Yehuda Amichai: Poetry Across Nations

Out of three or four in a room
one is always standing at the window.
Forced to see the injustice among the thorns,
the fires on the hill.
And people who left whole
are brought home in the evening like small change.

Out of three or four in a room
one is always standing at the window.
Hair dark above his thoughts.
Behind him, the words.
And in front of him, voices, wandering, without language.
Hearts without provisions, prophecies without water
and big stones put there
and staying closed, like letters
with no addresses, and no one to receive them. ¹

Yehuda Amichai was born Ludwig Pfeuffer on May 3, 1924 in Würzburg, Germany. His parents, of Orthodox Jewish descent, took their family and immigrated to Israel, then known as Palestine in 1935 when Yehuda was twelve.
Amichai later would become a member of the British Army's Jewish Brigade serving in WWII and subsequently on the front in the Israeli War of Independence (also known as the Arab-Israeli War) of 1948.

Amichai's first profession was a physical education teacher but his love for poetry, having begun while stationed in Egypt with the British Army, was a constant and serious thought for him. He first began writing poetry in 1946 at the age of twenty two, but not earnestly until 1948. It was in 1946 when Ludwig Pfueffer decided to be known hence as Yehuda Amichai.

He studied Bible and Hebrew Literature at Hebrew University Jerusalem where upon encouragement from one of his professors, published his first book of poetry "Now and in Other Days". The year was 1955.

In 1956 Amichai would serve in the Sinai War and in later years the Yom Kippur War of 1973. A good deal of Amichai's poetry is woven with the many experiences of the wars he fought and of those whom he knew and lost there.

In 1965, British Poet Ted Hughes happened to read some of Amichai's poems and was so moved he requested a collaboration between them so that his poetry could be translated. Hughes lover at the time Assia Wevill, produced the translations and Amichai's Selected Poems became the first volume of the poet in any translation in 1968.

The earth drinks men and their loves like wine,
to forget. It can't.
And like the contours of the Judean hills,
we shall never find peace.

I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,
I touched your flesh, prophet of your end,
I touched your hand, which has never slept,
I touched your mouth, which may yet sing.

Dust from the desert covered the table
at which we did not eat.
But with my finger I wrote on it
the letters of your name. ²

In his lifetime, Yehuda Amichai was Poet in Residence of several major universities and spent a great deal of time at Oxford.
Yehuda Amichai's papers are now held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Amichai's poetry is radiant and rich in the tapestry of love, loss, passion, irony, religion and sorrow. His lines are not perfect but are precise in poignancy. Full of emotion and longing not only for things present, but of memories, and the dreams of some future significance.

His poetry can be sparse yet expansive. His word play humorous yet under toned in sadness. His poetry is unpretentious, intense, riddled with echoes of the Psalms and Proverbs.

Yehuda Amichai revolutionized modern Israeli poetry with his use of slang and idiom. His poetry contributed to the formation of the Tel Aviv School, which consisted of a group of writers whose aim was to change the face of classical Hebrew Poetry.

Amichai's poetry is beloved in Israel and he was Israel's foremost Poet Laureate. He was nominated numerous times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but never won that coveted prize. He worked extensively with Arab Poets and was considered "dovish' in his politics. He consistently advocated for peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians.

I remember the rain,
but I have forgotten things
the rain covered years ago.

My gaze is lifted
like an airplane between control tower
and open spaces of abandonment and oblivion.

A foreign country covers
my face with it's waters.
I am a sad general of streaming water.

Cambridge. Closed door of a friend's house:
How much time must pass
for such spiderwebs to take shape,
how much time? ³

Yehuda Amichai was not limited to poetry, but wrote novels, short stories and plays. But his poems have often been used in speeches and on public occasions. Yitzhak Rabin, then Prime Minister of Israel who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994, recited Amichai's poem "God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children" during his acceptance speech.

And Yehuda Amichai, on this same occasion read his poem "“Half the People in the World" for Rabin's ceremony:

"Half the people in the world love the other half, half the people hate the other half. Must I, because of this half and that, go and wander and ceaselessly change, like rain in its cycle, and sleep among rocks and become rugged like the trunks of olive trees, and hear the moon bark at me, and camouflage my love with worries, and grow like frightened grass between the railroad tracks, and live underground like a mole, and be with roots and not with branches, and not rest my cheek upon the cheek of angels, and make love in the first of the caves, and marry my wife beneath a canopy of beams that support the earth, and act out my death, unto the last breath and the last words, always and without understanding, and put flagpoles atop my house and a bomb shelter underneath. And set forth on those roads made only for returning, and go through all the terrifying stations — cat, stick, fire, water, butcher — between the kid and the Angel of Death?
Half the people love, half the people hate. And where is my place between such well-matched halves? And through what crack shall I see the white housing projects of my dreams, and the runners barefoot on the sands or, at least, the flutter of the girl’s kerchief, by the hill?"

Chana Bloch, a frequent translator of Amichai's poems said (writing in the introduction to The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, 1986), "Some Israeli students were called up in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As soon as they were notified, they went back to their rooms at the university, and each packed his gear, a rifle, and a book of Yehuda Amichai's poems."

Amichai was indeed celebrated and loved, speaking not only to a new generation of war ravaged and "on the precipice" youth, but to the memories and aspirations of an older one. Yehuda Amichai died of cancer at the age of 76 on September 22, 2000 in Jerusalem. He is survived by two sons and one daughter.

His poems live on as testaments to the human condition of sorrow, love, hope, and compassion. He is appreciated outside of Israel and his poetry crosses languages and boundaries. He is translated into over 40 languages and is still being discovered by new generations across the world.

¹ Out of Three or Four in a Room, Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems
² Excerpts; In The Middle Of This Century, Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems
³ How much Time, Poems of Other Countries; Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994