SOURCE: "An Analysis of Yehuda Amichai," in Judaism, Vol. 41, No. 1, Winter 1992, pp. 97-104.

[In the following review, Spicehandler finds Glenda Abramson's The Writings of Yehuda Amichai: A Thematic Approach to be a valuable contribution to Amichai criticism.]

Yehuda Amichai has enjoyed international acclaim beyond any of Israel's poets. His works have been translated into many languages, particularly into English. He has taught as a poet-in-residence or lecturer at numerous universities. Although at least a hundred articles dealing with his poetry and prose (including fifteen in English alone) have been published, until recently, only one Hebrew book has appeared which treats Amichai comprehensively, Haprahim Vehaargtal by Boaz Arpaly (Tel Aviv, 1986). Glenda Abramson's new study in English, The Writings of Yehuda Amichai, is an important, first-rate, scholarly exploration of Amichai's literary achievement. It differs from Arpaly's work in several ways. Arpaly confines himself to Amichai's poetry, while Dr. Abramson covers both his poetry and prose. Abramson's is almost exclusively a thematic approach; Arpaly's also explores Amichai's structure and poetics. Moreover, the audience which each addresses is different. Arpaly aims at the literary specialist, and his language is heavily freighted with the professional jargon of the Tel Aviv School of Criticism; Abramson, while thoroughly acquainted with contemporary criticism, writes for a more general reader. Her work is far more readable than Arpaly's.

Both Arpaly and Abramson disagree with the wide-spread negative critical appraisal of Amichai's current writing as being "tired" and a "regurgitation of themes and techniques" which were once his unique contribution to Hebrew letters. Both divide his career into two phases: the younger Amichai of the 1950s and 1960s, and the "maturer poet" of the last two decades. Undoubtedly, the earlier Amichai was more exciting and innovative, and became one of the fathers of Israel's "new poetry." The later Amichai's mature line, while reflecting a more sedate imagery and the adult skepticism which modifies his youthful certainties, nevertheless reconfirms his position as one of Israel's major poets.

I shall confine myself to Dr. Abramson's discussion of Amichai's poetry, and deal with the six themes discussed by our author: (1) Biography and Autobiography, (2) Allusion and Irony, (3) The Father and God, (4) Alienation and Fragmentation, (5) Love poetry, and (6) Jerusalem.

1. Biography and Autobiography

No one can argue with Dr. Abramson's assertion that "Yehuda Amichai's personality as a poet is, in many respects, a reflection and distillation of the poetic personality of his generation, and conclusions about his poetic 'I' are relevant to the generation as a whole."

Born in Bavaria in 1924 to Orthodox Jewish parents, Amichai was brought by them to Israel in 1936, where he studied in religious schools at Petach Tikvah and Jerusalem, to which latter city the family moved before the outbreak of World War II. Following his graduation from secondary school, he enlisted in the Jewish Brigade and, when the war ended, joined the Palmach, the striking force of the Haganah, participating, first in its clandestine operations of smuggling Jewish refugees through the British blockade and, later, as a combatant in Israel's War of Independence. In the early 1950s, he studied at the Hebrew University and he published his first volume of verse in 1956 (Akhshav Uveyamim Ha'aherim, [Now and In Other Days]).

These biographical facts, with some variation, constituted the common experience of an entire generation of his literary colleagues. Many, like him, were born abroad, either in Central or Eastern Europe; others were native born to parents who themselves were immigrants. Most were affected directly and indirectly by the experience of the Holocaust. Almost all served as soldiers in either the Palmach or the Jewish Brigade or in both, and attended the Hebrew University in the 1950s. Many came from an Orthodox background, which they rejected during their adolescence.

They constituted the first generation of Israeli writers, whose primary childhood language was, or became, Hebrew (although Amichai was twelve years old when he arrived in Eretz Yisrael, Hebrew rapidly became his vernacular). The incursion of spoken Hebrew into poetry was primarily due to this fact, but was also caused by the general trend in European and American poetry not only to write in a "conversational style" but also to permit commonplace words (including slang and blatant sexual terms and phrases) to enter the hitherto "aesthetic" domain of poetry.

