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"Amichai, Yehuda"
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Yehuda Amichai’s “Hayi Shalom” and Other Partings
This essay broadens Yehuda Amichai’s corpus in order to understand the multiple sources—textual, intertextual, and autobiographical—that came together into the poem “Hayi shalom” (“Farewell”). This analysis of the poem incorporates, for the first time, the hundred love letters Amichai wrote to his girlfriend Ruth Hermann in 1947–48; interviews and conversations with Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, the woman who is the subject of the poem; and remnants of Clarice’s correspondence with Amichai in 1958–61. Through an idiosyncratic kind of interpretation, an essentially personal one, using sources often overlooked in scholarship, the analysis deciphers the secret language of the poem, tracing linguistic footprints from letters as well as the poet’s notes and drafts. Through the story of Amichai’s 1958 separation from Clarice Kestenbaum, the article reveals how their Jerusalem love affair is encoded in the language of “Hayi shalom.” Moreover, it demonstrates how, through the linguistic and experiential texture of the poem, the separation from Clarice joins with other partings in Amichai’s life—especially the unknown story of his heartbreak over Ruth Hermann. Finally, the grief for Amichai’s childhood friend “Little” Ruth Hanover, who perished in the Holocaust, forms the base of the fundamental, formative loss in the poem—and, in fact, in Amichai’s oeuvre. While “Hayi shalom” is dedicated to the day of separation from Clarice, in its hidden corners lie the partings and abandonments that preceded it. In its indirect way, the poem confronts two deaths.
Journal Article
The Full Severity of Compassion
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the twentieth century and an internationally influential literary figure whose poetry has been translated into some 40 languages. Hitherto, no comprehensive literary study of Amichai's poetry has appeared in English. This long-awaited book seeks to fill the gap.
Widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, Amichai is beloved by readers the world over. Beneath the carefully crafted and accessible surface of Amichai's poetry lies a profound, complex, and often revolutionary poetic vision that deliberately disrupts traditional literary boundaries and distinctions. Chana Kronfeld focuses on the stylistic implications of Amichai's poetic philosophy and on what she describes as his \"acerbic critique of ideology.\" She rescues Amichai's poetry from complacent appropriations, showing in the process how his work obliges us to rethink major issues in literary studies, including metaphor, intertextuality, translation, and the politics of poetic form. In spotlighting his deeply egalitarian outlook, this book makes the experimental, iconoclastic Amichai newly compelling.
eBook
Yehuda Amichai, the Unlikely National Poet
This article offers a reading of Yehuda Amichai's protests against being dubbed a national poet as a performative and rhetorical act that, along with the translation of his poetry, paradoxically helped to situate him as Israel's national poet. The author explores Amichai's “translatability” as a self-perpetuating myth at the heart of the debate about his national poet status. He understood the implications of translation for his career and perhaps, to a certain extent, his reception, which placed his work as eminently translatable (by virtue of having been translated) and his poetics as simple, colloquial, and unpretentious. Amichai's “Israeli everyman” poetics—the ambivalence his works project toward nationalist ideology and institutionalized forms of power—alongside his proactive involvement in translation, have marked him as a nonnationalist national poet primarily outside of Israel and among Anglophone readers. Rather than functioning as a reflection of a mainstream Israeli literary opinion, the idea that Amichai might be a national poet challenges dominant literary prescriptions on the subject, unwittingly creating a space for a transgressive nonnationalist national poetics with the skeptical, ambivalent poet at its center.
Journal Article
A Doctorate on Hope: Yehuda Amichai’s Affective Pedagogy
In a draft of a speech for an event called “Israel 85: For Peace and Social Justice,” the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote that he was working hard on completing a doctorate in hope, asserting, “I may not finish it by the end of my life.” This statement, ironic though it may be, attests to Amichai’s ongoing search for hope as a profound poetic project, traceable in the vocabulary of hope replete in his poetry and private writings, as well as in his active commitment to hope in extraliterary realms. Throughout his writing, Amichai questions, challenges, and recasts common conceptions of hope, positioning himself as a seeker of a new hope. In his pursuit of hope, Amichai searches for alternative modes of hoping while stressing hope’s complex, multifaceted nature and paradoxes. His poetics presents hope as both an affective force, channeling the creative process, and as a mode of knowledge. This article explores how Amichai’s project embraces hope as an active commitment to openness to the world and to others, as well as to mundane modes of knowing without mastery. This imbrication of hope and knowledge, I demonstrate, is evident in Amichai’s poetics through his affective pedagogy. This article proposes to see hope in Amichai’s poetics as a method of knowledge that remains open to uncertainty rather than as a fixed object. Rather than coming with a definitive meaning of hope, Amichai’s project instead presents hope as a form of relationality that defies notions of self-sufficiency and self-mastery. This view offers an alternative to readings that apply a hermeneutics of suspicion in understanding Amichai’s poetics.
Journal Article
The Vengeance of the Skull in Yehuda Amichai's Not of This Time, Not of This Place
Nitza Ben-Dov's Ḥayyei milḥamah, a study of ten literary works depicting the wars of Israel over the past one hundred years, was awarded the 2018 Yitzhak Sadeh Israeli Prize for Military Literature. This article, taken from that study and translated by eminent literary scholar and biblical translator Robert Alter, examines Yehuda Amichai's Not of this Time, Not of this Place (1963) and its dual treatment of the legacies of World War II and the Israeli War of Independence. The bifurcated hero of Amichai's sprawling novel lives out two parallel but contradictory plots, one takes him to the Germany of his childhood, the other unfolds in Jerusalem. For the attentive reader, these seemingly oppositional stories coalesce through a network of wordplays, perceptions, recurrent images (skulls, amputated limbs), and intertextual references to Hillel the Elder and to Agnon's classic 1939 novel on the impossibility of returning home, A Guest for the Night.
Journal Article
Ronny Someck and the Politics of Popular Poetry
Ronny Someck’s poetry is unique in that it translates canonical Hebrew poetry into popular poetry. It is especially visible in the intertextual relations that Someck’s poetry constructs with Yehuda Amichai’s canonic poetry. Following Marx, the article analyses Someck’s poetry as commodity structure as fetish. Someck brilliantly—and broadly—utilizes the figure of the stereotype; but in contrast with the accepted norm, he relies on the contradiction at the basis of the fetish to write subversive political poetry. Avoiding the binarism existing between resistance and affirmation, in his poems Someck develops a dialectic discourse that keeps rewriting the popular text as commodity existing in the circular rotation of selling and buying. This dialectic is manifested in the mode in which the fluid, hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity is represented in his poems. Through his poetry, Someck constitutes an inexhaustible space that allows the poems to develop subversiveness, which operates under the false appearance of total, coherent spaces. As part of Israeli culture, it could have been expected that this poetry would be stereotypical, adopting an Orientalist outlook. But Someck’s poems develop, instead, an unstable gaze that undermines Orientalism’s binarism. The lack of binarism is expressed in Someck’s poems through a dual-layered structure; the two layers, one figurative and one literal, are separate and continuous and carry out complex interrelations. Within this relational frame the literal, violent layer punctures the figurative layer, and then materializes via political violence. But instead of relating to the Israeli occupation as an arena of a binary confrontation between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, it relies on its Mizrahi identity to destroy this binarism, and thus develops a flexible moral and political stance. Through writing his poetry as a “minor literature,” Someck can maneuver between its two linguistic options—deterritorialization on one hand and reterritorialization on the other. A very impressive example is the poem about the Israeli Arab-Druze poet Samih El Kasem, in which he highlights the poet’s guitar-playing in Hebrew as a major language. The deterritorialization in Samih El Kasem’s poetry is expressed in the subversive deterritorialization of Someck’s poem. The linguistic deterritorialization is visible when Someck defines his poetry as a stammer and thus gives voice to the oppressed and the rebels.
Journal Article
Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century's (and Israel's) leading poets. In this remarkable book, Nili Scharf Gold offers a profound reinterpretation of Amichai's early works and reconstructs his poetic biography. Her close reading of his oeuvre, untapped notebooks, and a cache of unpublished letters to a woman identified as Ruth Z. that Gold discovered convincingly demonstrates how the poet's German past infused his work, despite his attempts to conceal it as he adopted an Israeli identity.
eBook
Introduction: Israeli Critical Reflection After Post-Zionism, or The Opening as Interpretive Horizon
This essay attempts to situate this special issue as an intervention, from a materialist perspective, in the field of Israeli cultural studies. We interrogate the common periodizations of Israeli culture, and its contemporary characterization as \"post-post-Zionist.\" We try to show that the latter betrays an unacknowledged failure of historical narration, present throughout Israeli cultural production. We then argue that rather than being satisfied with this failure, the goal of Israeli cultural critique today should be to search for new ways to narrate \"big\" history, to reassert the indispensability of relating personal experience of the present, in all its details, to the making of history. We then explain how each of the contributions to this special issue takes this task upon itself--some more and some less explicitly.
Journal Article