[In the following essay, Hirsch explores central themes in the poetry of Amichai, such as love, war, history, and Jewish identity.]

1

For more than thirty years Yehuda Amichai has been conducting his own highly personal war on forgetfulness and silence. He has the unique ability to render and enact the complex fate of the modern Israeli, the individual man locked in and responding to history. Amichai is a historical poet of the first order, a political writer in the deepest sense of that term. At the same time, he is a writer who always speaks of his own concerns, his private love pangs and personal questions, his parents' history and his own intimate secrets. Part of the achievement of Amichai's work has been the conjoining of these two spheres, always speaking of one in terms of the other. Indeed, one of the central themes of his work has been the way the personal is implicated in the historical, the private impinged upon by the public. Always his poems register the human implications of the political event—in Lorca's phrase, the drop of blood that stands behind the statistics. In a way, the poet is like one of Emerson's “representative men” transferred to Jerusalem and updated for the second half of the twentieth century, a prophet who shuns the traditional role and speaks in the guise of an ordinary Jewish citizen concerned with his people and his place. He is, like Wordsworth, a passionate man trying to speak to other men, and, as a modern Hebrew poet, his work is appropriately steeped in the common imagery of the Prayer Book and the Psalms, the communal imagery and mythology of the Hebrew Bible, the underground stream of Jewish mysticism.

Most often Amichai speaks without the mask of a fictive persona, as an individual witness, a quiet man who is always standing at the window. The poem “Out of Three or Four in a Room” (from Poems, translated by Assia Gutmann) captures and enacts precisely what it means to be a witness, a writer trying to bridge the speechless and enormous distance between the inadequate and false words (cut loose and “wandering without luggage”) and the terrible event. It is a poem that in the example of its making transcends its own pessimism, but it shows too that, as Williams said, “There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other.”

“OUT OF THREE OR FOUR IN A ROOM”

Out of three or four in a room
One is always standing at the window.
Forced to see the injustice amongst the thorns,
The fires on the hill.
And people who left whole
Are brought back in the evening, like small change.
Out of three or four in a room
One is always standing at the window.
Hair dark above his thoughts.
Behind him, the words.
And in front of him the words, wandering, without luggage.
Hearts without provision, prophecies without water
And big stones put there
And staying, closed, like letters
With no address; and no one to receive them.

Amichai is a poet who may say truthfully that “I go out to all my wars.” He was born in Wurzbürg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated with his parents to Palestine in 1936. He fought with the British army in World War II and then in three Israeli wars—in 1948, 1956, and 1973. He speaks from experience when he talks of children “growing up half in the ethics of their fathers / and half in the science of war” (from Selected Poetry, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell). One of the shocks that gave rise to Amichai's poetry was the confrontation between the protected world of his childhood (a world of sweet parental love and strict religious observance) and the hard actualities of adult life. As Chana Bloch suggests in her foreword to the Selected Poetry, he has spent his entire adulthood in the midst of Israel's struggle at first to exist, then to survive. He has not escaped that difficult history, or what he calls “the complicated mess” of Israeli life. The poem “Like the Inner Wall of a House” reports that

I found myself
Suddenly, and too early in life
Like the inner wall of a house
Which has become an outside wall after wars and devastations.

Wars and devastations are behind all of Amichai's work. Sometimes the knowledge of war is implicit in his poems, in their background of sadness, terror, and loss—but just as often it is imminent and explicit, violently affecting him. And the place where they impinge most is on his own love life, for Amichai is perhaps first and foremost a love poet, a writer preeminently concerned with the tenderness and ironies of sexual love. And he is continually waking to find that love engulfed by the external historical world. He writes, “In the middle of this century we turned to each other,” thus specifying the personal moment in terms of the larger epoch, and he announces wryly that:

Even my loves are measured by wars:
I am saying this happened after the Second
World War. We met a day before the
Six-Day War. I'll never say
before the peace '45-'48 or during
the peace '56-'67.

