Poetry for Students

(Rick Simeone) #1

Volume 24 147


people in the work-a-day world.” On the other
hand, Amichai’s iconoclastic and ironic approach
to the traditional idiom and his use of classical
allusion and syntactic fragmentation demonstrate
his indebtedness to Anglo-American modernism.
Amichai’s poem “Once a Great Love” reflects the
poet’s use of incongruous imagery. The image of
the snake in the first stanza does not correspond to
the metaphor of the Sea Level sign. The juxtapo-
sition of incongruities is even more salient in his
poem “Half the People in the World.” For the most
part, Amichai uses paradigmatic sequencing in or-
der to expose the irrational, arbitrary, and chaotic
nature of modern life. In this sense he follows the
modernist tradition, even when the break-up of log-
ical progression renders his poems less readable.


Amichai’s use of classical allusion also estab-
lishes him as a modernist poet. In his poem “Young
David” he all but eliminates the story of David and
Goliath recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Amichai’s David
is lonely among the fighters who celebrate his vic-
tory, fighters whose masculine swagger and vulgar
camaraderie are reminiscent of the Palmach mili-
tary camp. Where the Biblical David brings Go-
liath’s head to King Saul as concrete proof of the
victory he has accomplished, Amichai’s David is
at a loss about what to do with Goliath’s head.
Amichai’s David is tired and despondent after his
victory. The death of his enemy bothers him. He
finds no joy in his military accomplishment.
Amichai rewrites the Biblical David from a mod-
ern, Israeli, secular pacifist perspective. Amichai’s
David gives voice to the disenchanted individual
soldier who remains alienated among his compa-
triots. Goliath’s head lies heavy and superfluous in
David’s hands. The only literal allusion to the Bib-
lical text is evoked in the “birds of blood” flying
away from the battle scene, a subtle echo to the
birds Goliath mentions in his taunting speech to
David before their confrontation. As David Jacob-
son notes, “Yehuda Amichai challenges the ade-
quacy of the David and Goliath myth as a basis for
understanding the experience of fighting as a sol-
dier in the Arab-Israeli wars.” Amichai’s Biblical
allusions serve as a political critique of Israeli pol-
itics. These allusions, however, are multivalent and
not always accessible.


In his poem “The Real Hero of the Sacrifice
of Isaac,” Amichai, contrary to the numerous tra-
ditional and modern interpretations of the Akedah,
argues that the real hero of Genesis 22 is the ram.
Neither Abraham, nor Isaac, nor the angel, nor even
God is the true hero of the story. The shift from
both human and divine agents to the animal is


disconcerting. “The real hero of the sacrifice was
the ram / Who had no idea about the conspiracy of
the others. / He apparently volunteered to die in
place of Isaac.” How can a ram “volunteer” to die?
The personification of the ram is extreme, and the
detailed description of his killing and the produc-
tion of “shofars” out of his horns deflate the sacral
apotheosis that is usually associated with Rosh
Hashanah. But to the religious artifact Amichai ties
a military context. The “shofars” in the poem
“sound the blast of their war”—in the famous an-
tiwar poem of Amir Gilboa, “Isaac,” it is the young
generation of Israeli warriors who speak through
Isaac’s voice. Gilboa questioned the sacrifice of
Israel’s young generation by their fathers, the Zion-
ist political elite that hailed from Europe. Amichai
pushes this antiwar poem to further limits. The date
of the poem’s publication gives us a clue. The year
1982 was the date of the Lebanon war, the most
controversial war in the history of the nation.
Amichai uses the ram as a metaphor for the many
innocent youths sacrificed during that war. If a ram
can hardly “volunteer” to be sacrificed, so could
the many young fighters hardly have volunteered
to die. This volunteer-ism was imposed on them.
“Thus, here Amichai is ironically undermining the
Israeli army value of volunteerism in a war such as
the Lebanon War which does not seem to be justi-
fied.” Amichai transforms Abba Kovner’s famous
reference to Jews in the Holocaust who went to
their deaths like “sheep to slaughter”—only in his
poem the ram is the one who is slaughtered. “The
angel went home / Isaac went home / And Abra-
ham and God left much earlier. / But the real hero
of the sacrifice / Is the ram.”
Amichai’s classical allusions are not easily ac-
cessible. Neither are his paradigmatic sequences,
his combination of incongruities, his dissonant
metaphors. Amichai’s poetic signature, his ability
to deflate sacral pieties, and to celebrate mundane
experiences and ordinary reality also requires some
interpretive effort. His use of modernist poetics
suggests that he is indeed a self-conscious “poet”—
the very label he was trying so hard to dispute. We
may argue that Amichai is a marginal modernist,
or even an anti-modernist, but he is a modernist
nonetheless, and one of the leading Hebrew mod-
ernist poets of our time.
We began then with Amichai the “persona,” we
proceeded to investigate this “persona” through the
medium of Amichai the “person,” and proceeded to
examine the “person” through the poet. How then
should we approach Amichai, or, who is the “real”
Amichai—the persona, the person, or the poet?

Not like a Cypress
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