A common characteristic of Amichai's literary generation was their fierce disillusionment with the ideologies upon which they had been nurtured in their youth. In his case, this disillusionment was two-tiered. First, was the loss of his transcendental Orthodox faith, a tragedy which is frequently connected with the image of his father (often his dead father), who had remained steadfast in his faith, and the feelings of guilt toward him and the tradition which Amichai had forsaken. Second, was his abandonment of his Utopian Zionist dreams, which were shattered against the rock-hard realities of grimy, bloody wars and the grey, bureaucratized society which emerged as the new state developed and was swamped with the mass immigration of the 1950s.

2. Allusion and Irony

Amichai uses his biography as a symbolic lexicon rather than as a record of personal history. His war years usually serve as the great divide between his childhood world of faith and wholeness and his adult's hell of alienation, loneliness and fragmentation. At times, this dividing line is rolled back to the period of his departure from Germany, pre-Hitlerian Bavaria representing a childhood world of Orthodox wholeness and tranquility, while Erez Yisrael represents a kind of exile in reverse, a chaotic, war-torn immigrant society. But, paradoxically, Erez Yisrael is seen as the real world to which one must desperately cling, since there is no returning to the vanished dream-world of the past.

The Hebrew poet is compelled to express the disjunctive secular world which he inhabits through the medium of Hebrew, a language which, but a century ago, was the holy tongue. Amichai manipulates the religious resonance of the Hebrew language as an ironic device by which to express the angst of a generation which had lost its faith in Utopias. In Dr. Abramson's words:

The central figure of this poetry is its intertextuality and its reliance on the Bible, Rabbinic literature and the liturgy. Amichai employs a more subtle subtext, composed of an attitude towards the texts, not only his ironic response to their message but also his tacit agreement to relinquish their canonic value and consequently their entrenched holiness … The poet is … able to supply the texts with his own value; one not validated by tradition, but open to a new testing in his own time. Richard Ellmen's assessment of Joyce may exactly be applied to Amichai: "… Joyce left the Catholic Church not so much by denying it as transmuting its language for his own uses. Christianity had subtly evolved in his mind from a religion into a system of metaphors which as metaphors could claim a fierce allegiance. He converted a temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down."

One may add, parenthetically, that Amichai's lexicon of such symbols is usually drawn from Jewish religious practice, the Bible, the Siddur and the High Holiday Mahzorim, and only to a limited extent from Rabbinic and Medieval literature.

Hillel Barzel has suggested that "transposing" is a more apt term for this technique! "The taking of words, sentences, parts of biblical verses, proverbs, similes etc. out of their normative context and inserting them into a new frame with an imaginative sweep." Barzel broadens the scope of this technique beyond the Jewish vocabulary to include everyday cliches and even common contractual phrases such as "both parties as one and each one individually," which Amichai uses to allude to the ambivalence of the relationship between lovers. In dealing with traditional texts, Dr. Abramson contends that Amichai resorts to three techniques: (1) parodies of the original, (2) verbatim quotations followed by the poet's commentary, and (3) allusions to the text but misquoting, disturbing and engaging in word-play. These "transpositions" become a vehicle for what Russian critics call "surprise"—an ingenious, unexpected freshening of the familiar. This tool was used, if only occasionally, by Bialik, but undoubtedly Amichai also learned it from the English metaphysical poets, either directly or via Auden and Eliot, two poets whom he greatly admires.

3. God and Father

Amichai's "presentation of God as one of the central themes of his poetry" is more a transpositional technique than it is an expression of faith. Dr. Abramson avers that "the Jewish God of his childhood becomes, through a series of permutations, a psychological interjection." I would suggest that Amichai's view is agnostic, and that when he asserts that God has pity on kindergarten children, less on school children and none at all on adults, he is contending that for many (including himself) God is a reality only for the immature and that one outgrows the belief in Him. Yet, Dr. Abramson hesitatingly suggests that Amichai does retain a belief in God as a cosmic force whose ways are incomprehensible to human beings. "It is necessary to decide whether … God … throughout Amichai's early verse (1948–1964) refers consistently to the kind of arbitrary destiny defined in Hellenistic literature as Tyche or to some unspecified power." After 1962, she suggests, he no longer inveighs against "a primitive anthropomorphic deity and now invokes the Lord of the Universe worshipped by the Jews throughout their dispersal … a transition from a concretized God to the God … who no longer dabbles capriciously in human affairs." In the early poetry, Amichai's father appears as an embodiment of traditional Jewish values, historicity, and spiritual morality, in contrast to a capricious God, while, in the later poetry, both images fuse into one.

