Jewish Lives

...Even my loves are measured by wars," he writes in "Songs of Zion the Beautiful": "I say, 'That happened after/the Second World War.' 'We met/a day before the Six-Day War.' I would never say/'before the peace of '45-'48' Or 'in the middle of/the peace of '56-'67.'" The impact of Amichai's emotional, tactile poetry is evident in the Israeli literary scene, especially among younger poets...

...The tone, spiritually questioning and resolutely down-to-earth, would be impossible to imagine if Amichai's "God's Hand in the World" (1958) had not been written first: "God's hand is in the world/like my mother's hand in the guts of the slaughtered chicken/on Sabbath eve...

...What does my mother see...

...In the article, Amichai addressed the matter obliquely but reassuringly, his admirers began to be convinced by seeing him once again at his favorite Jerusalem cafes...

...It is likely that no city has been commemorated by an oeuvre of this magnitude...

...Infusing the mundane world of refrigerators, shopping bags, and supermarkets with the weight of sanctity is an Amichai trademark, which may explain the phenomenal success this very local poet—Amichai is most commonly referred to as the "poet of Jerusalem"—enjoys abroad...

...From October 1998, when he left for cancer treatment in New York, until August 1999, when he returned home, apparently cured, the country seemed to hold its breath for him...

...He infuses day-to-day life, and language, with the breath of God...

...By the time his latest book, Open, Closed, Open, was published in 1998, Amichai had provided his readers with almost 50 years of contemplation on amorous doings and undoings, ranging from adoration to despair, humor to resignation, ecstasy to desolation...

...Its warmth is its wisdom...

...It seems safe to say that hardly a single Israeli romance lives out its days without an Amichai reference between the lovers...

...But when the Israeli daily Ha'aretz recently published a lengthy interview with Yehuda Amichai in its weekend magazine, with a wrinkles-and-all close-up of the poet gracing its cover, this elegant, literary piece became the talk of the town...

...It's hard to breath...

...The uncrowned poet-philosopher of Israel had been sick for several months, and news of his illness, while never mentioned explicitly in the media, had worried its way into the hearts and minds of Israelis...

...Amichai's love poetry is the apex," says Ruth Kartun-Blum, a literary critic, professor of Hebrew literature at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of the forthcoming Profane Scriptures, an English-language survey of modern Hebrew poetry...

...Israelis of a not particularly literary bent recite lines from his poems as though they were bits of ancient popular wisdom...

...In an interview a few years ago, he remembered his parents as "religious Jews like you don't really see any more, very devout about Judaism, but more devout about love...

...Even the titles of his poems—"God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children" (see poem on p. 42), "It's Sad to Be the Mayor of Jerusalem," "A Pity...

...We Were Such a Good Invention"—have become part of the lingua franca of modern Hebrew...

...This is a very thought-out position: In his poetry, he is saying that without love there is no God...

...Yet despite the radical break from his family's tradition of observance, Amichai's memories of childhood remain invariably loving and sweetly nostalgic...

...Yet he remains indisputably a man of his town...

...Bom in 1924, in Wurtzburg, Germany to an Orthodox family that moved to Israel en masse before the Holocaust, his adult life has been entirely secular...

...In fact, Amichai's life has been not only secular, but resolutely Israeli...

...he is quoted at weddings with the regularity of liturgy...

...The fact of the matter is that a national icon was at stake— Amichai himself...

...He says [that] there is something in humanity that elevates life and suffuses it with meaning, and that that thing is the connection between a man and a woman...

...Yehuda Amichai's images are ubiquitous, street by street, shop by shop, street corner by street corner...

...Not surprisingly, the Hebrew word piyuti, endlessly used to describe the particular beauty of Amichai's work, means both "poetic" and "liturgical...

...And no Jerusalemite gasps for the cool night air in August without remembering "Ecology of Jerusalem": "The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams/like the air over industrial cities...

...that's why the anxiety about Amichai's health and the solace upon his return were as palpable as they might be at a farmer's market in New England...

...In completely secular poetry, he provides an answer to religious questions...

...They weep at the beautiful prowess of our boys/lust after our tough girls/and hang up their underwear/to dry quickly/in cool blue bathrooms...

...Israel is a small, chatty country, and literary circles are village-like...

...And university professors succumb to its charms no less than taxi drivers...

...No Jerusalemite avoids gawking tourists without thinking of his poem "Tourists": "So condolence visits is what they're here for/sitting around the Holocaust Memorial, putting on a serious face/at the Wailing Wall...

...And no one sees a somber Mayor Ehud Olmert arrive early in the morning at the new City Hall building, a stunning construction of Jerusalem granite, without hearing "Mayor" in his mind's ear: "It's sad to be/the mayor of Jerusalem—/it's terrible/How can a man be Mayor of such a city?/What can he do with it?/Build and build and build./And at night the stones of the mountains crawl down/and surround the stone houses/like wolves coming to howl at the dogs/who have become the slaves of men...

...In a country known for its prickly, ironic attitude towards public figures, Yehuda Amichai is one of an infinitesimal number of Israeli heroes who retain across-the-board respect, even adulation...

...It is entirely secular poetry, in which love has replaced the metaphysical...

...Lines such as "Your thighs are two sweet yes-terdays./1'm coming to you./All hundred and fifty psalms/roar hallelujah" (from "Six Songs for Tamar") seem to unify Israel's warm sensuality and ponderous religiosity with open-hearted delight, a quality notably absent from most contemporary cultural discourse...

...Lines from Amichai's poems are tossed about at toney literary events and at the Machane Yehuda open-air market—proof, if proof is needed, of Amichai's superstar status...

...People here see Amichai as a kind of troubadour whose lyrics represent their best selves...

...The question preoccupying readers was, "Is he really well...

...Amichai is uniquely positioned to unify the spheres of love and God...

...In "Question to a Vegan," from her 1995 collection The Interior Plain, the poet Agi Mishol, 52, asks, "And if my body were made of brown rice/would it sprout a purer soul...

...His trajectory— from fighting with the British against the Germans during World War LI, through the Six-Day War, and even on to his quiet life in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Yemin Moshe, where he lives with his wife, Chana, a university professor, and the youngest of his three children—mirrors that of the nation...

...What does God see through the window/while his hands reach into the world...

...Actually, he rediscovers the sacred in what human beings do all the time...

...He presents a fundamentally optimistic philosophical stance in favor of life...

...Shimon Adaf, 27, a poet who (like Amichai) grew up in an Orthodox home but has since become secular, says, "Amichai secularizes the sacred...

...Translated into more than 40 languages, he may be Israel's most visible cultural export...

...The synergy between him and Jerusalem is perfect, as though the city with its extremes of holiness and sacrilege, with its stark vistas that turn suddenly sensual, suddenly menacing, with its 3,000 years of stones and flesh, passion and devastation, prevailed only so it could be exposed to Amichai's loving eye...