SOURCE: "On Amichai's El male rahamin," in Prooftexts, Vol. 4, No. 2, May 1984, pp. 127-40.

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In an essay that outlines some major trends in recent Israeli poetry and prose, Shimon Sandbank shrewdly assesses the unusual relationship to language that distinguishes modern Hebrew literature from other contemporary writing. Israeli literature comes only belatedly—with the New Wave writers of the 1950s and 60s—to a dismay at the inadequacy of words such as was typical of a variety of modernist movements at the start of the century. Hebrew fiction and lyric have undergone this special development, Sandbank argues, because they have had to grapple so strenuously with the "inbuilt sacred meanings" of the language itself.

For thousands of years Hebrew existed only as a written language, steeped in religious tradition and permeated with biblical and talmudic associations. Its revival as a spoken language, with the rise of Zionism, required an adaptation to secular needs—a rejuvenated or newly created vocabulary for modern everyday life and a syntax to match the carelessness and fluidity of living speech. This has been a painful process, perhaps not yet completed to this very day. The creative energy that has gone into the process has left little initiative for a "modernistic" questioning of communication itself. To opt for silence, one must despair of language; to despair of language perhaps one must first exhaust its possibilities. Hebrew literature, it seems, has not yet exhausted the possibilities of the Hebrew language.

In short, its idiosyncratic history as a language has invested modern Hebrew with both an overload of allusive power and an awkward, though promising newness. The challenge of reconciling these two qualities in a flexible new idiom has diverted interest from the kind of experimentalism so characteristic of other twentieth century literatures.

Even so, with the work of Amichai, Zach, Carmi, Avidan and others of the post-1948 period, there figures prominently in Israeli poetry a new element of doubt about language. Marked by an impatience with the still incomplete revitalization of Hebrew, this poetry signals a moment of linguistic reevaluation and literary self-consciousness. If, previously, the modernization of the holy tongue absorbed too much energy to leave room for despair, now the slow progress of that renewal became in itself an irritant and cause for reexamining artistic values. As the younger poets shunned the grand certainties, collective focus and ideological stances of the older writers, they reacted also against grandiose language. This group of poets had a strong sense that the writing of the preceding generation was inauthentic—verbose, mechanical, out of touch with the living world of the present, and incapable of capturing contemporary experience with any kind of immediacy. Searching for a mode of expression more aptly suited to convey their own individual experience and inner lives, the New Wave poets made a concentrated effort to divest their Hebrew of traditional meanings. In their struggle to forge a new style they turned sharply to colloquial (heretofore unliterary) diction, to ironic understatement and to parody of liturgical allusion.

The discontents which helped motivate this new artistic sensibility involved more than a critique of poetic fashion directed by rebellious writers against established ones. At issue is a pervasive questioning of the nature of language which frequently thematizes itself in the poetry and which thereby adds a deliberate metalinguistic dimension to this writing. As Shimon Levy has remarked in an article called "Elements of Poetic Self-Awareness in Modern Hebrew Poetry," there are far more poems about poetry in the work of Amichai, Zach, and Carmi than in that of their predecessors, Bialik, Alterman, Shlonsky, Rachel and Steinberg. Among the interesting poems of this sort there is lyric which, like many another modernist text, dwells on problems of communication and on a rift, perceived as inevitable, between words and feeling. In addition, too, there is verse which specifically laments the difficulty of adapting an ancient tongue to modern expressive needs.

This intellectual climate goes a long way toward explicating one of Amichai's most well-known and finest poems, El male rahamim. The poem is worthy of close analysis, in part, precisely because it encapsulates so many of the central tensions of the generation's work. It presents an inadvertent poetics for Amichai's own writing and exemplifies in condensed form his contemporaries' major accomplishments as well.