The diversity of the God/Father relationship seems to be eclectic, dependent on how the poet chooses to "play" with these symbols, rather than on his later developing a new concept of deity. Amichai's cry

     O my father, Chariot of my life, I want
     to go with you, take me a little way,
     Set me down next to my house
     And then continue on your way
 
         ("A Second Meeting With My Father")

is nothing more than an anguished, nostalgic wish for a return to the God/Father, a wish that the poet finds impossible to fulfill.

4. Alienation and Fragmentation

Loss of faith breaks the circle of coherence, and without a center one's world-view is shattered into fragments. The speaker becomes alienated from family and society. Dr. Abramson avers that, although Amichai's early poetry is a "chronicle of futility, frustration, sadness and worthlessness," his

alienation is never entirely convincing and he is able to break out of his self-absorbed passivity and attempt … a confrontation with the external world, [and that the] "I" in the major body of Amichai's poetry is never wholly isolated but is concerned with relationships: father-son, lovers, friends, husband-wife and tender pupil.

However, these are but rare and very ephemeral gleams of light, soon turned into darkness. Indeed, "Amichai's poetry is peppered with images of isolation, helplessness, passivity, and impotence." His frustrated efforts to find "wholeness may not always result in the negation or rejection of value," but is not this very failure the cause of his alienation?

     the city in which I was born was destroyed by cannon
     The ship on which I emigrated was later destroyed in the war
     The barn in Hamadia where I lived was burned down
     The kiosk in Ein Gedi was blow up by the enemy …
     My life is being wiped out behind me
     According to a precise map.

5. Love Poetry

Alienated, devoid of religious faith or social idealism, man turns again and again to human love to fill the void, only to find that human relationships are ephemeral. A child's fantasy about an ideal love: Ruth, a little girl he once knew in his native Würzburg and who was killed in the Shoah represents an ideal love which can never be retrieved.

     What remains. The crisscross marks
     of a raffia chair in the thigh of a woman
     who sat by the sea and then went away
     Or, writing on a celebratory cake
     The words "I love"
     Already cut away from "you."

Again Dr. Abramson divides Amichai's love poetry into two periods, 1948–1968 and 1968–1984. In the first period the speaker explores the manipulation of love by forces beyond the lover's control, even when these emanate from the lover because of guilt and conflict. "The goal of fulfillment with a romanticized and unrealistic illusion as the guide" is never attained even against the puritanical tradition represented by God and father. Sexual love is at once an assertion of liberation and a source of guilt. Religious allusions are used to contradict the old moral code, yet the choice of physical love, and the correlated rejection of religious and spiritual love, is not easily made, for underlying it is a sense of sin, of stealing the exultation meant for God and offering it to a woman.

In the second period, the speaker resigns himself to failure. Love "did neither content the lover nor become a replacement for lost spirituality." Love is a human phenomenon and not a metaphysical state, and the love experience is now recorded with greater physical explicitness. It is viewed "in relation to the banality of life, not its promised or imaginary glory." The speaker's aging also becomes a recurrent motif. "Amichai's love poetry … [may not] at this stage be about love at all, but about the problems of youth and maturation … Love becomes a conceptual synonym for the shock of aging, physical change and the shifting roles in family and society. The solder becomes a good citizen; the young lover, a responsible husband. The son becomes the father."

