undefinedPhotograph by Hana Amichai

 

Born in Würzburg, Germany in 1924, Yehuda Amichai emigrated to Palestine with his Orthodox Jewish family in 1936. During World War II he fought with the Palestinian brigade of the British army in the Middle East, and he served as a commando in the Haganah underground during the 1948 war. He also fought with the Israeli army in the 1956 and 1973 wars. Amichai has worked as an elementary school teacher and has taught writing at New York University, but he devotes most of his time to writing. He moved to Jerusalem with his family in 1937, and presently resides in that city’s Yemin Moshe district with his wife and the younger two of his three children.

Immensely popular, Amichai is generally acknowledged as being Israel’s most important poet, and one of the writers who have shaped modern Hebrew literature. His books of poems sell about fifteen thousand copies each, in a nation where only three million read Hebrew. (Comparable sales in the United States would merit best-seller status.) Amichai’s stature and audience are international, and he is among the most widely translated poets alive. Since 1968, sixteen books of his poetry and fiction have been translated into English, including Poems (1969), Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (1973), Amen (1977), Love Poems (1980), Great Tranquility (1983), Jerusalem Poems (1988), Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1986), and Even the Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers (1991). In addition to the poetry for which he is best known. Amichai has written novels, short stories, plays, essays, and reviews.

He is a frequent visitor to the United States, and most of this interview was conducted in New York City, during the summer of 1989, at various cafés in Greenwich Village—the Triumph diner and Caffe Dante among them. All of the meetings took place in the early morning and were conducted in English, which Amichai speaks fluently in an accent that crosses German and Hebrew. Additional material was gleaned from correspondence exchanged during 1990, and a final session took place in New York in March of 1991, shortly after the Gulf War cease-fire.

In person, Amichai’s amiability and charm mix with a subtle wryness, mental rigor, and a gentle sense of irony and humor. He is handsome and compactly built, with dark eyes and the presence of a former athlete and soldier. The recurrent awareness of the physical in his poetry appears in person; frequently gesturing with his body and eyes he answered questions openly and without hesitation. He was completely at ease with the considerable background clatter of the cafés—in fact, he preferred it.

 

INTERVIEWER

You were born in Germany, shortly after the First World War, part of a postwar generation.

YEHUDA AMICHAI

Yes, I was born in Germany in 1924. And I’ve always believed, as a general remark, that those born after World War I until, I would say, 1926, bear the weight of the twentieth century. We are the generation that inherited the aftermath of World War I and came of age during World War II. In my case, as an Israeli, I was still young enough, after World War II, to be actively involved in three additional wars. I really have the feeling that I am the result and very contents of the twentieth century.

INTERVIEWER

Had your family been in Germany for a long time?

AMICHAI

Yes. On both sides. My father was a German Jew, very Orthodox, a strong believer, in the best sense of the word. He was born in a Jewish farmhouse in the south of Germany, in a village, Giebelstadt; there must have been twenty to thirty thousand farmhouses like the one he was born in all over the south at that time. My father’s was a family of farmers. So was my mother’s family. They were also from the south, from a village that today would be about a two-hour drive a bit north from Giebelstadt. At the time, that was a great distance. My grandparents and my great-great-great-great-grandparents all were born in Germany, reaching back, I think, to the Middle Ages. My father was the youngest of a family of seven children. Only one of them remained a farmer, one of his brothers. My father went to a town, Würzburg, and became a merchant. That’s where I was born. Würzburg had a very strong Jewish community—two thousand or so in a town of a hundred thousand inhabitants. But two thousand was quite a substantial Jewish community at that time. There was a Jewish hospital and a Jewish school—a state school Jews could go to. I learned Hebrew in first grade, to read and write Hebrew as well as German, which may explain why I had no trouble with Hebrew later on.

INTERVIEWER

Did your father fight in World War I?

AMICHAI

Yes, he did. So did my uncle, my mother’s brother, who fell in 1916—I have a poem about that. It was strange for Jews who fought in World War I—Jewish people were divided among feuding nations. There were Jews fighting for Germany, for France, for Britain, for Russia, Jewish rabbis praying for the Allies, for the Turks, for the Germans and the Austrians. It was very much like the Druze in the Middle East—Israeli Druze fighting for Israel, Syrian Druze fighting for Syria against Israel.

INTERVIEWER

Do you come from a large family?

AMICHAI

I have a sister, who is older than I am. She lives in Israel. But I come from a large extended family. My family—the extended family—were all Orthodox. It was a very close-knit family which met for all sorts of occasions—weddings, bar mitzvahs. There was a strong, warm, very protected feeling among us. Also, my family—all the brothers and sisters of both my parents and their children, my cousins—moved to Palestine between 1933 and 1936, all of them. Some of them were settled into Palestine before the Nazis really took power. My family was, at the time, one of the few Jewish families from central Europe in Palestine. No one was killed in the coming Holocaust.

INTERVIEWER

Were you raised a Zionist?

AMICHAI

I was, but my family’s Zionism wasn’t ideological in any intellectual sense. It was the Zionism of religious orthodoxy, a practical Zionism—going to Palestine. For my parents, going to Palestine was typically romantic, motivated in part by their sense of Orthodoxy and in part by the longing to be in their own country. I had cousins who may have seen Zionism in utopian socialist terms, though my parents did not. There was, of course, zealous anti-Semitism before Hitler, which also had something to do with my family’s going to Palestine. Some people think that anti-Semitism didn’t really exist in Germany until 1933. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Hitler’s guilt, but the anti-Semitism I grew up with predated Hitler. We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine. Then in Palestine we were told to leave Palestine—history juxtaposed can be very ironic. But I do remember in 1933 when the Nazis came into power the anti-Semitism had been religiously based. Then it became political and economic. Before that the two hadn’t merged—there was a kind of horrible limbo—but you could feel what was happening. I remember my parents telling me to keep away from the military parades, not to become mesmerized by the music and marching. I was also told—Würzburg was a very Catholic town—to keep away from the Catholic processions on certain feast days. All Saints’ Day, I remember in particular. The processions were very somber, very German in a way, with students, priests and nuns carrying banners and holy icons and figures. Once—I was nine or ten—I was watching a Catholic procession because I liked its colorfulness and pageantry. Since I was Orthodox I was wearing a yarmulke. Suddenly, someone hit me in the face and shouted, You dirty little Jew, take your skullcap off!

INTERVIEWER

How did your father make his living?

AMICHAI

My father was what you might call a middleman. He and his brother had a large store, and they sold merchandise to tailors and companies but didn’t sell retail. We were what you would call here upper middle class—quite well-off. My father never attended university—he apprenticed as a merchant, as was done in those days. But he was educated. He was well-read and he enjoyed and appreciated music. He had a great sense of humor. He was well liked and had many non-Jewish friends who later tried to talk him out of leaving Germany for Palestine. My mother, too, read a lot. There was a great deal of culture in our home. Music and poetry—Goethe, Schiller, Heine. My mother and grandmother used to read to me from German literature.

INTERVIEWER

Would you characterize the environment you were brought up in as religious?

AMICHAI

Very much so. I went to synagogue regularly. My first education was interpreting the Bible. But I also grew up with German folk songs and stories, which became as much a part of my imagination as the Bible stories. My sense of history came from these stories—I was fascinated with what you might call fairy-tale-shaped history. But from the beginning I felt I belonged to a different people, which wasn’t any problem for me. I made the German landscape, which was very beautiful to me—flowing rivers, mountains, forests, lakes—into a biblical landscape. The valley of sunshine into which we went on school excursions in my imagination became the valley in which David and Goliath fought. Even though there was anti-Semitism, the German landscape was idyllic to me. This was mixed in with the dream of Palestine. I existed in a realm of dream, in the realm of the romantic, in a romantic dream of moving from a place where we were a small group, sometimes victimized, to a Jewish Palestine that had ancient roots in the Bible. Using the word tribe to describe us would be absolutely correct, I think. We didn’t have our own tribelike, private ways of dress like the gypsies did, for example, but what we possessed was deeper, it was inside us. We were so strong in our beliefs and dreams and imaginations, we felt we could live with the others because we were so deeply different. We didn’t need to dress differently and we could work among them, because what we felt inside was so strong. I was a very religious child—I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good—I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world. The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.