(In this collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and ...)
In this collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved poems, including forty poems from his later work. A new foreword by C.K. Williams, written especially for this edition, addresses Amichai’s enduring legacy and sets his poetry in the context of the new millennium.
(In poems marked by tenderness and mischief, humanity and ...)
In poems marked by tenderness and mischief, humanity and humor, Yehuda Amichai breaks open the grand diction of revered Jewish verses and casts the light of his own experience upon them. Here he tells of history, a nation, the self, love, and resurrection. Amichai’s last volume is one of meditation and hope and stands as a testament to one of Israel’s greatest poets. Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That’s all we are.
(One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai ...)
One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations - some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love.
Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet, who synthesized in his poetry the biblical rhythms and imagery of ancient Hebrew with modern Hebraic colloquialisms to try to make sense of the dislocation and alienation experienced by many Jews escaping genocide in Europe for perpetual war in Israel.
Background
Yehuda Amichai was born on May 3, 1924, in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. His German name was Ludwig Pfeuffer. Twelve years later, during the Nazification of Germany that led up to World War II (1939–1945), he emigrated with his parents to Palestine, then a British protectorate in the Middle E. Although his family avoided the horrors of Nazi Germany, Amichai lost many friends and relatives in concentration camps, a loss that haunted him throughout his life.
Education
Amichai attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem and became a teacher in Haifa. After the 1947 - 1949 Palestine war, Amichai studied Bible and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Amichai received his degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1955. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.
In World War II Yehuda Amichai fought with the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, and upon his discharge in 1946, he joined the Palmach. During the War of Independence, he fought in the Negev, on the southern front.
Amichai received his degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1955 and began teaching biblical and Hebrew literature in high schools. He published his first book of poetry in 1955 as well, Now and in Other Days, which was revolutionary for its use of colloquial Hebrew. His 1958 collection, Two Hopes Apart, established him as a major Israeli poet. He was one of the first poets writing in Hebrew to use images of tanks, airplanes, and other technology in his poetry, reflecting his belief that contemporary poetry should embrace the contemporary world.
Amichai first gained the notice of British and American audiences with the English translations of Amen (1977) and Time (1978), two volumes of poetry Amichai translated with the English poet Ted Hughes. Both books address the spiritual and political concerns of the Jewish people. Amichai's deep and ongoing engagement with history and its impact on individual lives is evident in much of his poetry and in his 1963 novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place. In this book, a Jewish archeologist is torn between returning to the German town where he grew up - like the author himself - and staying in Jerusalem to carry out his extramarital affair. The novel is generally considered a seminal work of Israeli Holocaust literature, investigating two options for living with the knowledge of Nazi genocide: Negotiate with the consequences of the past or deny it.
Later in his life, Amichai turned more and more to Hebrew scriptures as a route to understanding himself and the world, focusing on matters both internal and external. In Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers (1983), Amichai addresses Israel's troubled political history and its paradoxical desert landscape, which is both arid and rich with promise. “Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela” is a sequence of fifty-seven poems in which Amichai analyzes his Jewish identity by comparing his life story with legends of a wandering medieval rabbi. Published separately in book-length form as Travels in 1986, this work also appears in his Selected Poetry (1986), a compilation of verse from ten volumes published over a thirty-year period.
In Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers (1991), Amichai again draws from the Tanakh, the holy text of Judaism, to illustrate the individual's struggle with history. And the very late Open Closed Open (1998) is widely seen as Amichai's masterpiece. The twenty-five linked poems in this collection examine human nature and universal concerns through the lens of the Jewish spiritual tradition and Israel's justified fears about the future. At the time of publishing, the Oslo Peace Process begun in 1993 had helped Israel achieve a limited peace with its separatist Palestinian minority - after years of religiously inflected civil war and tension - but Amichai's concerns about a future for Israel were prescient. As a result of the failure of that peace process in 2000, Israeli-Palestinian hostilities flared back up and remained yet to be resolved still in 2008.
Amichai sold his archive for over $200,000 to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. The archive contains 1,500 letters received from the early 1960s to the early 1990s from dozens of Israeli writers, poets, intellectuals and politicians. Overseas correspondence includes letters from Ted Hughes, Arthur Miller, Erica Jong, Paul Celan and many others. The archive also includes dozens of unpublished poems, stories and plays; 50 notebooks and notepads with 1,500 pages of notes, poems, thoughts and drafts from the 1950s onward, and the poet's diaries, which he kept for 40 years. According to Moshe Mossek, former head of the Israel State Archive, these materials offer priceless data about Amichai's life and work.
Like many secular Israeli poets, Amichai struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious experience. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism.
Politics
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war Amichai fought with the Israeli defense forces. The rigors and horrors of his service in this conflict, and in World War II, inform his poetry, although he is never ideological. In an interview with the Paris Review, Amichai noted that all poetry was political: “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”
Views
Yehuda Amichai's artistic life was in nearly every way a negotiation of his Jewish identity, of the traditions to which he was heir, and of the world and regional politics that shaped his options for being and for writing. Throughout his career, Amichai had frequent recourse to a rich and varied Jewish literary tradition and attempted to synthesize the stylistic and conceptual offerings of that tradition with the colloquial Hebrew spoken in Israel, as well as with the ever-shifting and often threatening circumstances surrounding the modern Israeli state.
Serving in the British Army during World War II exposed Amichai to British and American poetry, and the influence of the Irish poet Dylan Thomas and the British-American poet W. H. Auden can be seen in his early work.
Membership
Yehuda Amichai became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1986), and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991).
Academy of Arts and Letters
1986
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1991
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He is one of our great poets, a very accessible one. Once one has read his poems, one can never forget them- there can be so much life in sixteen lines. Yehuda Amichai is a master." - Octavio Paz
"I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poetic voices of this past century – one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humorous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures." - Ted Hughes
Interests
Writers
Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden
Connections
Amichai was married twice. He was first married to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. He had two sons, Ron and David, and a daughter, Emmanuella.