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Home Page > Articles in English > Yehuda Amichai
In
Memoriam
Yehuda Amichai: By
Tekla Szymanski
Jerusalem, a place everyone remembers / they have forgotten something but they do not remember what they have forgotten. / And in order to remember I / wear on my face my father’s face. / This is my city where the vessels of my dreams / are filled like oxygen tanks for deep-sea divers. / The holiness there / sometimes turns into love. Amichai was Israel’s most quoted and beloved poet, who wrote the survival guide to Jerusalem for the people who live there. He was a voice from the street, who wrote about love with an echo of war, and about war while hinting at love. Amichai came from an Orthodox background and in 1935 moved from Würzburg, Germany, to Palestine. “I am lucky; I am from one of the very few Jewish families from Central Europe where the whole tribe lives in Palestine,” Amichai once recalled. He fought as a volunteer in the British Army and later in the Palmach, the underground pre-Israeli-state commando force. He studied literature and biblical studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and taught at a secondary school for many years. During his long and prolific career, he wrote about 1,000 poems and published 25 books of poetry. He received the 1982 Israel Prize for Hebrew Literature, the Brenner and Bialik prizes, and was also a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. Although Amichai’s work was nourished by the Bible and the Jewish liturgy, along with German lyricism and English modernism, his poetry is contemporary, both in language and substance. His language is intimate, detached from the national pathos that had characterized Hebrew poetry in the past. And his voice sometimes had a political edge. “My slogan, so to speak, in recent years has been: Not what yes, but what no. The ideal is no longer peace, but absence of war.” “When we read Amichai, we feel as if he has written his verse in our kitchen, in our living room, in our bedroom,” Israeli novelist Amos Oz commented in Tel Aviv’s Yediot Aharonot. “With Amichai, one hardly feels when one switches from speech to poetry, from the profane to the sublime and back again,” wrote Doron Rosenblum in Ha’aretz. “He was the person who enriched our difficult lives with mercy and a modicum of serenity,…through the act of living among us. He always sounded and talked like an ordinary citizen—a genuinely concerned, unpretentious citizen.” Amichai himself once said that he wrote “in order to comfort myself. About life, about wars, about difficulty. I write poems after things are finished. During war and love, poems are not written.” Indeed,
his poetry was a “balm of comfort” for his readers, remembered Israeli
author Meir Shalev in Yediot Aharonot about his friend. “Whoever was
thirsty [would read Amichai], whoever was hungry, whoever hunted beauty, whoever
sought out wisdom....We, his admirers and orphans, will be comforted by the poems
he willed to us.”
For further reading: The
Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Tel Aviv:
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“Jerusalem—the
only city in the world, where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.”
