Yehuda Amichai Touched the Soul of a Nation -- But Not Ours

by Jonathan Chisdes

As I was driving to temple last Friday, I heard the report on the radio -- Yehuda Amichai had died. The famous Israeli poet was 76 years old.

I felt suddenly saddened to know that a great one had passed from this world. As both a Jew and a poet myself, I felt a connection to Amichai. He was rightly praised and now greatly mourned in Israel. His poems spoke to the soul of his nation; when his first book of poems, Now and in Other Days, was published in 1955, it revolutionized both Hebrew language and literature. And in 1993 when then-Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize, he read Amichai's poem "God Takes Pity on Kindergarten Children."

Yet here, in the US, his passing is hardly noticed. There was only a small mention in important newspapers like The New York Times, and absolutely nothing in the local Orlando Sentinel. Why was such a giant ignored here? Do Americans really care so much less about poetry and poets than most other cultures?

Perhaps it is the strange culture in this country which shuns anything intellectual. The phrase "popular poetry" seems like an oxymoron in America. Poets are just not mainstream here.

Amichai once said, in an interview with NPR, that most Israeli poets were clearly in the mainstream as they write about the political and historical conflicts that are tearing their country apart. And although Amichai shunned most political causes, he did help found Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) and strongly supported the policies of Yitzchak Rabin which sought peace with the Palestinians. Amichai himself fought in four wars, and many of his poems have an anti-war bent. They are filled with lines such as these: "It's sad to be the mayor of Jerusalem," "Your hair hangs down like the smoke from Cain's altar: / I have to kill my brother. My brother has to kill me," "Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up / as a little girl with flowers."

I like that. I tried to put such politics into my own poems, yet five years ago I had quite an ongoing disagreement with my graduate poetry professor. His view, like that of most American poets, was that politics did not belong in poetry, for it ignobled such high literature that should remain above such base crudities. If American poetry is to reflect mainstream American society, than my professor was right. But I was not interested in reflecting mainstream culture.

Amichai, who had been called Israel's Robert Frost (a reference to his saturation of Israeli mainstream culture), was more of a model for me than poets like John Ashbery or Susan Howe who just wanted to play with language and theoretical ideas. Amichai, instead, was down with the people. He was somebody who, according to Israeli writer and critic Noga Tarnopolsky, "managed to tap into the deepest currents in this society, the greatest hopes and deepest sorrows, in a way that is simultaneously high literature and an expression of the common soul."

Perhaps it is easier to mix seemingly contradictory forces in a place like modern Israel. Amichai once said he took deep inspiration from his "country's mix of ancient and modern, tragic and triumphant."

This can be seen in one of his most famous poems, "Tourists," which is very moving to me, on a personal level. I identify with it not only because for two weeks in 1989 I visited Israel, saw many of the sites listed in the poem, and acted like the tourists he described, but more importantly the poem addresses the things that really matter, things that I struggle with every day. The poem concludes: