SOURCE: "In the Great Wilderness," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall-Winter 1983 and Spring-Summer 1984, pp. 155-68.

We recognize the speaker in the poem. His skin is leathery from long hours in the sun; he is rugged, muscular. He might be a farmer, but then again, he appears to have been doing something more abstract, going over accounts, say, someone else's as well as his own. In his mid-thirties, he has been through a couple of wars, many alarms. Though history is continuously knocking at his door, he has taken on a private life. He has a wife, three kids, an affair from time to time. He prefers to dress in a comfortable coat that keeps his form, but he is not a comfortable man: his clenched jaw makes his head ache, and he probably grinds his teeth at night. He handles tradition familiarly—he has known it from childhood—and is accustomed to the desert where he spent a good part of his adolescence with his friends, the chevrah. Yet here in adulthood for one long moment he loses his confidence. "Obsolete maps" in hand, he stands alone, "without recommendations," in the great wilderness.

So Yehuda Amichai, Israeli poet, represented himself some twenty years ago. From the sun-squint of his eyes to the protective coloration of his skepticism, we recognize ourselves. And this desert he posits, whether the Judean or the Negev, reminds us of our own. But there is a major difference. The midbar ha gadol of Amichai's poem does not stretch forever like Frost's desert places. Nor is the great wilderness, to an ancient Hebrew or a modern Israeli, only sandy waste. It is also the source of comfort and enrichment; at the very least, it is what he must traverse on his way to the Promised Land.

The Israeli sets out well equipped. Yet a plethora of directions—call them traditions or recommendations—may confuse the poet as well as the common man. Israeli identity encompasses 1) the Bible and the land, Eretz Israel 2) two thousand years of dispersion 3) the values of Western Jewry 4) a Levantine country on the edge of the Mediterranean 5) the twentieth century in its technological chaos 6) a war-torn and politically inhibited nation forced to define itself by artificial boundaries. Modern Israel is a place—or a state of mind—which accommodates the gasworks on the road to Hedera as well as the oasis of Ein Gedi. It has planted the Diaspora's longings in the stoic garden of reality. Arab music winds through the indolence of a Tel Aviv street in its sabbath nap, stucco crumbles in middle eastern laisser aller, but the German Jews have erected shrines to industry in Haifa, and the wrath of the people whom Amichai calls the "black crows" of Mea Shearim underlines the fact that the Messiah has not arrived. Where the diaspora Jew is inclined to cry "Oy!" and to express his feelings lavishly, the Israeli is taught from kindergarten to tighten his emotional belt, to keep a glinty eye on the horizon, to contain himself and his utterances. Under such circumstances, wilderness can indeed become bewilderment.

Amichai successfully fuses these disparate elements of self in his work, which includes prose as well as poetry. His early pose has not paralyzed him; he has not turned to stone. Going out into the wilderness has not led him to hear strange voices in that extraordinary landscape. Nor does Amichai dance around a calf in his poetry, although from time to time he remembers the fleshpots of Egypt and even pines after them. But to crave what you have left behind is only natural. Amichai has proven himself: he has not refused to take Jericho or to inhabit the cities of the plain. He leaves the pure, clean air of the desert for the clutter of Dizengoff Square and the claustrophobia of the kibbutz steering committee. More than any other Israeli poet, he has consistently brought together different sets of images and vocabularies.

Amichai's linguistic task was not small. One of the greatest problems for an Israeli poet is to keep Biblical echoes out, since the rhythms and diction of the prophets threaten to drown the individual voice. Some very beautiful Israeli poetry, in an exalted diction more possible in Hebrew than in English, retains the chiselled purity of desert speech, seems to be composed of the elements themselves. In Amir Gilboa's "Against the Wind," for example, the speaker, striking a rock with a sledgehammer "Preserved here from a generation past," pauses to hear the wind answer, "Amen, Selah." This elevated diction, however, excludes the incidents of daily life.

Poets such as Avoth Yeshurun, on the other hand, abandon classical Hebrew for cadences that reflect a transposed and quirky Yiddishkeit. Yeshurun's work is full of "alte sochen": the tight little stores of the pursemender or keymaker, with their rags and remnants, their dark interiors; the words themselves like refugees from ghetto life. Amichai avoids both extremes in his phrasing and diction; moving towards greater and freer use of prose or colloquial rhythms, his lexicon, like that of the state, meshes incongruities, polarities. He has an assured stride, an extraordinary—and sometimes overbearing—sense of self:

      Once I escaped, but I do not remember why or from which God,
      I shall therefore travel through my life, like Jonah in his dark fish,
      We've settled it between us, I and the fish, we're both in the world's bowels,
      I shall not come out, he will not digest me.
 
