Volume 24 145
Amichai questions the meaning of political fac-
tionalism in the name of the individual. Because
two groups of people declare war on each other,
should then the individual have to resign him/her-
self to a life of military discipline and deprivation
in the natural roughness of an inimical landscape?
Later on in the poem, Amichai makes use of an al-
lusion to the Passover Haggadah. The individual
“I” finds himself caught between the “stick” and
the “fire,” between the “water and the ox,” and be-
tween the “angel of death and God”—the familiar
stations of the Had Gadya. While the Haggadah,
however, presents God’s victory over the various
obstacles as a justification of human toil and tribu-
lation, Amichai’s poem leaves the reader with the
sense of encumbrance and hardship. For Amichai,
there is no respite from the awful trial by fire and
water; there is no sense of redemption or resolu-
tion in the modern day trials imposed on modern
Israel. Neither is there any hope for peace or mean-
ing in the world in general for the individual who
aspires to privacy and personal contentment.
The question that raises the right of the indi-
vidual versus the demands of the group is at the
very heart of Amichai’s novel Not of This Time,
Not of This Place(published in Israel in 1963 and
in English in 1968). This novel represents the Is-
raeli condition after the Holocaust and the War of
Independence as an impossible nightmare. The pro-
tagonist Yoel, an archeologist who tries to find a
place in his secular Jerusalem community finds
himself increasingly alienated from both his friends
and his Israeli wife, Ruth. He searches for love and
meaning in his childhood past, in memories of pre-
Holocaust Germany, specifically in his childhood
love for a Jewish girl who was murdered by the
Nazis. In addition to his escape from Israeli time,
Yoel flees from Israeli culture and discourse by at-
taching himself to an American lover, Patricia. The
vortex of confusion and dissolution into which the
protagonist sinks reflects a post-Zionist and post-
Holocaust reality in which ideals are no longer pos-
sible. The archeologist whose profession is to
reconstruct the past is unable to deal with his own
personal past, nor is he able to face his present. On
the one hand, Amichai seems to imply that indi-
vidual life in Israel is impossible because of the
collective pressures of the immediate Jewish past
and the present demands of the new state. The in-
dividual cannot find a coherent space or time where
he may find a meaningful life, because the collec-
tive seems to supersede all individual quests.
Amichai’s novel was defined by the critic Gershon
Shaked as one of the major breakthroughs of the
New Wave generation, a generation of writers like
A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Amalia Kahana-
Carmon. This generation sought to give voice to
the individual and personal perspective, over
against the collectivist desideratum of the previous
Palmach generation of the 1940s and 1950s.
This sketch of Amichai’s public or critical
“persona” was strongly challenged by Amichai
when I met him in person in 1981. I met Amichai
in Jerusalem and completed my interview with him
for my book, Encounters with Israeli Authors,in
Austin, Texas, where I taught Hebrew literature as
an assistant professor at the department of Orien-
tal Studies. Certain biographical details seem to
challenge the perception of Amichai as a native Is-
raeli secularist author. For one thing, he was born
in Wurtzburg (Bavaria) and immigrated with his
parents to Israel at the age of 12, in 1936, during
Hitler’s ascent to power. He received an Orthodox
education; his father, who appears as a central sub-
ject in his poetry, was an observant Jew. Amichai
joined the British Brigade, and fought with the
Haganah during the War of Independence of 1948.
After that war, he was graduated from the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, having majored in Hebrew
Literature and Bible. He taught in various colleges
in Jerusalem and the US for over 40 years. Amichai
has been widely translated, and he represented Is-
rael in numerous international forums. In 1975, he
won the Bialik award for literature, and in 1981 he
was awarded the coveted Israel prize. In my inter-
view with Amichai, I was struck by his consistent
rejection of his public and critical persona. He in-
sisted that he did not consider himself part of any
aesthetic trend, or poetic coterie. He shied away
from the critical consensus about his novel. He told
me that the surrealistic juxtaposition of Germany
and Israel, the past and the present, was a result of
a simple personal experience. He was in love, he
told me, with his childhood friend from Germany
and as well as with the girl he describes as Amer-
ican. Because in reality one cannot love two women
at the same time, he chose to bring the two together
in fiction. Amichai dismissed his representation as
a secularist ironic writer, arguing instead that he
makes constant use of the Bible, Midrash, Siddur,
and other traditional sources. Amichai refused to
discuss his poetry as an art form. He argued that
his poetry is neither a skill nor an art, but rather an
expression of a basic need, the need for self-
expression. He insisted that he was no poet, but
rather “a man who writes poems.” Amichai de-
scribed his poetic activity as a sort of reporting on
basic emotional responses to daily events. Just asNot like a Cypress