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Openclosedopenclosedopen Tags: Yehuda Amichai, Israel News One evening in 1997 I went to a university lecture in New York City with Yehuda Amichai, Israel's best-known poet. We sat in the back row at the end of a crowded hall and waited for the speaker to begin, when suddenly he touched my arm and said, almost in a whisper: "Do you see, three rows in front of us, near the aisle, a woman sits? Her name is Ruth Z. Do you remember the poem about the one who 'ran away to America?' I wrote it about her." Thus begins literary scholar Nili Scharf Gold's exciting monograph "Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet" (Brandeis University Press, 433 pages), which was recently published. Gold recalled his poem "The Rustle of History's Wings," a blunt poem seething with anger over abandonment (translation by Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic, December 2008): Those were the days of a great love and a great fate, Advertisement the foreign government imposed a curfew on the city and confined us to a sweet union in a room, guarded by heavily armed soldiers. For five shillings I exchanged the exile name of my fathers for a proud Hebrew name that suited hers. That whore ran off to America and married a man, a spice dealer, pepper, cinnamon, and cardamom, leaving me with my new name and with the war. To understand the story behind this poem, one must become acquainted with an early chapter in Amichai's biography, the story of his personal life between the spring of 1946 and the spring of 1948, a story that Amichai kept hidden. Gold learned of this story two years later, when she met the woman whom Amichai had pointed out. Gold, who in 1994 published a book, "Not Like a Cypress," about Amichai's poetry, lucked out: A treasure fell into her hands - a bundle of about 100 letters that Yehuda Amichai wrote to his first love, Ruth Z., who left him and hurt him so badly that he erased their love story from his biography. Gold met with Ruth Z. and obtained permission to read the letters the young Amichai wrote to her three times a week, from August 1947 until April 1948. The letters, which are now preserved at the Heksherim Institute at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, along with research in the archive donated by the Amichai family to Yale University, produced some surprising revelations. Among many other fascinating things, Gold learned that as of January 1948, Amichai had already been writing poetry for two years. She also learned that Ruth Z. is the one who gave him his Hebrew surname, saying that Amichai was a name befitting a great poet. In light of these new revelations, Gold's interpretation of everything related to Amichai's poetry and image changed. As a consequence, she wrote this engrossing monograph that offers a portrait of the poet as a young man, aptly naming it "The Making of Israel's National Poet." As for Ruth Z., she and Amichai studied teaching together in Jerusalem, fell in love and even planned to marry. But then Ruth Z. left for the United States and after eight months there, married someone else. Yehuda Amichai, who'd changed his surname at his beloved's behest, and still nurtured hopes of a life with her during the time she was abroad, was dealt a terrible blow. The poem clearly expresses his fury. According to Gold, Yehuda Amichai's relationship with Ruth Z. influenced his poetry and alters the understanding of the poems collected in the volume "Poems 1948-1962." Her findings indicate that Amichai suppressed this trauma, as well as many of the decisive events of his younger years, and that essentially he lived like a combat soldier behind a camouflage net. Gold shows that after the War of Independence, Amichai dictated his biography and altered the timetable of his career as a poet, matching his creative birth date to the birth date of the State of Israel. In interviews, as well as in poems about his poetic calling, Amichai hinted that he never wanted to be a poet, and that the battles in the Negev are what made him start writing suddenly, as a way to console himself. The poems he had written before that he published afterward, as later poems. His behavior is completely understandable. For as he wrote in poem No. 10 from the "I Am a Prophet of What Has Already Been" cycle ("Open Closed Open - Poems by Yehuda Amichai," translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kornfeld, Harcourt, 2000, page 14): Life, I think is a series of rehearsals for the real show. In a rehearsal you can still make changes, cut out a sentence, add a line of dialogue, switch actors, directors, theaters - up until the real show. Then there is no changing. And it makes no difference. In order to maintain his sanity, he had to suppress the early traumas and make room for coping with new traumas brought about by the War of Independence and the wars that followed. Like many inhabitants of Israel, he aspired to an appearance of normalcy and wished to die in his bed (See: "I Want to Die in My Own Bed," translation by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav). It may be overly simplistic to say that he was