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Poet Revolutionary
Rochelle Furstenberg
Yehuda Amichai is the unofficial poet laureate of a country known forits machismo, a warrior who could write a poem called `I want to die in my own bed'
"One could see the sadness in the wrinkles of his face... the layers of his life in his poetry." The words come from Yehuda Amichai, and he used them, in a short story he wrote in the late 1950s, to describe the aging W.H. Auden, the English poet, who died in 1973.
But the description could just as easily apply to Amichai, Israel's most popular and acclaimed poet, who earlier this year turned 70. As the waning light of late afternoon darkens his modest Yemin Moshe home, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, there is a quiet sadness etched into the lines of his face. With his closely cropped gray hair, this man - often mentioned as the next Israeli most likely to win the Nobel Prize for literature -
has the bearing of a weathered Roman general who has come back from the wars. And yet, though he served in both the British army and Israel's legendary pre-state Palmah, he is the antithesis of militaristic.
His poems have punctured the bravado of a military ethos that for so long dominated Israeli thinking. Decades before today's peace negotiations, Amichai was questioning the heroic ideal reflected in the legendary deathbed line of the early pioneer-fighter Joseph Trumpeldor, "It is good to die for our country." Wrote Amichai: "I want to die in my own bed." He emphasized the "I" rather than the "we," and juxtaposed images of lovemaking with those of soldiering as in this poem from the mid-60s:
When after hours of walking You suddenly discover That the body of the woman striding beside you Is not made for A march or war,
That her thighs grow heavy And her buttocks move like a tired flock You are filled with great joy For the world Where women are like this.
In a certain sense, the peace process can be traced to Amichai's poems, as well as to the fiction of writers like A.B. Yehoshua. After Nathan Alterman and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, whose poetry contributed to the national cause, they helped turned Israeli attention from the collective to the little man who must die in the nation's wars.
"The motto of Yehuda Amichai's existence," says writer and critic Ortzion Bartena, "is anti-heroism. He is a poet of grocery lists...He celebrates the everyday."
A winner of the Israel Prize for literature in 1982, Amichai has published 11 volumes of original poetry in Hebrew, many of them bestsellers; two novels, including the very fine "Not of This Time, Not of This Place" (1963); and a handful of short stories (see box, next page). And his poetry is so apt, so in tune not only with the Israeli situation, but with the human condition at large, that even those who don't read poetry will hear Amichai's regularly recited at weddings and funerals. Speaking to the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot last May, Amichai described flipping on the TV news and seeing a report on the funeral of a soldier who had died in an auto
accident. In place of a rabbi or cantor performing the standard service was only the young man's mother, reading an Amichai poem over the open grave.
Amichai is also the Israeli poet most renowned outside the country; recently, a volume of selected works came out in Chinese. "It looked like a Chinese menu to me," says the poet. Pu Hao, the Beijing scholar who
rendered Amichai into Chinese (via an English translation), told a reporter: "He is very esoteric, foreign to me in many ways, but at the same time, close and true. He's really my brother in spirit." In June, Oxford University held a conference on Amichai's work, during which he received a medallion from Egypt's Islamic Asyut University. And New York strap-hangers enjoyed his "To My Love, Combing Her Hair," as part of a program called "Streetfair Journals."
Now, to coincide with the poet's 70th birthday, an expansive selection of poems that spans his entire career, "Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994," in English translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, has appeared in the United States (see accompanying review). And on November 14, Amichai was awarded the New York Public Library's "Literary Lion" prize. Amichai was one of 18 writers to receive the annual honor (winners this year also included Paul Auster, Walter Mosley and E. Annie Proulx), the first time that foreign authors were considered for the prize. Amichai says he "conditioned accepting it on their arranging for the tuxedo I had to wear."
If only from reading his poetry, one could guess that Amichai, who was born in 1924 in Wurzberg, Germany, was much loved and protected as a child. "My mother baked the whole world for me/ In sweet cakes," one poem declares.
"My grandparents were farmers in southern Germany, my father a
businessman," says Amichai. "The family name was Pfeuffer. And the whole tribe, eight families from both sides, came to the Land of Israel between 1933 and 1936."
The clan first lived in Petah Tikvah, where Yehuda's father and uncle opened a sausage factory. After that failed, they moved to Jerusalem, and lived on his father's inheritance. Yehuda went to Ma'aleh, then the elite religious high school. "My father was very Orthodox, but in the way of German Jews. He was cultured, he loved music, theater."
It was from his father, Amichai says, that he "learned one must hold on to one's own sense of reality. One mustn't be absorbed by the group's vision of reality, whether it be that of the media or of what's politically correct. It tries to absorb you, to cook you. It's important not to turn into soup, to stay a chicken."
A year or two after his bar mitzvah, Amichai decided he'd had enough of religion. Today, he claims that he wasn't rebelling against his father. "I loved my father," he says simply. "But I couldn't take the boredom of the synagogue. There's nothing more boring than theology, except perhaps,psychology. What I liked about religion were all the tricks, the drama,searching for hametz (before Pesah), beating the chest (on Yom Kippur) for having sinned. I used to argue with my father about the order of the universe. It was a way of struggling with God." His dialogue with his father continues in his poetry to this day.
Having given up religion, Amichai made an absolute value out of love. And for the last 30 years he has been writing love poems to his second wife, Hana Sokolov-Amichai, whom he met when he was teaching at a Jerusalem night school and she was a student-teacher. Today Hana teaches in the education department of the Hebrew University.