The poem revolves about a rejection of tradition and a complementary openness to linguistic innovation. The two attitudes are intimately linked in a crumbling of collective values, both religious and nationalistic. Like the other New Wave writers, Amichai turns away from public concerns to a focus on the individual and the inner self; the elevated diction of allusion disappears as the system of values to which it refers can no longer validate it, and the shift of interest to the individual leads naturally to a new placing of importance on creativity, on private frames of reference, and on personal freedom and inventiveness. The metapoetic element in El male rahamim emerges as a byproduct of this process. Most directly this happens as a concern with self results in a concern with the self as poet and, eventually, with the role of the poet in renovating language. Less directly, the breakdown of referentiality here draws attention to language itself. When words no longer signify effectively within the context of external frames of reference, they may come to produce meaning primarily with relation to one another as elements of discourse within a text. Such a case, which brings language itself to the fore, prevents the reader from perceiving words simply as a medium to larger, shared understandings. This is what comes about in Amichai's El mate rahamim. A close reading of the poem illustrates how, by bringing the focus of signification back inside the text, the poet insists that we notice the medium, the words themselves, in their capacity for semantic renewal.

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     "God Full of Mercy"
 
     God full of mercy,
     were it not for the God full of mercy
     there would be mercy in the world and not only in Him.
     I, who picked flowers on the mountains
     and I looked into all the valleys,
     I, who brought corpses from the hills,
     know to say that the world is devoid of mercy.
 
     I, who was the king of salt by the sea,
     who stood without decision by my window,
     who counted the footsteps of angels,
     whose heart lifted weights of pain
     in the awesome contests.
 
     I, who use only a small portion
     of the words in the dictionary.
 
     I, who must solve riddles against my will,
     know that were it not for the God full of mercy
     there would be mercy in the world
     and not only in Him.

The first three lines of El male rahamim, which also constitute the first full sentence, proffer an assertion and define the basic premise of the entire poem: were it not for God, a God of compassion, there would be more compassion in the world. The rest of the poem serves as an elaboration on this statement and a justification for the poet's irreverence.

The hypothesis postulated here depends at several levels on a reversal of expectations. The logical supposition—that a God of compassion will foster compassion in the world—is challenged by a simultaneous over-turning of literary convention, a parody of liturgical language. The parody, in turn, hinges on a wordplay, that is, on phonetically similar words that engender a semantic inversion. Beginning in the first line with the opening from the prayer for the dead, the first sentence makes an abrupt about-face in line 2. Through the word ilmale, which consists of the same consonants as el male, the poem barely departs from the letter of the prayer, but renders its spirit completely alien. Thanks to the slightest of shifts in division between almost identical letters, this repetition entails a radical revision of meaning. Consequently, rather than the supplication to God that one would expect from line 1, the poem presents a protest and makes a plea not for the priority of divine will, but of man's well-being.

A tiny displacement of linguistic components thus turns the vocative of prayer to a disavowal of faith, delimiting a shift of emphasis from the divine to the human realm and so undermining a whole world view. The reversal of expectations here also dramatizes a reorientation toward the self and so helps enact the shift to the human realm advocated in lines 2 and 3. How does this dramatization come about? First of all, the word-play, the inventiveness of an individual poet, subverts the allusive power of the opening line and so mocks the traditional frame of reference on which it depends. Secondly, to call on God blasphemously is to heighten one's own rebelliousness. As Jonathan Culler notes in an essay on apostrophe, the vocative attributes responsiveness to the one invoked. If the being addressed in a poem is not one who can react, the whole convention then serves to call attention to the voice that does the addressing. Hence, a man standing in the rain cursing buses does not make the bus come faster; he merely makes a spectacle of himself. By the same token, the Romantic poet who calls out to inanimate objects most effectively draws attention back to himself and his own action. For this reason Culler surmises, "One who successfully invokes nature is one to whom nature might, in its turn, speak. He makes himself poet, visionary. Thus, invocation is a figure of vocation." If Amichai's God is removed from mankind and unresponsive to its needs, then the poet's ability to engage in some kind of discourse with the deity magnifies his own stature, emphasizing his own spiritual capacities and initiative.

