Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet (review)

Groundbreaking research usually revolves around innovative analysis of extant materials or the exploitation of new materials that demand reevaluation of previously held assumptions. It is uncommon for one study to contain both of these elements, but Nili Gold's new book constitutes a rare example of this combination.

Intimate familiarity with Yehuda Amichai's 1963 novel Not of this Time, Not of this Place, which chronicles the return of its Israeli protagonist Joel to his German hometown, led Gold to conclude that German language, German culture, and Amichai's childhood years in Germany continued to play a strong role in his life long after his arrival in Israel. Yet, despite the strong influence of Romanticism and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, which both looked at one's childhood years as powerful material for the creation of poetry, Amichai's Poems 1948–1962 seems to contain almost no mention of Germany, where Amichai spent the first twelve years of his life, or its language and culture. Clearly the cultural forces working to shape Israeli society in its formative and inaugural periods pushed Jewish immigrants in Palestine to adopt Sabra norms and abandon their Diaspora roots but how could a poet so attuned to the nuances of everyday experience completely repress important elements of his identity and banish them from his poetry?

Picking up on subtle nuances in his poetry, Gold noticed that aspects of Amichai's German past, although not readily apparent, were present in his first canonical collection. Amichai had developed a camouflaging technique to obscure them, and Gold's study shows how this technique and proper understanding of its function offer a whole new way of understanding his poetry. Rather than repressing his entire childhood, Amichai allowed certain elements, such as his intimate familiarity with Hebrew prayer, to remain clearly visible in his poetry, while disguising traumatic experiences of critical psychic import, such as his relationship with his childhood friend Ruth Hannover, who perished in the Holocaust, and his immigration, that underpin his biography and help explain his poetry. Sometimes the camouflaging process led him to employ simple techniques, such as the conversion of references to Wuerzburg to references to Paris or Jerusalem and the replacement of European forests and rivers with olive trees and dried river beds, but frequently his poetic strategies proved much more complex.

Despite Amichai's reputation as an accessible poet employing simple language, large portions of Poems 1948–1962 prove enigmatic. It is precisely for the most hermetic of these texts that awareness of camouflage proves most useful. A skilled reader cognizant of camouflage's role can decipher poems employed by Amichai to subtly express important facets of his identity. For example, Gold shows how "The Elegy on the Lost Child" voices the tension existing between the seemingly hidden child Ludwig Pfeuffer (Amichai's given name) and the poetic persona of the emerging national poet.

For one to recognize camouflage, however, one needs to have a sense of what the camouflaged objects actually look like. In the case of Amichai's poetry, one needs a fuller sense of who Yehuda Amichai actually was to understand how he camouflaged his identity in his poetry. As a result, Gold organizes her book to reveal the abandoned landmarks of Amichai's early life and to show how this past survives veiled throughout his corpus. In so doing she overturns long held assumptions about Amichai's poetry. While critics frequently link Amichai's emergence as a poet to his experiences in the War of Independence and his loose affiliation with the emerging poets of the avant-garde "Likrat" group in the early 1950s, Gold decisively proves that Amichai had already dedicated his life to poetry, developed his own Ars poetica, and started writing poetry in accordance with it prior to the war.

In working to develop her argument concerning the continued importance of Amichai's German past and the theory of camouflage, Gold could not rely exclusively on published materials, and...