Volume 24 153
something discomfiting about this recording of one
lost love after another in which the speaker never
(or hardly ever) appears to come into contact with
a separate and unique individual as densely spe-
cific as himself. To harp on this last point might
become dreary, humorless (the last things one
wants to appear in the presence of a master of tragi-
comedy), but it remains a disappointment in work
otherwise marked by uncompromising complexity.
The voice of an Amichai poem—we might be
able to spot even an unattributed Amichai—comes
to us with a tone at once funny and sad, fanciful
and commonsensical, sweet and bitter, fluid and
laconic. What makes the diverse elements cohere
is a somehow recognizably Jewish and Israeli vari-
ety of irony, at once lugubrious and tough-minded.
If Amichai quarrels with his diasporan fathers, he
does so—ironically—by borrowing their method of
coping and their tone of voice. Indeed, he sees him-
self as adopting the voice and view of his own fa-
ther: “Irony is integral to my poetry. Irony is, for
me, a kind of cleaning material. I inherited a sense
of humor and irony from my father, who always
used humor and irony as a way of clarifying, clear-
ing, cleaning the world around him. Irony is a way
of focusing, unfocusing and focusing again always
trying to see another side. That’s the way I see,
that’s the way I think and feel, that’s the way
I live—focusing and refocusing and juxtaposing
different shifting and changing perspectives.”
A capacity for entertaining multiple perspec-
tives and an attempt “to see another side” may be,
in the end, the only hope for peace, in the Middle
East, or anywhere—which is why Amichai’s par-
ticular deployment of humor and irony carries a
certain amount of political as well as poetic freight.
In section five of “Jerusalem, 1967,” a long poem
emerging from the experience of the Six-Day War,
Amichai (whose father, previous to his Israeli in-
carnation as a sausage-maker, had been a whole-
sale distributor of tailoring goods in Germany)
shows us how possible and yet impossible it is to
make a human connection with someone on “an-
other side”:
On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I
put on my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old
City of Jerusalem For a long time I stood in front of
an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop, not far from the
Damascus Gate, a shop with buttons and zippers
and spools of thread in every color and snaps and
buckles. A rare light and many colors, like an open
Ark.
I told him in my heart that my father too had a shop
like this, with thread and buttons. I explained to him
in my heart about all the decades and the causes andthe events, why I am now here and my father’s shop
was burned there and he is buried here.
When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the
Gates prayer. He too lowered the shutters and locked
the gate and I returned, with all the worshipers, home.
This long noncommunication, which conjoins
the incompatible elements of irony and prayer,
takes place in a surprising and generous image in
front of a homely “Ark of the Covenant,” a clut-
tered Arab tailor’s shop in the Shuk. The phrase
“all the worshipers” may be read as wishful think-
ing, encompassing Arab and Jew alike, humanity
in general. Yet the speaker here, in spite of his
somewhat self-congratulatory and sentimental as-
sertion that he stood “For a long time,” comes
across as someone realistic, someone who regret-
fully concedes the division between Arab and Jew
brought about by “all the decades” of irrevocable
“causes and events.” He returns to his home in the
still-embattled city together with the worshipers
who are Jewish. What the shop/“Ark” has on dis-
play, we notice, are small, assorted inventions for
closing more easily repaired rents or gaps than that
between the shopkeeper and the Yom Kippur wor-
shiper: needles and thread, buttons and zippers and
snaps. But the poem reminds us that wishful think-
ing alone cannot join what history has separated.
The refusal to proffer simplistic solutions:
Amichai’s speaker here and in most poems is a man
who, despite wide-ranging experience and an as-
tringent intelligence, finds himself, like most of us
most of the time, morally troubled and perplexed.
And the most perplexing subject for this
poet/speaker is the significance of Jewish history.
On the one hand, history is clearly the wellspring
of his humane art and the source of his most ef-
fective metaphors. On the other hand, history is, as
Amichai himself acknowledges, the ultimate cause
of the ongoing inhumanity that he abhors. In the
following passage, for instance, the poet’s wry ge-
nealogical metaphors come out of and comment on
an extensive history of sufferings and reprisals (the
phrase “eye to eye” wearily echoing the Old Tes-
tament edict of “an eye for an eye”):
Joy has no parents. No joy ever learns from the one
before, and it dies without heirs. But sorrow has a
long tradition, handed down from eye to eye, from
heart to heart.
“I hate war,” Amichai has said, “So I hate
history.”
It is unsurprising, then, that one of Amichai’s
most accomplished volumes of poetry is entitled
simply Time;unsurprising, too, that one of his best
single poems takes up the time-obsessed book ofNot like a Cypress