                                   ("Two Quatrains")

We recognize the pitch of his voice; it is familiar speech. His father's moments of peace, he tells us, have been so few

             that he could pick
     Between the bombs and smoke
     And put them in his tattered sack
     With the remains of mother's hardening cake.
 
                                    ("Here We Loved")

He makes learned allusions:

    My deeds grow fewer,
    Progressively fewer,
    But commentaries about them have increased:
    Just as the Talmud grows difficult
    concentrated on a page,
    And Rashi and the Tosaphists
    Enclose it on every side.
 
                                 ("On My Birthday")

He ranges from the Biblical and prophetic in tone—

     The earth must be cured
     Of history
     And the stones need to sleep
     Even that one
     That which killed Goliath must sleep, dark.
 
                                  ("Leaves Without Trees")

to the soiled quotidian:

      But I
      Like a garage
      Turned into a synagogue,
      And again abandoned.
 
                                   ("Leaves Without Trees")

These vocabularies coalesce:

      And now for the thirty-second time,
      After the thirty-second year,
      I am still a parable
      With no chance of a moral.
      I stand without camouflage before enemy eyes,
      With obsolete maps in my hands,
      With growing opposition and amidst towers,
      Alone without recommendations
      In the great wilderness.
 
                                   ("On My Birthday")

Amichai the man has nonetheless managed to orient himself and therefore the poet has not remained mute. By what means has he found his direction? Through human relationships, for one thing, the pull of emotion between father and son, man and woman. His poems about his father are extremely moving, unsullied by the bitterness which sometimes accompanies the topic of sex. At times, addressing his father, Amichai's voice assumes the intimacy of a man addressing his God, and with great tenderness.

Mothers are another matter. For Amichai, childhood represents the part of us that refuses the knowledge of adults; mothers are its guardians. The mothers in these poems supply sweets, i.e., the stale cake in his father's knapsack, and cautions ("My Mother Once Told Me," Poems). They also supply a continuous reminder to the poet of an innocence he can neither return to nor reject:

      The bannister I clung to
      When they dragged me off to school
      Is long since burned.
      But my hands, clinging,
      Remain
      Clinging.
 
                                   ("My Mother Once Told Me")

The Ur-mother of Jewish tradition thus appears ringed with ironies:

      Sons of warm wombs join the army.
      Those with feet kissed by mothers and aunts
      and with shoes decorated with buckles and beautiful buttons
      will have to pass through minefields.
 
                                             (No. 23)

She cannot keep his childhood and protect her son forever. Amichai has therefore created an alter ego for her, the "maneating evil" woman (No. 14, Time).

Yiddish, mamalushen, is the language of childhood; Hebrew was and symbolically remains the language of grown men. It is the father who initiates Amichai into the rites and responsibilities of his inheritance. At times, the past as represented by his father and forefathers is a burden:

      So many tombstones are scattered behind me—
      Names, engraved like the names of long-abandoned railway stations,
      How shall I cover all these distances,
      How shall I keep them connected?
      I can't afford such an intricate network.
 
      It's such a luxury.
                                              ("Luxury")

More often, however, the past is carried proudly; the poet has been entrusted with it as a sign of loving approval. The figure we recognized earlier is not a boy-poet but a grown man. While the father in Amichai is more tender than forbidding, the speaker has arrived at his understanding, at his adulthood, through conflict. In "King Saul and I" (Poems), Amichai evokes the struggle between the old king, the man of action, and the young David, the man of words; "He is a dead king," Amichai relates at the conclusion, and "I am a tired man." In other poems, more frequently, resolution comes through identification rather than replacement; the poet sees himself in an entire series of genetic mirror images:

      The figure of a Jewish father I am
      with a sack on my back returning
      home from the market. I have a rifle hidden
      among soft woman-things in the closet in the scent of lingerie.
      A man hit by the past and ill with the future I am.
 
                                     (No. 21)

To be the son of a Jewish father, the father of a Jewish son, is to know both strength and sweetness. At night, in the poem above, the speaker "lonely and slowly" cooks jam:

      stirring round and round till it grows pulpy and dense
      with thick bubbles like thick Jewish eyes
      and froth, white and sweet for coming generations.

Perhaps half of his poems are addressed to a woman. There is a collection entitled Love Poems. Amichai must feel with Pasternak that the mystery of attraction is tantamount to the mystery of life. Some of these poems descend directly from the Song of Songs:

      Your eyes are still as warm as beds—
      time slept in them.
 
