Yehuda Amichai: A Perspective
By poet Gunilla T. Kester. "War shaped the life and the work of Yehuda Amichai, the popular and lucid Israeli poet who wrote about balloons and bombs, children and soldiers, lovers and tourists."
War shaped the life and the work of Yehuda Amichai, the popular and lucid Israeli poet (1924-2000) who wrote about balloons and bombs, children and soldiers, lovers and tourists. War makes you homeless and rootless. But, if you’re Yehuda Amichai, you have one strategy available to deal with the tragedy and horror of war: language. Born in Germany, Amichai and his Orthodox Jewish family emigrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in 1936. When Amichai arrived in Palestine, he was twelve years old and had one great advantage. Thanks to his religious upbringing in Germany, he was already fluent in Hebrew. He and his family had narrowly escaped the Holocaust, but the young Amichai would soon become fluent in war. His poem “Autobiography, 1952” captures his experience of the move from a (at the time) safe and idyllic childhood to the upheaval he encountered in Palestine:
And in ’31 my hands were joyous and small
and in ’41 they learned to use a gun
and when I first fell in love
my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
and the girl’s white hand held them all
by a thin string—then let them fly away.
As Chana Bloch noted in the foreword of The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai, Amichai served “as a soldier with the British army in World War II, with the Palmach in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and with the Israeli army in 1956 and 1973. He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war.” That’s at least a thirty year stretch of war experience fighting for a place to call home. Fighting also to have a language to write in and to develop rhetorical strategies in which to express and share your experiences. At the end of a poem called “You Mustn’t Show Weakness,” Amichai gives one of the clearest descriptions of PTSD that I can recall:
And don’t ever show weakness.
Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing. I’m like an ambulance
on two legs, hauling the patient
inside me to Last Aid
with the wailing cry of a siren,
and people think it’s ordinary speech.
Imagine being the ambulance and the patient simultaneously, quite a burden and a responsibility. It is also a brilliant image, easily accessible and very modern. Use of images, whether similes or metaphors, is one of the most striking features of Amichai’s poetry.
In my view, the use of images serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, they only work when you are familiar with the comparison. “Achilles is a lion,” Homer sang. If the reader doesn’t know what kind of an animal a lion is, the image doesn’t work. On the other hand, an image can also defamiliarize a reader and serve as a shock or a wake-up call, as in the example above. We all know what an ambulance is and does, but we may never have experienced what the poet expresses here. The concept of “defamiliarization” in art and literature was first developed by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984). He volunteered in World War I and fought in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Shklovsky argues against the familiarity of clichés and the numbness they bring to a reader. Art should shake the reader and wake him or her up to the revolutionary qualities the object described possess. In Theory of Prose, he states:
And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.
Cliché or not, if the image is familiar, it can still be defamiliarized by its function and treatment in a poem. One of Amichai’s most famous poems “Wildpeace” uses images from the Prophet Isaiah most of us are familiar with, yet their very presence in this context changes them as well as our perception of them. Amichai read this poem written twenty years earlier at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yasir Arafat in 1994. Here is the core of the poem:
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds—
who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have wildpeace.
Amichai uses the familiar imagery from the Bible in a new way focusing on the noise of war and peace, the clanging of the swords, the talking about peace, the thud of the rubber stamp. The last image captures the bureaucrats of the twentieth century, their resourcefulness and their helplessness. Here are the famous lines from the Prophet Isaiah (via The Jewish Study Bible):
Thus he will judge among the nations
And arbitrate for the many peoples,
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks:
Nation shall not take up
Sword against nation;
They shall never again know war.
The Prophet Isaiah lived in Jerusalem during the last half of the eight century BCE which makes him a contemporary of Greek authors Homer and Hesiod. Whatever our relationship is with the Bible in its various versions and translations, we all must agree that it is a great source of literary material and quality. When a contemporary poet, like Yehuda Amichai, engages directly with this ancient imagery, he engages in a dialogue between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Amichai also engages in the rhetorical practice of “intertextuality,” creating a dialogue between an older literary text and a new one. Imagine the chutzpah it must take to create a dialogue with one of the most iconic passages from Western literature! The concept of “dialogism” was first developed by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) in his groundbreaking work on Fyodor Dostoyevsky and focused mainly on the different social levels of language. It was Julia Kristeva, who in her seminal essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” coined the term “intertextuality.” Here is how she describes it in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art:
Each word (text) is an intersection of word (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read. In Bakhtin’s work, these two axes, which he calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished. Yet, what appears as a lack of rigor is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double. [All italics hers]
The dialogic aspects of Amichai’s poetics are not limited to intertextuality. His perhaps main dialogue is with G-d and also with what we might call history. Think of Milan Kundera’s description of “the wheel of history.” History as a bulldozer! We’re hearing Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” But for all his war experience, Amichai believes in the individual. In his (part prose) poem “Tourists,” he contrasts the power of empires that occupies land with the single person doing what’s good and useful:
Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David’s Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. “You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head.” . . . I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, “Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn’t matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there’s a man who just bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
Deracinated from his native country, a survivor of exile and many wars, Yehuda Amichai looks at the tourists with a wary eye. He knows the cost of war and the lack of roots. His poem “Jews in the Land of Israel” ends:
Spilled blood is not the roots of trees
but it’s the closest thing to roots
we have.