The pivotal wordplay of lines 1 and 2 alerts us, however, not only to the distance between reverence and blasphemy, but also to their inherent proximity. Just as the words el male and ilmale resemble one another yet remain opposite in intention and implication, so the poet maintains a stance simultaneously close yet far from tradition. The very use of a vocative testifies to a recognition of God and reminds us that loss of faith is predicated on having had faith in the first place. The parody acknowledges that the poet's understanding of the world derives from the past, grows out of Jewish religion, and cannot deny the formative importance of that heritage. It could even be argued that perhaps the man would not know compassion had he not known religion; what remains entirely without doubt is that religious tradition and language no longer suffice to sustain him.

The next full sentence of the poem (lines 4-7) leaves the past behind and reconfirms the importance of the poetic self. A speaker is only implicitly active in lines 1-3, but the next sentence clearly identifies the poetic voice as I. Repeating the word ani at the beginning of line 4 and the beginning of line 6, the poem most emphatically introduces an individual as source of the contention that the world is empty of mercy. Together, the first two sentences of the poem comprise the first verse, and this stanzaic separation highlights the central contrast, divine/human. The focus on God in 1-3 stands in direct contradistinction to the focus on the individual in 4-7.

The second verse (lines 8-14) defines in more detail the nature of the self and the individual's knowledge of the world. There are no complete sentences in this verse, and this fact acquires significance by contrast with the careful division of focus between the two complete sentences of verse 1. Here we have merely a listing of relative clauses that describe the self. (Note that she appears five times here with reference to ani, just as it has twice in the preceding verse.) These lines are clearly to be understood as a continuation of 4-7: that is, not as an addition of fundamentally new information, but, instead, as a filling-in of details. This elaboration, in its insistent attention to the self, further advances the shift of importance to the individual which began in the opening verse. The word ani itself assumes special prominence, since it stands in the initial position of lines 8 and 13, as it does, too, in 4, 6, and 15. This location, moreover, makes the description reminiscent of liturgy. Many prayers in Jewish and Christian tradition likewise follow an enumerative structure, providing long lists of attributes or epithets that serve to imply the immensity of God, the multifacetedness of that which is unlimited. In this way the poem again satirizes traditional literature as it replaces God with a human being.

The last verse of Amichai's poem (lines 15-18) summarizes and recapitulates the first three lines. Repeating the exact words used previously (ilmale ha'el male rahamim / hayu harahamim ba'olam / velo rak bo), this verse introduces two variations over the preceding treatment of God's disregard for human beings.

To begin with, these lines combine ani and el in the same sentence and in this manner, for the first time, forge a direct link between the two words. (Before we had only an implied contrast between them, along with the tacit understanding that an I is addressing God in line 1.) Significantly, in this sentence ani is the subject of the main clause and el that of the subordinate clause. Man claims to have the upper hand here, to encompass God to a certain extent in his own knowledge. Moreover, we realize here that this man's knowledge led to the conclusion with which we began. This means that the intervening lines have served a primarily epistemological function, explaining how the self came to an understanding of God. While the opening assertion presents itself as an abstraction, the final lines, with their emphasis on the insights of the person, reinforce yet again the reorientation from the divine to the human realm developed throughout the poem.

The second departure of this refrain from the earlier statement both strengthens and counterbalances the effect of this first variation. The last line ends with the phrase lo rak bo, separated, as it was not before, from the rest of the sentence. In this way the final line reflects the isolation of God, but reminds us once more that blasphemy depends on a faith once held and then questioned: El male rahamim begins and ends with God, and though the closing remark is a rejection, awareness of God remains the frame around the celebration of self in the middle segment of the poem. This insistent return to God suggests the poet's lingering nostalgia for belief, a longing for a kinder world transmuted now into an angry sense of injustice at God's indifference.