                                   ("Six Songs for Tamar")

Many are playful, expressive of the romantic teasing that is almost a national characteristic:

      When you smile
      serious ideas suddenly get drowsy
 
      all night the mountains keep silent at your side—
      at morning, the sand goes out with you, to sea
 
      when you do nice things to me
      all heavy industry shuts down
 
                                   ("Songs for a Woman")

Many more remind us of the transient nature of love, its fleeting presence before death:

      I think these days of the wind in your hair,
      and of my years in the world which preceded your coming,
      and of the eternity to which I proceed before you;
 
                                   ("Savage Memories")

Sometimes, as in the poems of Wilfred Owen, romantic love pales in the face of war's reality:

      and I think of the bullets that did not kill me,
      but killed my friends—
      they who were better than me because
      they did not go on living;
 
                                   ("Savage Memories")

Thinking of love makes the poet aware of separation and loss:

      We came back to our empty room already let to others,
      On the floor a torn mattress and orange peels
      and a sock, a newspaper and other knives for the heart.
 
                                   ("Return from Ein Gedi")

The lovers in this poem, grown apart, are aware of themselves as distinct and separate entities:

      Once more we looked out of the arched window.
      Together we saw the same valley, but each of us
      saw a different future, like two fortunetellers
      who disagree with each other in a serious and silent encounter.

The poet laments the lovers' lost sense of wholeness:

     And as we stray further from love
     we multiply the words
     words and sentences so long and orderly.
     Had we remained together
     we could have become a silence.

Yet lovemaking, for the poet, is often an attempt to stem thought and feeling:

     People here live inside prophecies that came true
     as inside a thick cloud after an explosion
     that did not disperse.
     And so in their lonely blindness they
     touch each other between the legs in the twilight.
 
                                               (No. 1)

The reader senses an undercurrent of resentment towards the women whom the poet loves. No woman is the mother to whom the speaker wishes to cling. None of his lovers can protect him, and thus some of the poems reveal an ancient grudge ("An attempt to hold back history," Great Tranquillity). Love hurts:

      I'm like an old-fashioned firearm,
      But accurate: when I love
      The recoil is fierce, back to childhood, and painful.
 
                     ("When I have a stomachache")

Amichai the poet experiences women as Other:

    What's it like to be a woman?
    What's it like to feel
    a vacancy between the legs, curiosity
    under the skirt …?
 
    ....
 
    What's it like to have a whole voice,
    that never broke?

And finally, tellingly, he asks:

    What's it like to "feel a woman"?
    And your body dreams you.
    What's it like to love me?
 
                (from The Achziv Poems, Love Poems)

A painful sense of betrayal pervades the poems Amichai addresses to his city, his country, as if city or country were a woman also. "Jerusalem is a cradle city rocking me," the poet relates (No. 52, Time), but he finds himself "always on the run"

      from blows and from pain,
      from sweaty hands and from hard hits.
      Most of my life in Jerusalem, a bad place
      to evade all these. All my wars took
      place in deserts among hard stones and sharp wounding gravel.
 
                                              (No. 74)

Amichai, a twentieth-century poet, cannot travel by the old routes. All his "prophets died long ago," and his country's fate, to be in a perpetual state of siege, has been a tragic one. Though humanity protests, the very trees point him in the direction of death. Since the battle at Ashdod in the War of Independence,

          all the cypresses and all the orange trees
      Between Negbah and Yad Mordechai
      Walk in a slow funeral procession
      Since then all my children and all my fathers
      Are orphaned and bereaved
      Since then all my children and all my fathers
      Walk together with linked hands
      In a demonstration against death.

The ideals of his youth, too, have been defeated, "fell in the war / In the soft sands of Ashdod" ("Since then," Great Tranquillity). This landscape, this wilderness, nature itself, erodes our history; while the poet replaces forgetting with remembering, he articulates the often unspoken grief of his countrymen in a place which bespeaks mutability:

     Everything here is busy with the task of remem bering:
     the ruin remembers, the garden remembers,
     the cistern remembers its water and the memorial grave
     remembers on a marble plaque a distant holocaust
     or perhaps just the name of a dead donor
     so that it will survive a little longer than the names of others.
 
                     ("In the mountains of Jerusalem")

Amichai also articulates the terror of his countrymen at being hedged in, circumscribed, debilitated by living in fear and denying it. "You mustn't show weakness," the speaker reports in one poem, "And you have to be tanned":

     But sometimes I feel like the white veils
     Of Jewish women who faint
     At weddings and on the Day of Atonement.
     You mustn't show weakness
     And you have to make a list
     Of all the things you can pile
     On a child's stroller empty of children.
 
                    ("You mustn't show weakness")

This hidden fear becomes, to the man so inhibited, a cosmic one:

     This is the situation:
     If I take the plug out of the tub
     After a pleasant and luxurious bath,
     I feel that all Jerusalem and with it the whole world
     Will empty out into the great darkness.

