.

It is almost as if in late poems such as "Summer Rest and Words," in the space between summer siesta (menuchat kayits) and final rest (menuchat olamim, or menuchat ha-kets), Amichai feels compelled to insert an accounting of his intertextual practices, to claim them as his own—the first six lines are a collage of internal allusions to earlier poems of Amichai—and in the process to take personal responsibility for their success or failure, meaningfulness or emptiness.

Reinscribing human agency into the impersonal tissue of citations doesn't allow for much authority to remain, either in "the sources" or in their contemporary iconoclastic appropriation. But that, Amichai ventures to suggest, can only be for the better.