Within this general organization of the poem, how does the poetic I portray itself? Within this world neglected by God, how does the self view its own function and the meaning of its own existence? Immediately striking is the fact that all the verbs in the poem are governed by ani (save for hayu rahamim, lines 3 and 17). God is associated only with the predicate adjective male, that is, an attribute and not an action. There is no indication of past, present or future here. This God full of mercy remains at a remove from the world of fulfillment, of efforts, disappointments, realizations and change. Underscoring the difference between God and man, most of the verbs linked with ani appear in the past (katafti, histakalti, heveti, 'amadti, hayiti, safarti, [libi] herim). It is experience that defines man's nature and shapes his character. While God has stayed apart from the world, the poet deals directly with it and, indeed, with a very concrete, physical world. He has extended contact with nature: valleys and mountains, hills and sea, flowers, salt and death in its most palpable form (heveti geviot min hageva'ot, line 6). His, moreover, is a very specific reality. The proliferation of definite articles (bahar, ha'amakim, hageva'ot, ha'olam, melekh hamelah, hayam, bataharuyot hanora'of, hamilim, bamilon) roots us in a here and now imbued with particularity. Though not an identifiable social setting familiar to the poem's readers, this world of personal perceptions and the imagination nonetheless values its own inherent worth. It does not defer to any other, more transcendental realm, and in this here and now things in themselves matter; people, as individuals, matter. (It is worth noting, too, that the phrase el male rahamim uses rahamim in indefinite form. This is not specific compassion, not mercy directed toward a particular end. The definite article does attach itself though to the noun rahamim when the poet associates compassion, albeit only as wishful thinking, not with God but with the world [hayu harahamim, lines 3 and 17].)

The general motion away from the spiritual and toward the material in verses 1 and 2 entails more than just the poet's allegiance to earth-bound concerns. The change in outlook depends as well on a rapprochement between the lowly and the lofty, which ends by curtailing the sacred or divine and, concomitantly, attributing new spiritual importance to the individual.

The motif of limitation begins as the I brings corpses out from the hills. Here it is important to read this poem specifically as an Israeli text, and not as a universal one, for nature, not traditionally the sustenance of the Jewish people, in Zionism establishes itself as a praiseworthy new ideal. This new embodiment of the sacral, however, cannot divorce itself from the cruelty of the human world. To realize an ideal in this case is literally to bring it down to earth. Contact with the land of Israel, the materialization of Jewish longing and dreams, has inevitably meant acceptance of violence and bloodshed. As the poet juxtaposes images of death and of mountains, he vivifies the notion that out of the exalted heights comes compelling proof that the world is empty of compassion.

The phrase melekh hamelah (line 8) furthers the idea of a leveling process occurring between two opposite realms. Rather than extolling the supreme being (elohenu melekh ha'olam), the poet joins the superior with the humble to ironize the idea of sovereignty and supremacy. He does so in order to insist simultaneously on his own importance and his own boundaries; this is a paradoxical self-aggrandizement of humility. In similarly ambivalent fashion the poet asserts in line 16 that he counts the steps of angels. The human here has access to heavenly creatures, but only in order to quantify them, to assign them an earthly measure. A comparable leveling emerges furthermore in line 11, libi herim mishkalot ke'ev. In this inescapably concrete world, pain and feeling are perceived as phenomena with tangible weight. This pain struggles with the heart, which, conversely, is a physical entity associated by convention with the emotions. Neither contestant clearly overpowers the other (though herim suggests at least an element of success in the fight against gravity), and so the confrontations between the two are designated as taharuyot nora'ot. The word nora', indicating tremendous conflict, a battle of equals, in addition has strong religious connotations. In the poet's world, we should note, qualities of awe and terror do not belong to a special, identifiably religious domain. They are part and parcel of everyday life on man's earth, in a realm of feeling that does not admit differentiation between the physical and the spiritual.

The reciprocal transfer of qualities in lines 11-12 prepares us for the ambivalence of 13-14 as well: ani shemishtamesh rak behelek katan min hamilim shebamilon. Up to this point the attention to limitations has been aimed at exalted things, and as an extension of this pattern, writing or speech, too, now become something lofty. The limitations of language here come from the man who uses words, and not from the act of writing itself. The poet in this manner again stresses his own humility, even while insisting on the high purpose of the activity in which he engages.

