Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet

by Nili Scharf Gold

Brandeis, 2008, £29.95

Yehuda Amichai is one of that great generation of Israeli poets who shattered traditional forms and used the materials of daily life and the language of the streets. The voice in his poetry is unapologetic, wry, matter of fact. It was very much the voice of the man I first met in Jerusalem at a party given by the theatre director Arieh Sachs. Amichai was then in his forties, short and compact,with an amused shrug I thought peculiarly Israeli: that is to say, less weary than an Eastern European shrug, but acknowledging equally the awkward unpredictability of events.
Amichai was a courageous soldier who ran guns for Haganah in 1948 and fought in all Israel’s subsequent wars. Like most Israelis then he recognised a human dignity in fighting, after so many European Jews had found the limits of putting their faith in law-abiding passivity. But he didn’t like soldiering, and he never forgot the murderous cost of war.

The bereaved father
has grown very thin:
he has lost the weight of his son

Two decades later, when I met him again in his refurbished home in Yemen Moshe, I remembered his poem about the impermanence of any building in Jerusalem where the stones of the mountains roll down at night towards the stone houses ‘Like wolves coming to howl at the dogs/Who have become the slaves of men’.  The last time I saw him in London he had just been given a literary prize in Egypt and was uncharacteristically glum. When I asked why, he said simply: ‘They hate us.’ Read more