incapable of dealing with the terrible guilt aroused by his experience with Ruth Hanover, his cherished childhood friend, referred to as "Little Ruth." Little Ruth was the daughter of Rabbi Hanover, rabbi of the Jewish community of Wuerzburg, Germany, where Amichai was born and raised by a loving and protective family. They attended the same school and since they lived not far from one another, they used to walk there and back together. One Hanukkah, the school decided to put on a play. Amichai was assigned a role he didn't like and asked to switch. This led to an argument between Amichai and his little friend, Ruth Hanover. She got mad, stormed out of the classroom, got on her bike and started pedaling home. It was winter and frost covered the ground; the little girl slipped and fell. As a result of the accident, one of her legs had to be amputated. She was in the hospital for a year until she was fitted with a prosthetic leg. Without question, Amichai held himself responsible for what happened. But the matter didn't end there. By the time Ruth Hanover recovered and they resumed walking to school together, the Nazis had come to power. One day, as they were on their way home, a gang of Hitler Youths attacked them and knocked them down. Yehuda saw them kicking Little Ruth and was powerless to help her. This was the second trauma. The third trauma was learning that Little Ruth had been sent to a Nazi concentration camp. The tale of Ruth Hanover's death is particularly sad since her family survived and made it to England. Because of her handicap, she was unable to join them; she fled to Holland, but was caught there and deported. These experiences were not given direct expression in Amichai's poetry. He disguised them, says Nili Scharf Gold. Now they are being revealed in her book, which illuminates his poetry in a new light. The new perspective that Gold proposes both enriches and deepens Amichai's poetry, making its complexity suddenly apparent. "Something else is intended," as he declares in his poem of that name. Most scholars, says Gold, disregard the inner conflicts that suffuse Amichai's poems and do not see how his poetry serves to blur the traces of his foreign origins. In the Amichai archive, Gold found excerpts indicating that "German remained at his fingertips" and that, even after the age of 40, his poetry was replete with the trauma of the Nazi persecution. The letters show that he composed poems in German, translated them into Hebrew and planted the translations in the local Israeli environment. The excerpts and scribblings in German that she uncovered reveal the German "truth" beneath the Hebrew facade, says Gold - the European landscape beneath the Israeli topography and history that are manifest in his most oft-quoted poems. And because Amichai was so skillful at covering up the foreign traces, the poems are perceived as completely Israeli. Part of the poet's personality, claims Gold, was in conflict with his Israeliness. He comprised different identities that did not mesh with one another. He became an exemplary Israeli poet, planted in the country, in its landscape, its history and its language, while hiding certain aspects of his own history. He concocted a personal mythology that would behoove a national poet. Gold's book sets out to reveal the real Amichai behind the camouflage, and to reinterpret the milestones of his past that found a veiled existence in his poetry. The subtitle of Gold's book, "The Making of Israel's National Poet," contains her working thesis, which says that Amichai is a national poet, in fact the national poet of Israel. To the best of my knowledge, the only figure in Hebrew literature to have been called a national poet before Amichai was Bialik. But Bialik was crowned "a national poet," while the title of Gold's book crowns Amichai as "the national poet" of Israel. Can this possibly be so? Don't Gold's discoveries place this in question more than ever? The answer must be a firm and unequivocal no. Not only do the revelations not call Amichai's status as a national poet into question, they reinforce it all the more. I have no doubt that Amichai is worthy of the title of national poet, if only for lines such as: "Whoever put on a tallit when he was young will never forget," from poem No. 19 in the "Gods Come and Go, Prayers Remain Forever" cycle ("Open Closed Open"), or the lines from poem No. 7 from the same cycle (translation by Karen Alkalay-Gut): "Our Father our King, What does a father do whose children are orphans while he is still alive? What can a father do whose children are dead and he remains a mourning father to the end of days? Weep and not weep, not remember and not forget." Or poem No. 18: The ways of my life are snarled and tangled. I am a knot that cannot be unraveled. I am the knot in the handkerchief. That is all and this is my life. Perhaps here, in this metaphor, "I am the knot in the kerchief," through the psychological position expressed in it, Amichai is unwittingly defining himself as a national poet and relating to Bialik as a poet who reproves, remembers and reminds. Or, for example, the poem that sends a shudder up the spine, poem No. 11 from