The statement in 13-14 then creates a transitional link to the motif of limitation in the final verse, which begins with a direct parallel in line 15: ani shemukhrah liftor hidot be'al korhi. The limitation in question here is one of enthusiasm. The poet solves riddles, and therefore is one who confronts mystery, the unknown, things beyond his grasp, but he does so against his will. His attitude reveals both a longing for a faith bigger than himself, and a conviction that he has nowhere else to turn but to himself.

Reconfirming this reading of his outlook as an existentialist kind of self-reliance in an indifferent universe, the poem as a whole highlights the idea that he cannot rely on absolutes nor on inherited teaching, but must find wisdom only in his own perspective and in what he learns from a series of painful personal events. In contrast to the other verbs in the poem, the verbs in 13-16 appear in the present tense (mishtamesh, mukhrah [liftor], and yode'a as a refrain to line 7). This fact indicates that the poet's arrival at knowledge has depended on a temporal process, a progression from past action to present realizations. He bases his conclusions, moreover, on a wide variety of data. The mention of extremes (mountains and valleys) and opposite perspectives (inside and out: leyad hayam, leyad haloni) implies a breadth of empirical evidence as does the repeated use of plurals (taharuyot, milim, prahim, geviot, geva'ot, mishkalot, malakhim, etc.). Images of multiplicity again recall the enumeration of prayer, replacing hints of God's immensity with the implication that, in this case, comprehensiveness of experiences leads to comprehension.

In short, it is the individual who formulates supreme values, and he does so by drawing on his own experiences and senses rather than on a system of beliefs emanating from divine law. The entire motion of leveling between the human and the divine, which culminates in this state of affairs, expresses itself most clearly in that final verse which subordinates God's action (or inactivity) to man's knowledge. The same process culminates as well, we might say, in the very act of writing the poem, in replacing the El male rahamim of the prayer book with the poet's. The poet glorifies his own responses to the world, and his writing certainly counts as one of the most important among those responses.

Supporting this argument, lines 13-14 in a relatively overt metapoetic statement, have already called our attention to the elevated nature the poet imputes to writing. In addition, literary self-consciousness, which calls attention to the poet's ingenuity and invention, manifests itself in the conspicuous wordplay of the poem. This process comes about as the wordplay illustrates Roman Jakobson's definition of poetic language as self-referential. This is language that doubles back on itself as a primary point of reference. The words el male and ilmale, for instance, signify not so much due to their denotation of an extratextual reality, as due to their relation with one another: their similar sounds, their parallel positions in lines 1 and 2, their contrasting vocative and declarative functions. By the same token, the phrase melekh hamelah derives much of its meaning from the phonetic closeness of the two nouns, rather than from inherent definitions of these words. These two nouns ordinarily share no semantic similarity, but the sameness of sound puts into relief that they do indeed have something in common. In the poet's view the high and the low, the supreme and the base, are not far apart; they are inseparable elements of everyday life. In this way the poem creates a focus internal to itself and so directs the reader again to the poetic self who produces meaning by bringing disparate realms together, inventing new sense out of the resulting synthesis.

The resemblance of the words geviyot and geva'ot plays a comparable role in line 6, reminding us that when we think of nature, we must also think of death. The line heveti geviyot min hageva'ot works particularly well, because the poet seems to have drawn one word out of the other, precisely as he has drawn corpses out from the hills. The act described and the poetic act of describing therefore reflect one another, and the mutual reinforcement of sound and sense increases our awareness of the active role of the poet. Just as the ani draws conclusions about the world from his own experience, without relying more on his own authority than on that of conventional definitions and reference. This means that as the poet turns in on himself, his language also turns in on itself. Having begun with a parody of prayer that depended on a play on words, El male rahamim takes us quickly from a disillusionment with the language of tradition to a celebration of self and of linguistic invention.

3

The kind of playfulness that characterizes El male rahamim is not unique to this one poem, of course. It is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of Amichai's style, though at times it functions very effectively and at other times less so. Critics have on occasion taken Amichai to task for the over-ingeniousness of his writing, for being glib, or simply for overwhelming the reader with an unassimilable amount of wordplay and metaphor. Is this the case with El male rahamim? To be sure, the quality of play raises disturbing questions, for it jolts the reader in its prominence and in its incongruity with the seriousness of the poem. What is the place of punning and wit in such a text? What does it contribute?

Gershon Shaked has appraised this aspect of Amichai's writing most perceptively as resulting from pressure to escape the cruelties of the external world. Attempting to shake himself of historical, political, metaphysical and personal anguish, the poet rejoices in the free play of language. Such an explanation could well apply to the text at hand, in which the poet recoils from the misery around him. To an important degree El male rahamim is "about" language; that is, it is "about" the poet's own cleverness, since this is an outstanding aspect of his self and the poem returns time and again to the self as source of wisdom and supreme values. To say this, however, is not to dismiss the human feeling in the poem, nor to call this work superficial. The poet's evasion does not represent irresponsibility nor lack of concern and compassion so much as a creative response to a crisis of belief. Having rejected the language of prayer which implies an entire network of significance and values, the poet attempts to invent a personal world, an inner world, through language of his own. His wordplay represents an impulse to create a refuge from the hardness of life, to maintain a sense of order and personal integrity when external harmony and inherited understandings are called into question. He writes to express anguish, certainly, but he also writes to forge a network of values in which his anguish will acquire meaning, despite the meaninglessness of a universe abandoned by God.

George Steiner, in After Babel, is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for the counterfactual genius of language as just such a territorial defence of the self. He argues that the communication of verifiable fact, of ostensible information, is a secondary part of human discourse. By contrast, the ability to manipulate the future tense or the subjunctive, to imagine worlds beyond ourselves, is a basic way of gaining freedom over death and over our terrible limitations of time in this world.

Ambiguity, polysemy, opaqueness, the violation of grammatical and logical sequences, reciprocal incomprehension, the capacity to lie—these are not pathologies of language but the roots of its genius. Without them the individual and the species would have withered.

El male rahamim, in its polyvalence, ambiguity and wordplay, in its pivoting around the word ilmale and in its conditional statements (hayu rahamim, lines 3 and 17), is a poem that very deliberately focuses on man's ability to envision alternative worlds. The entire poem is not only about the self, but about what that self can envisage as a better world. And, implicit in the very act of writing the poem is hope in the redemptive capacity of language, that is, the capacity to help conceive of new worlds when old worlds fall apart.

El male rahamim does not necessarily exhibit self-consciousness more than do many others of Amichai's work which likewise bristle with wordplay and ingenuity. This poem does, however, distinguish itself in this regard for reasons already explicated but which bear recapitulation. First, as a text that explicitly addresses loss of faith, El male rahamim also cultivates an awareness of language by rejecting the vocabulary of prayer. Second, through the word ilmale and conditional constructions, this poem alerts us directly to the possibility of fashioning new worlds out of words. In addition, the seriousness of the poem gives us pause to think about its wittiness; if wordplay is not entirely out of place here, then it, as well, must have a serious function. The examples of wordplay in question do, furthermore, add dimensions of subtlety and meaning to the poem and are far from being superfluous or frivolous. Finally, lines 13-14 call attention to the poet as someone, who, writing, wrestles with exalted matters. Every poem can be said to have a metapoetic element, but these lines in this particular piece encourage us to consider that aspect of the poem as an essential, and not as a secondary concern. All these points force us to keep our sights on language and to tie linguistic questions in with the central ethical and theological problem El male rahamim poses: how to live and act in a merciless world, abandoned by God. Throughout Amichai's work there is an inextricable link between building faith only on the individual, without benefit of divine guidance, and an emphasis on individuality in language. This poem, though, illustrates in a particularly effective and concentrated way this assumption which underlies so much of the poet's writing.

Whether or not we sympathize with Amichai's existential values, his poetry nonetheless brings us in this way to a fundamental problem which plagues twentieth-century literature. When a system of beliefs no longer holds up, what happens to language? Faced with incomprehensible disaster or a failure of conviction, is silence or incoherence all that remains for the individual? How do words mean, and how can we continue to make them signify in a world bereft of meaning?

These are far more than merely aesthetic questions, as El male rahamim demonstrates. At the same time, though, at issue here is a problem of referentiality which helps explain the aestheticism that permeates so much modernist poetry and prose. The breakdown of traditional understandings, the threat of disintegration and a sense of the absurd leads again and again in literature of this century to introspection, to the mind that turns in upon itself, and so also to the isolated imagination in precarious touch with the external world. The reasons for hermeticism in modern art are many, to be sure: not only a sense of horror at the world (as in Kafka or Celan), nor a profound interest in private time, dream vision and hallucination (e.g., Proust, Stevens or Vallejo), but also an anxiety of influence, a compulsion to find ever new modes of expression (such as in portions of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, the Dadaists), as well as a basic loss of faith in language itself (witness the Symbolist realization that there is no essential mimetic link between signifier and signified). What all these tendencies have in common is that they bring the writers to the very edge of language, to an awareness of its limits and to questions of what it can and can't do. An aesthetic of fragmentation and discontinuity that lends itself to conveying inner worlds, worlds inaccessible to logic, may resemble the wrenching syntax and neologisms of experimentation for the sake of novelty, and it may also resemble the faltering, stammering incoherence of an lonesco or a Beckett which suggests that the important things cannot or ought not be expressed. All of these self-referential kinds of discourse call attention to the internal dynamics of the text itself. From there it is only a short leap to a new critical, metalinguistic focus or to a rejoicing in the creative energy of language itself. Deemphasis on the external world therefore frequently leads to fiction about fiction and poetry about poetry. The language of breakdown then becomes the basis for new strategies of reading and writing.

The isolated imagination, the collapse of consensus and the self-absorbed text all remained alien concerns to the Israeli writers of the '48 generation, deeply engaged as they were in the struggle for national, cultural rebirth and political independence. It is only with the questioning of collective values that the New Wave writers leave Israeli literature open to a modernist orientation. Then they, too, develop a certain degree of literary self-consciousness. As do other modernist poets, Amichai as well takes refuge in introspection as he turns from the horrors of the world, and as he flees the heavy burdens of the past and the language of tradition, he attempts to invest private energy in Hebrew semantics through wordplay.

All the same, this introspective and individualistic poetry does not border on the hermetic by any means. True, it may be self-contained, self-referential and self-centered, but it is not hermetic. For one thing, the language is too accessible and the syntax too orderly. And, more important than the simplicity of the language itself, but working fully in connection with it, the poet's deep concern for the world still binds him to others about him. In his commitment to compassion we see that the poet of El male rahamim has not lost a sense of identity within community.

Here the discrepancy between Hebrew and other modernist traditions makes itself felt. In Amichai's generation the challenge of the Hebrew language seems to have created a pressure against the esoteric or solipsistic. For these writers experiment with colloquial diction represented innovation and an expression of individualistic artistic impulses. This means that these poets, in their individualism, come naturally but ironically back to the language of shared understandings and so closer to the popular audience. This turn of events, this odd combination of the individualistic and antihermetic, explains itself in terms of the literary history of the previous generation. While Greenberg and Alterman, for example, stayed in line with other modernisms and delved much deeper than their successors did into extravagant metaphor, expressionistic imagery, and a personalized idiom marked by neologisms, they did so nevertheless in the service of a pronounced nationalism and without the alienation so widespread elsewhere. The New Wave poets subsequently gained precisely that kind of modernist alienation absent before, but at the same time they moved in reaction against outdated styles toward "fluency, immediacy and localism." Their efforts consequently resulted in a curious blend of distrust in language, literary self-consciousness, and a contradictory reaffirmation of communication.