The Amichais have two children, Emmanuella, 16, a high school student, and David, 21, now in the army. Amichai proudly relates that David was given an outstanding sergeant award this past Independence Day. He also speaks proudly of his 33-year-old economist son Ron, from his first marriage, to Tamar Horn, in 1949 when he was a university student.
Amichai has been called the "Jerusalem poet" and has written scores of poems about his hometown, but admits to having a love-hate attitude to the city. "It's like my friend who's allergic to dogs but loves them anyway," says Amichai. His allergy stems from the city's grand, historical aspects, which clash so with his simple, down-to-earth approach. In "Jerusalem Ecology" (1980) he wrote, "The air above Jerusalem is filled with prayers and dreams/ Like the air above cities with heavy industry./ Hard to breathe."
The Amichais bought the Yemin Moshe house in which they live not long after the Six-Day War, when what is today one of the city's most exclusive quarters was still a rundown neighborhood, on the border between Jordanian and Israeli soldiers. Only years later were they able to renovate it, adding both a second floor and a basement study.
Poet and novelist Yitzchak Laor suggests that Amichai is by now writing for a foreign audience, calling him a "bilingual poet who writes only in Hebrew." He adds: "He's taken his translatability and pushed it to the hilt. He bases his poems on his own biography, which creates a narrative that sells outside the country." Once, says Laor, Amichai was a revolutionary: "When he hit out at Ben-Gurion's Zionist sacrifice stuff, and espoused bourgeois comfort in the 50s and 60s, he was a rebel. But to be bourgeois today is not very revolutionary."
Amichai's use of language was also revolutionary in its day. Says Hebrew University literature professor Gershon Shaked: "He changed the rhythm, the vocabulary of Hebrew poetry. His metaphorization of everyday things is easy to imitate... But no one has achieved his depth and virtuosity."
A common criticism says that Amichai repeats himself in his later poetry, neglecting new themes. Amichai, unperturbed, acknowledges he is attracted to certain recurring themes. "I can only be myself. It would be like asking Mozart to write atonally. Repeating themes is a very Jewish thing to do," he says, smiling. "There's the text in the middle, and over the years, all around it are interpretations, midrashim, different versions. Some foolish, some funny. It gives my life continuity."
There are even thematic figures that continually resurface in the poetry: Ruth, a girl from his class in Germany who died in the Holocaust; Dicky, his commander in the Palmah, the elite military unit in which Amichai served during the War of Independence. "He was like a father to me in the army, and was killed," says Amichai. In a 1989 poem, Amichai wrote:
Here Dicky fell, Four years older than me, like a father to me In times of trouble and distress. Now I am older than him By forty years and I remember him Like a young son, and I am his father, old and grieving.
During World War II, Amichai served for 3 1/2 years in the British army. It played to his adventurous side, for at the same time the Jewish Agency had him smuggle arms from the Egyptian desert to the fledgling Jewish army in Palestine. Later he served in the Negev Brigade of the Palmah. It was the poet Haim Gouri, with whom Amichai served in the Seventh Battalion, who wrote about what came to be called the "Palmah Generation": "We speak in first person plural."
But Amichai turned away from the collective voice. Influenced by poets like Auden, he wrote personal poetry in a casual tone. But perhaps already anticipating his place in the pantheon of great Hebrew poets, he sees himself as the spiritual descendant of the medieval Hebrew poet Shmuel Hanagid."He was a scholar, soldier, commander-in-chief of eleventh-century Granada, a lover, and altogether very down to earth, who also spoke in a personal voice," he says.
And indeed, Amichai's everyday tone is harnessed to, and constantly in tension with, Biblical, religious and liturgical metaphors. This creates some startling connections. In "The Opening of the School Year" (1983) he depicts children lined up in the gym as they will someday be in the army, and the cries of kids in the schoolyard suddenly become those of the "eldest smitten in Egypt." An Arab's store in Jerusalem's Old City on Yom Kippur of 1967 becomes the Ark of the Covenant before which one prays for forgiveness.
But Amichai has no problem with younger colleagues who do not allude to Biblical sources, nor continue the Jewish literary tradition. "I do though, find today's poets esoteric," he says gently. "Everyone sits in his own corner writing private messages." Yitzchak Laor argues that Amichai simply "doesn't interest himself in Israeli poetry today," and says it saddens him that he doesn't seem to care that the next generation is unfamiliar with "the richness of Judaism."
In spite of Amichai's efforts for peace - in addition to his poems, he has appeared on occasion for Peace Now - he is enraged by the "politically correct" Israelis who, he argues, declare "we are the bad guys and the Arabs are the good guys." Amichai feels "they alienate the rest of the nation from peace. Real peace is with an army, the way Rabin is doing it."
Amichai's humanism is based on a common-sense iconoclasm that says nothing is sacred, that "everything changes. Eternity is now." The kibbutz, Zionism, religion, politics have changed. "We can't transform life into archaeology," he says. "The only thing one can know is one's own body."
Maybe so, but the things Yehuda Amichai's body tell him seem to speak to an entire nation, and beyond. "When did you ever hear of a country celebrating a poet's birthday?" says Tel Aviv University literary critic Chaya Hoffman about the many articles and entire literary supplements about Amichai that have appeared this year. "There might not be a poet laureate in Israel, but Amichai is the closest thing to a national poet since Chaim Nachman Bialik."
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |