Poetry for Students

150 Poetry for Students

preparing for a new conflict while the one we were

in was fading away. One event in Egypt had an ex-

tremely important impact on my life. It was in 1944,

I think, we were somewhere out in the Egyptian

desert. The British had these mobile libraries for their

soldiers, but, of course, most of the British soldiers,

being from the lower classes and pretty much uned-

ucated, didn’t make much use of the libraries. It was

mostly us Palestinians who used them—there we

were, Jews reading English books while the English

didn’t. There had been some kind of storm, and one

of the mobile libraries had overturned into the sand,

ruining or half-ruining most of the books. We came

upon it, and I started digging through the books, and

came upon a book, a Faber anthology of modern

British poetry—the first time I read Eliot and Auden,

for example, who became very important to me. I

discovered them in the Egyptian desert, in a half-

ruined book. The book had an enormous impact on

me—I think that was when I began to think seriously

about writing poetry.

With this episode the older Amichai, retro-

spectively proud of his military exploits and upper-

class education, presents for the literary/historical

record a self-epitomizing image: a young Zionist

soldier-reader, groping in foreign sand for the sec-

ular, poetic word. And the text unearthed is not in

Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Hebrew, but self-

consciously modernist, twentieth–century English.

Ironically (and Amichai is a great relisher of

ironies), this digging excavates a future instead of

a past: Amichai will produce his own brand of mod-

ern poetry—a mixture that stirs together Biblical

Hebrew and phrases from the diasporan siddur with

a newly evolving, spoken Hebrew suddenly called

upon to accommodate the new nouns and new re-

alities of cars and ketchup, Pepsi-Cola and tanks:

Caught in a homeland-trap: To talk now in this tired

tongue, Torn out of its sleep in the Bible: blinded, It

totters from mouth to mouth. In a tongue that de-

scribed Miracles and God, now to say: automobile,

bomb, God.

Amichai’s self-described “mixed sensibility,”

then, merges with and emerges from the historical

occasion that was the birth of the modern Jewish

state and the reawakening of the Hebrew tongue.

It is Amichai’s genius as a writer to have seized

this moment in Jewish history as a literary oppor-

tunity and to have seen in his own personal history

a microcosm of Israeli national experience:

When I was young, the whole country was young.

And my father was everyone’s father. When I was

happy, the country was happy too, and when I jumped

on her, she jumped under me. The grass that covered

her in spring softened me too, and the dry earth of

summer hurt me like my own cracked footsoles.

When I first fell in love, they proclaimed her inde-

pendence, and when my hair fluttered in the breeze,

so did her flags. When I fought in the war, she fought,

when I got up she got up too, and when I sank she

began to sink with me.

In its egocentricity, exuberant and unabashed,

its revolutionary energy, and its evocation of youth-

ful accord with a responsive, feminized Nature,

these opening lines of “When I Was Young, the

Whole Country Was Young” recall, of course,

Wordsworth’s Romantic posture—and particularly

Book XI of The Prelude,in which Wordsworth,

recounting the optimism and excitement surround-

ing his first exposure to the French Revolution,

famously exclaims, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be

alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!” Yet the

overall arc of Amichai’s lyric is not Wordsworthian

but self-consciously anti-Romantic, swerving as it

does from the heroic to the humdrum, from the

blithe to the blighted, with an unmistakable ironic

undertow and with characteristic insistence on

prosaic, pathos-deflating ordinariness. Here is the

poem’s final stanza:

Afterward I bought myself some non-kosher salami

and two bagels, and I walked home. I managed to

hear the evening news and ate and lay down on the

bed and the memory of my first love came back to

me like the sensation of falling just before sleep.

Anti-heroism, reduced expectations, undercut-

ting of what at first had seemed universal and ab-

solute, with a sense of fragmentation and individual

isolation: this poem, so self-consciously about

“sinking” and “falling,” is very much in line with

Western iconoclastic writing of the nineteen fifties.

“When I was young” is at the same time a markedly

idiosyncratic and local incarnation of modernist

tropes and dilemmas, a specifically Jewish work

that takes stock of four decades of life in the

“Promised Land.”

The poem is enriched if one has read

Amichai’s earlier writing, where the analogy is

repeatedly drawn between his beloved orthodox

father (dead of a heart attack at sixty-three, at the

very commencement of Amichai’s writing career)

and God the Father; or if one is aware that, like so

many of his generation of pioneer Zionists, the

young Amichai repudiated orthodoxy; or if one

happens to know that when the family immigrated

from Germany, Amichai’s father and uncle opened

a small factory in which they made salami

sausages. What is ironically evoked in the last

stanza, then, as the speaker goes home with his soli-

tary meal of “non-kosher salami,” is not only a dis-

solution of the original, Edenic reciprocity of

speaker and country, but also a personalcum-

national turn away from kashrut and religious

Not like a Cypress