The inner self, the speaker intimates, is irreparably damaged and its capacity for speech impaired, though its listeners cannot perceive the distortion:

     And you mustn't show weakness,
     Sometimes I collapse inside myself
     Without people noticing. I'm like an ambulance
     On two legs carrying the patient
     Inside myself to a no-aid station
     With sirens blaring.
     People think it's normal speech.

This straitened condition of the soul leads to a compensatory swagger. Sometimes Amichai accepts the constraints. The tough guy does not cry but makes a wisecrack. Contemplating his children in one poem, the speaker compares their eyes to different kinds of fruit; he concludes:

     And the eyes of the Lord roam the earth
     And my eyes are always looking round my house
 
     God's in the eye business and the fruit business
     I'm in the worry business.
 
                                           ("Eyes")

Sometimes this tough guy relaxes and reveals his longings for a moment. These he must immediately qualify or playfully mock:

      I lay in the dry grass, on my back,
      I saw high summer clouds in the sky,
      motionless, like me below.
      Rain in another land, peace in my heart.
      And from my penis white seeds will fly
      as from a dandelion tuft.
      (Come, blow: poof, poof.)
 
                                        (No. 2, Time)

Sometimes the persona overdoes it. He boasts, for example:

    I feel good in my trousers
    In which my victory is hidden
    Even though I know I'll die
    And even though I know the Messiah won't come,
    I feel good.
 
                        ("I feel good in my trousers")

Daring imagery, refreshingly bold, a kind of poetic Entebbe, is sometimes dismissive:

     I'm made from remnants of flesh and blood
     And leftovers of philosophies. I'm the generation
     Of the pot-bottom: sometimes at night
     When I can't sleep,
     I hear the hard spoon scratching
     And scraping the bottom of the pot.
 
                        ("I feel good in my trousers")

Like many of his countrymen, Amichai's persona prides himself on his rudeness, which trait can lead to inappropriate metaphor, or a downright boorish analogy. He watches his child sleeping and asks,

     Will he get soft or harder and harder
     Like an egg?
     That's the thing about cooking.
 
                           ("The parents left the child")

He is at his best, I think, when his manners are improvisational, born of the necessity of finding his way beyond the conventional. In "Things that have been lost," for example, "From newspapers and notice boards" he finds out "what people had / And what they love." Once, letting his head fall on his chest, he finds his "father's smell / Again, after many years"; altogether, he tells us, his memories

               … are like someone
     Who can't go back to Czechoslovakia
     Or who is afraid to return to Chile.

He dares to take the last barriers by storm. In the final poem of his most recent collection, Amichai records that "People in the painfully bright hall / Spoke about religion" as it is manifested in modern life. They spoke, he notes, "in excited voices / Like at airports." The speaker leaves them:

     I opened an iron door over which was written
     "Emergency" and I entered into
     A great tranquillity: questions and answers.
 
                                  (Great Tranquillity)

Amichai's poems translate well. His greatest strength lies in his resourcefulness in reading the world. No event is too trivial, no analogy too homely, for his eye:

       A clean washed board is saved
       from the fate of becoming furniture.
       Half an apple and half a footprint
       in the sand try to become together
       a whole new thing.
 
                                         (No. 80, Time)

Amichai's prose rhythms are compatible with English or American poetic speech while Biblical cadences lend depth and breadth:

     The salt eats everything and I eat
     salt, till it eats me too.
     And what was given to me was again taken
     from me and given again, and what was thirsty
     has since quenched its thirst,
     and what was quenched has found rest in death.
 
                                          (No. 80, Time)

His versification is organic, and he uses Hebrew's native tendency to compress expressively. The original language of the poems is often more terse and clipped than the translations. The absence of the indefinite article or the present tense of the verb "to be" in Hebrew tightens the tone further. Deeply sonorous, the poems make effective use of the Hebrew phenomenon of echoing constructions; in Hebrew, much more than in English, since different forms of the word stem from the same root, repetition is not only desirable but inevitable. But Amichai does not carry this too far. As in Italian poetry, harmonious endings can become tedious. We find him varying the kinds of verbs he uses, choosing from various classes (binyanim), and making sure that his line endings do not perpetually ring with "ah," "im," and "ot," the most common endings for nouns. An abundant concatenation of sounds marks true poetic association: "I am still a parable / With no chance of a moral" is in Hebrew "Ani adayin masal, / Bli sikooyim lihiot nimsal" ("On My Birthday").

Yehuda Amichai's strengths are the strengths of his country; he manifests a freshness, even a brashness, yet he is rooted in history and tradition. Like a desert plant, he has flowered in what might appear adverse circumstances. What is missing here may be the outcome of historical forces beyond the poet's power or reckoning. It is said that when the People of Israel went into Exile, the Shekinah, the female emanation of the godhead, went along in order to comfort and console them. It may be that her spirit with its gentleness and grace still has not returned from the Diaspora.