6. Jerusalem

My remarks about the Jerusalem theme in Amichai's poetry will include my reaction to the recent republication of the bi-lingual Poems of Jerusalem (Harper & Row, 1988). Amichai has lived in Jerusalem for more than forty years, and his poetry expresses the ambivalence of residents of ancient cities to their history. On the one hand there is a rather matter of fact relationship to one's domicile, no different, for example, than the one which Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun, ascribes to 19th century Romans toward their external city. On the other hand, there is an awareness that one is living in the sacred capital of Jewish history. Thus, in the poem "Tourists" the speaker wryly remarks:

    Visits of condolence is (sic) all we get from them.
    They squeal at the Holocaust Memorial
    They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
    And they laugh behind heavy curtains
    In their hotels …
    They weep over our sweet boys
    And lust over our tough girls
    And hang their underwear
    To dry quickly
    In cool, blue bathrooms …

This poem concludes with a deliberate prose paragraph which tells of an experience that the speaker had, as he paused at the Tower of David on his way home from the vegetable market and rested his two heavy baskets on its steps. A guide leading a group of tourists uses the resting speaker as a target marker.

"You see that man with the baskets. Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period …" I said to myself redemption will come only if their guide tells them. "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important; but next to it left and down a bit,… sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family." (the translation is by Drs. Abramson and Parfitt)

In contrast, in the poem "All Generations Before Me," written in 1967, the speaker is animated by a sense of the continuum of Jewish history.

     All the generations before me donated me
     bit by bit, so that I'd be
     erected all at once
     here in Jerusalem, like a house of prayer …
     it binds …
     I have to change my life and my death
     daily to fulfill all the prophecies
     prophesied for me …
     it binds.
     But, he sees more:
     I've passed forty
     There are jobs I cannot get
     … Were I in Auschwitz
     they would not send me out to work
     but gassed me straightaway …
     it binds

This double vision of Jerusalem goes beyond its particularistic Jewish relevance. The speaker, climbing the Tower of David in another poem, tells of rising

    a little higher than the highest prayer
    Halfway to heaven. A few ancients
    managed: Mohammed, Jesus
    and others …

Yet his agnosticism intercedes:

     But they didn't find peace in heaven,
     only the excitement of heights.
     Yet the acclaim hasn't stopped.

And Jerusalem remains a divided city, seething with animosities. Its fluttering laundry lines bear

      a white sheet of a woman who is my enemy woman
      the towel of a man who is my enemy
      to wipe off the sweat of his brow

and concludes with the ironic coda:

     We have put up many flags,
     and they …
     to make us think they're happy
     To make them think that we're happy.

The divided city becomes a metaphor for the poet's divided self: old vs. new, tradition vs. modernity, union and ideal love vs. the inevitable separation of earthly love. Dr. Abramson claims that, in the poetry after 1967, Amichai's speaker abandons his role as prophet and chastiser and becomes "a mellowed and fond Jerusalemite … [N]o longer the observer of a spoiled woman's depredations, he has become rather like a loving although not critical husband." Yet I find little evidence for such a change. Jerusalem remains, for him

     a place where everyone remembers
     That they have forgotten something there
     But don't remember what it is

And although the speaker declares in order to remember

    I wear my father's face
    on mine

his reference to his father's mask (tradition) fails to alter his alienated state.

A word about Poems of Jerusalem and its translators. The sparse, conversational style of Amichai usually lends itself to successful translation—like, for example, the highly textured styles of poets like Pagis and Gilboa. This has much to do with Amichai's international reception. Yet, when his lines are freighted with puns and allusions to Jewish texts, the translators fail. Poems like "If I forget Thee Jerusalem," because of its Hebrew texture, are untranslatable. One cannot render into English the double-entendres implicit in such verbs as shakhah meaning both to forget and to turn lame, puns like tizkor (remember) > tisgor (close), or the rhymes tishkhah > yipatah < tislah. Much of the poem's musicality cannot be transmitted, and the Hebrew reader wonders why anyone troubled to translate a poem whose texture and tone are primary and, therefore, untranslatable.

Admirers of Amichai's will find Dr. Abramson's work an invaluable companion as they explore the deeper regions of the poet's literary world. They will, like myself, hope that she will produce a second volume, which will deal with his poetics, a task which, judging from this fine book, she is certainly well-equipped to undertake.