In his perceptive introduction to Amen (1977), Ted Hughes comments on the way in which Amichai's imagery ramifies both outwards and inwards, wedding the private to the public. Hughes writes:

Writing about his most private love pangs in terms of war, politics, and religion he is inevitably writing about war, politics, and religion in terms of his most private love pangs. And the large issues are in no way diminished in this exchange … Each poem is like a telephone switchboard—the images operate lightning confrontations between waiting realities, a comic or terrible conversation between the heavy political and spiritual matters and the lovers.

Perhaps the finest example of Amichai's conjunction of love and politics (or love and war, or love and religion), his imagistic tangle of supposedly separate but inevitably tangled realms, is the poem “A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention” (also from Poems). This poem is remarkable for its directness and profound simplicity, its unique mixture of the erotic and the political, its subtle tone of outrage and nostalgia. As a love poem, it is worthy to stand beside “The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter” or, more appropriately, “The Good-Morrow” and “The Canonization.” The Amichai of the 1950s and 1960s was a somewhat formal and metaphysical poet, a tender ironist influenced by W. H. Auden (especially in his conjunction of the private and the political spheres) and George Herbert (mainly in his redefinition of the metaphysical conceit); John Donne was an especially strong early influence, and this poem has some of the qualities, though presented retrospectively, of “For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love …” It reads:

“A PITY. WE WERE SUCH A GOOD INVENTION”

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An airplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above this earth.
We even flew a little.

The final memory of this poem, understated and passionate, may be effectively placed against the violent and surgical destruction of the unspecified “them.” Here the lovers are not “stiffe twin compasses,” as in Donne's famous image, but, appropriate to their century, “an airplane made from a man and wife.” There is a sad, ironic, outraged, bitter, and wistful tone in the homely invention of this little hovering aircraft. And, though it is true that there is an enormous burden in this act of remembering, there is also a vehement anger and determination. This is the same poet who will convincingly title another poem “To Remember Is a Kind of Hope.” Because to remember is a kind of hope, particularly as those hopes are embodied in poems.

2

Amen begins not at the window but in the street, and it starts out not with the poet but with Mr. Beringer, “whose son / fell by the Canal.” Mr. Beringer is the first of many in this book who has lost a son or a husband or a father or a lover. He is grief-stricken and responsible to his dead son, and because of the weight of that responsibility (or rather because of the weight he is losing) the poet becomes responsible to him.

Mr. Beringer, whose son
fell by the Canal, which
was dug by strangers
for ships to pass through the desert,
is passing me at the Jaffe gate:
He has become very thin; has lost
his son's weight.
Therefore he is floating lightly
through the alleys,
getting entangled in my heart
like driftwood.

The poem, “Seven Laments for the Fallen in the War,” goes on to speak of the monument to the unknown soldier, which, ironically and because it is on the enemy's side, will become “a good target marker for the gunners / of future wars.” It remembers Dicky, who was hit “like the water tower at Yad Mordecai”; there “everything poured out of him.” It speaks of “Bitter salt … dressed up / as a little girl with flowers” and a dead soldier who “swims above little heads / with the swimming movements of the dead.” These laments come from a country where “everything [is] in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.” He asks the heartfelt question, “Is all of this sorrow?” The answer: yes.

“May ye find consolation in the building
of the homeland.” But how long
can you go on building the homeland
and not fall behind in the terrible
three-sided race
between consolation and building and death?

And in this world even an old textbook, faulty but tenderhearted, becomes an emblem of a friend who died “in my arms and in his blood.”

I found an old textbook of animals,
Brehm, second volume, birds:
Description, in sweet language, of the lives
of crows, swallows and jays. A lot of mistakes
in Gothic printing, but a lot of love: “Our
feathered friends,” “emigrate to warmer
countries,” “nest, dotted egg, soft plumage,
the nightingale,” “prophets of spring,”
The Red-Breasted Robin.
Year of printing 1913, Germany
on the eve of the war which became
the eve of all my wars.
My good friend, who died in my arms and in his blood
in the sands of Ashdod, 1948, in June.
Oh, my friend,
red-breasted.

