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

Hebrew Studies 50 (2009) 425 Reviews The theoretic framework Oppenheimer proposes in the introduction, according to which the representation of Arabs in Hebrew literature oscillates between national and universal narratives, that is, between portraying Arabs as national and cultural others and representing their universal humanity, may be related to the inconsistencies delineated above. For Oppenheimer, the universal and the national contrast each other, and the universal narrative is privileged in the sense that it has the potential to “suspend ideological judgments and orientalist knowledge” (p. 18) and to create an “in-between space” that allows for real human interaction between Arabs and Jews. This “in-between space” appears in some Hebrew texts, Oppenheimer suggests, but is always doomed to failure as no author manages to completely avoid the national narrative that reconstitutes the borders between Jew and Arabs. If the only way out of orientalist discourse open to Hebrew writers is universalistic humanism, which in itself is a conceptual framework imbued with western ideology, then no wonder that no author can release herself from “the prison of language” (the title of Oppenheimer’s introduction). Again, Oppenheimer’s own readings point toward different directions, as for example, his interesting analysis of Ronit Matalon’s Sara Sara that raises questions regarding the humanist value of the “in-between space” as it sometimes entails violent erasure of differences in the guise of empathy and good will. This reading evokes, although does not explicitly articulate, the split inherent to the humanist thought between the desire for universal sameness and the need to preserve the boundaries between self and other. The tension between these two facets of humanist universalism is pertinent both to the reading of Hebrew literature’s representations of Arabs and to thinking about the relations between modern nationalism and humanist universalism in general. Oppenheimer’s book opens the way to further theorization of these issues through the site of Hebrew literature, in which universal and national narratives do not only conflict but also overlap. Orian Zakai University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48104 orianz@umich.edu YEHUDA AMICHAI: THE MAKING OF ISRAEL’S NATIONAL POET. By Nili Scharf Gold. Pp. xiii + 445. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2008. Cloth, $35.00. For many people, the lives of writers are more interesting as objects of our concern than the work they have done, and a remarkable number of Hebrew Studies 50 (2009) 426 Reviews literary treatments these days include something about the lives of our subjects . Perhaps yielding to the temptations to become insiders, we explore our great writers for the strings of tidbits that we hope can be made into a comprehensive narrative that explains their art. Nili Gold’s new book on Amichai will serve that purpose for many people, as its intense research has uncovered much about the early life of the man whom many of us view as the preeminent Hebrew poet since the establishment of Israel. He is certainly the best known by the wider English-speaking public. There are serious aesthetic questions imbedded in the biographies of immigrant intellectuals—especially those who took on new languages in their work (think of Conrad, Berlin, Nabokov, or Wiesel, for example). In her study, Nili Gold has clarified some of these questions, and the material here may influence our understanding of the language of many other immigrant Hebrew writers, such as, Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, T. Carmi, Lea Goldberg, to name a few. Few of us can resist thinking about what makes up a great writer, and, in the case of Amichai, there developed an irresistible pull to expand on archival evidence that supported and/or enriched what we knew of Amichai’s early German origins. Gold’s engagement with the Beinicke Archives at Yale (where the Amichai papers are housed) and opportunities that led her to explore outside of those archives have resulted in an intriguing, complicated, and sometimes over-determined description of the provenance of Amichai’s art. I would like to welcome Nili Gold’s well researched and thoroughly intriguing exploration of the childhood and spiritual origins of Yehuda Amichai, whose existence as Ludwig Pfeuffer has heretofore been known but attended to too little. It was a...