Yehuda Amichai: The Poet, The Man, and The Symbol of Israel

By AVIYA KUSHNER

Yehuda Amichai was the kind of poet—and the kind of man—who was loved by macho generals and diplomatic statesmen, shy young girls and harried housewives, sabra schoolchildren and their European-born grandparents. For years, he worked as an elementary-school teacher, and he fought in several painful wars as a combat soldier. He was married twice and wrote lovingly of both of his wives and of his children.

Amichai’s life paralleled the fight for, creation of, and growth of the State of Israel. He was born in Wurzburg, Germany, to Orthodox Jewish parents in 1924. His family emigrated to Haifa (in what was then British-controlled Palestine) in 1936 when Amichai was just twelve years old. Amichai had a traditional Jewish education, and in his family, synagogue attendance and the acquisition of Jewish knowledge were mandatory. As an adult, Amichai chose to live a secular life. Though his poems are full of references to God and are packed with Biblical imagery, they are the poems of a person raised in Orthodoxy but who has left it.

In that perspective, Amichai’s stance mirrored that of many in the “Dor HaMedina” or “Generation of the State,” the generation that came of age with the State in 1948. Though many of that generation grew up in religious European homes, they decided to lead secular Israeli lives in which physical ability and willingness to fight to survive were essential values.

Like his peers, Amichai served in the British Army in World War II, and fought with the Palmach in Israel's War of Independence in 1948. Amichai’s commander in the 1948 war, interestingly enough, was the well-known poet Haim Gouri.

Years later, reading some Amichai poems, the commander felt that he was "stabbed in the back"—which is how he described the sharp, deep jealousy that he said lets him know that he's reading a truly good poem. Mr. Gouri often reminisced about a 1950s Amichai line about a woman opening a refrigerator. When he saw that line in the draft of a poem, Mr. Guri said, he knew "this was the beginning of a new era in Hebrew poetry. It was so immediate, so everyday and so easy to relate to."

Later in life, after Amichai already had a world reputation as a poet, he worked as a teacher of foreign students coming to study in Israel, and he also taught and lectured widely in the United States. Amichai traveled the world and wrote poems about other cities, like the Café Dante series about New York, but he was devoted to his home city of Jerusalem, which was his muse.

Amichai was the kind of man who left students, writers, and poetry fans around the world with personal stories, autographed books, and memories of his close attention to their work and their daily lives. In Jerusalem, supermarket cashiers tell stories of Amichai, as do café owners, bank tellers, and bookstore salesmen.

Here are three stories of Amichai the man, among the countless stories told about him. A girl in Chicago went to a poetry reading, and afterwards found herself talking to a tan, somewhat wrinkled poet with interested, twinkly eyes. She told him that she would soon take her first trip to Israel. He said “Call me.” Stunned, she said, “How?” Calmly, he answered, “Call information and ask for Amichai Yehuda in Jerusalem. Yemin Moshe.”

A few weeks later, she did. She found herself in Amichai’s apartment, where he welcomed her warmly and served her juice and fruit. He was her first friend in Jerusalem.

Another story is of Amichai as a teacher of poets. Once, at a reading of Amichai’s poems, a middle-aged poet discussed her beginnings as a writer in the early 1970s. She said that the young poets of Jerusalem would meet weekly in the Old City, and that Amichai would teach them, offering much closer attention than their beginners’ poems deserved. She said that she learned how to be a poet not in those classes with Amichai, but when he would walk her and other students home, through the Old City, showing her how to see a rock, a street, a gate, and also a woman, and a man, and a child, walking through the city in the night.

The third story is of Amichai as a friend, and as a man who inspired deep devotion in others. In New York about a year after Amichai’s death, several prominent American intellectuals gathered to remember Amichai. One powerful man—a well-known publishing figure—decided to read Amichai’s poems in Hebrew, though his Hebrew was very weak. He said that Amichai had chronicled human vulnerability; Amichai was his great friend, and as his friend he wanted to remember Amichai in his language, even if reading the Hebrew was a struggle. That public vulnerability moved many in the audience.

Amichai’s poems are easy to memorize, and difficult to forget. Generations of Israeli schoolchildren learned his poems by heart, and so some of Amichai’s lines have become part of the national character, recited at weddings and funerals. But Amichai’s verse is also credited with helping to build the idea of an “Israeli” identity. Here was a man who was a poet-soldier, a new type of Jew, someone who both led a literary life and a combat life, and wrote of both. Rather than writing in the Hebrew of the Bible, Amichai took Biblical phrases and imagery and helped make them modern, the kind of language that could be spoken between lovers, between parents, and in the kitchen while the radio blared.

Above all, Amichai’s poems of war and loss are associated with Israel’s quest—and the Jewish people’s quest—for a lasting peace with its neighbors. In 1994, when Yitzhak Rabin accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with Shimon Peres and Yasir Arafat, Amichai was there to read an early poem, “Wildpeace,” and Rabin read one of Amichai’s best-known poems, “God Takes Pity on the Kindergarten Children.” Here is that poem, translated from the Hebrew by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav:

God takes pity on kindergarten children,
Less on schoolchildren.
On grownups, He won’t take pity anymore.
He leaves them alone.
Sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the blazing sand,
To get to the first aid station
Dripping blood.

Maybe He will take pity and cast His shadow
On those who truly love
As a tree on someone sleeping on the bench
On a boulevard.

Maybe we too will spend on them
The last coins of favor
Mother bequeathed us,
So their bliss will protect us
Now and in other days.

This poem still seems immediate, nearly five decades after it was published. Amichai’s poems continue to soothe and protect us, both “now and in other days.”

Reprinted with permission from the AVI CHAI Bookshelf, where birthright israel alumni can order free books and periodicals.