One of the remarkable and metaphysical aspects of this sly and sad poem is the way the feelings for the textbook imply, without becoming sentimental, the tender feelings for the friend. The connection is made with lightning-like precision, the name of the robin transformed and infused with new meaning as it comes to represent the dead soldier, frozen in time, red-breasted. And by speaking about this outdated textbook of animals (“year of printing 1913”) the poet lines the poem not only with sorrow, but with warmth and affection too. Indeed, the sixth lament makes this distinction important: “Yes, all this is sorrow” … but leave / a little love burning, always / as in a sleeping baby's room a little bulb.” The lightbulb gives off “a feeling of security and silent love” that keeps us from giving ourselves wholly to grief. It is true that sometimes, as on Memorial Day in the seventh lament, the poem itself gives way, mixing grief with grief, sorrow with sorrow, until the poet (in “camouflage clothes of the living”) cries out, much as one imagines Job crying out:

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.

In these poems Amichai's sardonic Jewish quarrel with God reaches a fever pitch worthy of the biblical prophets. “We begged / for the knowledge of good and evil,” he complains to the Lord in another poem, “and you gave us / all kinds of rules like the rules of soccer” (Selected Poems). But against this, and with a terrible irony infusing a kind of tender hopefulness, the poem juxtaposes its final line: “Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

Amichai's war poems are unique in that they are informed by a strong sense of personal responsibility—the self simultaneously implicated in and victimized by the war—or, as one poem puts it, “the hunter and the hunted in one body.” No poem demonstrates this sense of personal responsibility, the individual voice assuming the weight and burden of these collective deaths (and what is that collective but a sum of individuals?) better than the fourth poem in Poems from a Cycle Called ‘Patriotic Songs.’ The poem begins, typically, with a disclaimer about itself (“I have nothing to say about the war”), and it ends, also typically, with a complex and sweet-voiced affirmation.

I have nothing to say about the war,
nothing to add. I'm ashamed.
All the knowledge I have absorbed in my life
I give up, like a desert
which has given up all water.
Names I never thought I would forget
I'm forgetting.
And because of the war, I say again,
for the sake of a last and simple sweetness:
The sun is circling round the earth. Yes.
The earth is flat, like a lost, floating board. Yes.
God is in heaven. Yes.

This final affirmation, in a language that is itself a kind of last and simple sweetness, is particularly poignant in that it is an affirmation of a world that has long been lost, a world that has been initiated into another kind of knowledge. The extraordinary sense of a world that has a flat wooden surface and a calm God can only predate 1913, that dark eve of all our wars, when the West put on its helmet of fire and, like the Hebrew poet, “crossed the borders of being an orphan.” It is now a bloodstained, red-breasted world for adults, and, as an early poem of Amichai makes clear, “God takes pity on kindergarten children … but adults he pities not at all.”

He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the roasting sand
To reach the dressing station
And they are streaming with blood.

(Poems)

It is with this knowledge and through these eyes that one must consider Amichai's final affirmation. Somehow and all at once that affirmation is simultaneously sincere and ironic, terribly honest and tender, deceptively simple and impossible. Perhaps most of all it is impossible. And yet, like Rilke in his self-portrait, the poem does make its affirmation, “it says its yes.”

Reading Amichai's poems is a harrowing experience. The sheer accumulated weight of these losses is enormous. I find it nearly impossible to read these poems, however successful, as a merely literary performance. Their human presence is too close. Even the weakest poems, and some of the little love poems toward the end of the book seem tossed off and merely cute, bear a particular stamp. Ultimately, these poems may not have the stature of, say, Whitman's poems, but, as in Whitman, one cannot read them without simultaneously touching the man who stands behind them. At times, in their deepest moments, in their naked splendor, the simple recital of losses may take on the quality of a sacred litany. Here is Amichai's eleventh “Patriotic Song.”