the "In My Life / On My Life" cycle ("Open Closed Open"): When a man dies, they say 'He was gathered unto his fathers.' As long as he is alive, his fathers are gathered within him, each cell of his body and soul a delegate from one of his thousands of fathers since the beginning of time. In my view, it's precisely Amichai's self-definition as a representative of all the generations, which he does demonstrate in his poetry, that naturally makes him Israel's national poet. Take note: As Gold's book shows, Amichai was a poet behind whom the German language trailed like a wedding gown over the land, with the real bride being the Hebrew language. Yehuda Amichai's mother tongue was German and was, as such, an inseparable part of him, as Gold shows in her book, for he continued to think and write in it even after he was grown and had thoroughly conquered the heart of Hebrew, which he first came to know as a child, in the synagogue and in special after-school classes. Of all people, Amichai was the one to become Israel's national poet. Because it is precisely this complexity, precisely this universality, that makes him a representative of all generations, all factions, all families. Very roughly speaking, one could say that what Gold discovered beneath the disguise donned by Yehuda Amichai is a German poet wearing a Hebrew mask. She demonstrates this quite convincingly, and yet I still disagree with her. Yes, German, his mother tongue, remained in the background and did not completely disappear, but my feeling is that what's hiding behind the mask that Amichai wears, and beneath his mother tongue, and is the thing that really makes him such a great poet, and the thing that makes him a national poet, is the Jewish prayerbook, the siddur. In my understanding, Amichai is continuing to write the Jewish prayerbook, a prayerbook he learned by heart as a child. In his poetry, beyond his verses, the liturgical poetics, songs and melodies of the siddur are playing. And even though he wrote in German, too, and sometimes, according to Gold's findings, actually wrote a poem first in German and then translated it into Hebrew, and even though he is certainly a German Jew - he is also the successor of the great medieval poets, of the ancient liturgists. He is not the successor of Bialik and certainly not of Alterman, nor does he resemble his contemporaries. He is the successor of the Jewish liturgists, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, whose compositions became enshrined in the siddur. He is heir to Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, the reputed author of the awe-inspiring "Unetaneh Tokef" Yom Kippur prayer, on the one hand, and at the same time, he is the most universal of poets. This combination of the Jewish poet and the universal poet is what really warrants him the title of national poet. When Amichai writes the shiver-inducing line, "vehagriat horai lo nirge'ah bi" ("And the migration of my parents has not subsided in me") - a line that penetrates deep inside, whose words were selected with German meticulousness - behind it, we hear the opening melody of the ancient liturgical poem, "unetaneh tokef kedushat hayom ki hu nora ve'ayom" ("Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness, for it is awesome and frightening"). One must read these two lines aloud and hear their meter, their music, in order to appreciate their close connection and how they were hewn from a common source. "Amichai's letters to his beloved recall not only the German reading they shared, but also other texts from his childhood in Wuerzburg," Gold writes (page 114), such as nursery rhymes that were taught to them as young schoolchildren. And she adds, two pages later: "One may think of the German language as the 'subconscious' of Amichai's verse and the remnants of it as the scattered pieces that break through the mask of repression." True, but by the same token, one could also say and possibly demonstrate more easily that the Jewish prayerbook is the subconscious of Amichai's poetry and that its verses are studded throughout his poetry in a completely open way. I have no argument with Nili Scharf Gold. She has written a very exciting book that enriches and deepens the poet's personality, showing it to be much more complex than previously portrayed. This is a persuasive, unique book that is strongly supported by sources and poetry, a book that presents a new poet - more complex and fascinating than ever, and a faithful representative of his people. Not only does the new side of Amichai revealed in Gold's book enrich his marvelous poetry, it depicts Israel as a multicultural society, gathered from all ends of the earth, bearing numerous and varied traditions. And his Israeliness in combination with his distinct Jewishness gives rise to a rare complexity that is perfectly blended in this representative of all the generations. Translated by Anne Pace Bookmark to del.icio.us   Humanitarian initiative There is a way for Israel to prove it is committed to universal moral values. Top Targets An Islamist site is compiling a list of U.K. Jews to target over Gaza op.

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