The town I was born in was destroyed by shells.
The ship in which I sailed to the land of Israel was drowned late in
the war.
The barn at Hammadia where I had loved was burned out.
The sweet shop at Ein-Gedi was blown up by the enemy.
The bridge at Ismailia, which I crossed to and fro on
the even of my loves,
has been torn to pieces.
Thus my life is wiped out behind me according to an exact map:
How much longer can my memories hold out?
The girl from my childhood was killed and my father is dead.
That's why you should never choose me
to be a lover or a son, or a bridge-crosser
or a citizen or a tenant.

It is no wonder, given the accumulated burden of these losses that the thirty-fourth poem goes on to move in three ascending sentences, from “Let the memorial hill remember, instead of me / that's his job” to

let dust remember, let dung remember
at the gate, let afterbirth remember.
Let the wild beasts and the sky's birds eat and remember.
Let all of them remember, so that I can rest.

At times the ravages of death and destruction almost reduce the poet to silence. But more often he posits two central consolations: the temporary joys and glories of erotic love (his typical procedure is to use the religious vocabulary of the Psalms to praise his beloved) and the sacred trust of memory. Love is for him a secular salvation, a doomed momentary stay against the furies of the outside world. So, too, remembering is a terrible and exhausting burden in his poems, but it is also one of his only redemptions. Memory itself becomes a hedge against oblivion. Amen is a book of faith and doubt, sorrow and sweetness, astonishment and recognition. But mostly it is a book of memory, a book that continues to remember even as it refuses that very act, even as it longs to rest. But there is no rest. Out of three or four in a room one is always standing at the window.

3

With the aid of Ted Hughes, Yehuda Amichai has translated his poems from Hebrew into English with surprising immediacy and effect. Many of the poems are written in a style that is disarmingly playful and direct, deceptively simple; they are so artful that at times they appear artless and naked, utterly spontaneous. What a long apprenticeship must precede such simplicity! Much of Amichai's strength rests in the tone and temper of that style, the way in which he strikes the exact registers of feelings, the sympathy that is always flowing outward in his work. Almost always his poems move on the winds of a rich and nearly surreal imagery, somehow both personal and anonymous, absolutely contemporary and yet very ancient. In a way the poems seem like one of the women they describe: “With a very short dress, in fashion / But weeping and laughter from ancient times.”

Amichai is an especially tricky poet to translate. His characteristic linguistic strategy is to bring together in wry confrontation ancient biblical Hebrew and the living language of the streets. His poem “National Thoughts” speaks of a people's struggle to adapt a historical language to harsh contemporary realities:

People caught in a homeland trap:
to speak now in this weary language,
a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled
it wobbled from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described
miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.

(Selected Poetry)

This modern Jacob-like struggle with the angel of Hebrew is one of the central issues of Amichai's work. It is also a compelling problem for anyone who chooses to translate him.

Unlike most books of contemporary poems, Amen is filled with other people. These poems speak with a natural and real tenderness of a village Jew (“God fearing and heavy eyed”), a tired gym teacher (“I never realized gym teachers could be sad”), a Czech refugee in London (“She behaves here as in a schoolbook for foreign languages”), and a bride without dowry (“What a terrible blood bath is she preparing for herself”). In a country filled with “all this false tourism” he speaks comically but also with a certain amount of warmth of “a Jewish girl / Who has American hope / In her eyes and whose nostrils are still / Very sensitive to anti-Semitism.” And there is a heartrending poem about a school-teacher who traveled all the way to New York to commit suicide.

People travel far away to say:
this reminds me of some other place.
That's like it was, it's similar. But
I know a man who traveled to New York
to commit suicide. He argued that the houses
in Jerusalem are not high enough and that everyone knows him.
I remember him with love, because once
he called me out of class in the middle of a lesson:
“There's a beautiful woman waiting for you outside in the
garden
and he quieted the noisy children.
When I think about the woman and about the garden
I remember him on that high rooftop,
the loneliness of his death and the death of his loneliness.

Amichai's poems, as in this elegy for his schoolteacher, always try to keep “the route to childhood open.” Often they speak with warmth, nostalgia, and reverence for his dead father. There are so many lovely lines about Amichai's father here (and “All those buried with him in one row, / His life's graduation class”) that it is hard to resist quoting them all. One poem begins, “My father's cheeks when he was my age were soft / Like the velvet bag which held his praying shawl.” And in “Letter of Recommendation” the son inside the lover breaks loose, and he cries out:

Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman!
This is not a scar you feel under my shirt.
It's a letter of recommendation, folded, from my father:
“He is still a good boy and full of love.”
I remember my father waking me up
for early prayers. He did it caressing
my forehead, not tearing the blanket away.
Since then I love him even more.
And because of this
let him be woken up
gently and with love
on the Day of Resurrection.

When Amichai speaks of childhood, he does so with a sly and wistful sadness, a longing to cross the barriers of that other. Cocteau tells us that “there are poets and grown ups.” But at times Amichai almost takes Cocteau one step further, as if to say, “there is no such thing as a grownup” and, simultaneously, “we are all in exile from childhood.” Lit up by a dry interior weeping, we are always recalling our lives, lugging around worn-out letters of recommendation from the past, our futile hearts, our endless queries for affection.

In Amichai's poems those queries are most often sent out as a lover. Sometimes his love songs (“Love Song,” “Menthol Sweets,” “Sometimes I Am Very Happy and Desperate”) seem to be too short and unrealized, too imagistically interchangeable. But his finest love poems are filled with a bittersweet tenderness, an ancient mine of wisdom. He tells us that “He who put / masculine and feminine into the language put / into it also departing.” Amichai is best, however, not when he laments a lost love but when he praises: simply, wildly, without restraint. “A Majestic Love Song,” for example, begins majestically.

You are beautiful, like prophecies,
And sad, like those which come true,
Calm, with the calmness afterward.
Black in the white loneliness of jasmine,
With sharpened fangs: she-wolf and queen.

He is a poet able to speak of the royal scar and the blind golden scepter; he names a woman's rings as “the sacred leprosy of your fingers.” It is only when the erotic poems move at the speed of such marvelous images that they earn their delicate vulnerability, their deep, heartbreaking voices. And from “You are beautiful, like the interpretation of ancient books” they move successfully into

To live is to build a ship and a harbor
at the same time. And to complete the harbor
long after the ship was drowned.
And to finish: I remember only
that there was mist. And whoever
remembers only mist—
what does he remember?

Robert Lowell once called Randall Jarrell “the most heartbreaking poet of his generation:” Amichai, too, is a heartbreaking and heartrending poet, and, in an odd way, in a different incarnation, speaking in different language of a different people moving through a different landscape, his poems sometimes remind me of Jarrell's finest and most luminous poems. Artfully simple, direct, and absolutely honest, simultaneously sweet and sorrowful, tender and unsentimental, both poets continually remember the enormous burden and mystery of ordinary adults shouldering their memories, carrying around the secret of their childhoods, the weight of their losses, the endless rituals of their daily lives, which are so utterly original, so utterly “commonplace and solitary.” I would not push the connection, but I cannot shake the feeling that, however different they are, Jarrell's housewives, secretaries, and ball turret gunners are part of the same human band as Amichai's gym teachers, tourists, refugees, and Jewish soldiers. Both poets speak naturally of orphans, warriors, parents, children, and citizens.

Yehuda Amichai is a poet with a genuine talent for rendering the complex interior lives of other people. Human sympathy flows generously out of his work like a great river. He is, in his own small way, part of a tradition that dates at least as far back as the ancient Hebrew prophets. Amen is the book of a representative man with unusual gifts telling the tale of his tribe.

Notes

The essay expands on a piece of the same title that first appeared in the American Poetry Review 10, no. 3 (1981).