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Literary Review
Amichai's little ironies
Ravi Vyas
My life is spiced with heavy lies, and the longer I live, the bigger the art of forgery keeps growing inside and the more real. The artificial flowers seem more and more natural and the growing ones seem artificial. Who will be able to tell the difference between a real bank note and a forged one? Even the watermarks imprinted in me can be forged: my heart. The subconscious has gotten used to the light like bacteria that after a while get used to a new antibiotic. A new underground is being established, lower than the very lowest.
Yehuda Amichai: Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tuleda
"IF you want God to smile," goes an old Hebrew joke, "tell Him your plans." For almost all Jewish writers, the master ironist, the joker, is life itself. Jewish writers — you can go all the way back to Isaac Babelto, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow and so many before and in between — have always had a sardonic quarrel with God, an ingredient of irreverence or "a religious irony" that is attributed to the behaviour of God in human affairs. Much of this can be traced to the central element in the Old Testament — you have only to look at the Books of Jonah and Job — and the sacred commentaries that follow where doubt and scepticism — mocking, mischievous, nearly impious — form the core of the teachings.
Hebrew literature is steeped in the language of Moses and the prophets, intermingling the sacred and the profane, where the sacred is brought in blunt confrontation with the profane as Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) says after a particularly jubilant party at a friend's house:
The last to leave
greet the first to pray at dawn —
some at the synagogue
others at the prayer houses of
remembering and forgetting.
Only a little later we come across these lines:
And from the distance, like the
sound of a ping-pong game:
belief in one God and blasphemy
rally with each other.
Prima facie, Amichai's irony, drenched in the sacred texts and resonate with holy language may appear flippant but it is no less serious for all that. There can't be the least doubt that Amichai was obsessed with religious life, not as something handed down from above but as something lived and experienced in every waking moment of his life. And this means a sceptical intelligence that is impatient with camouflage and pathos and self-deceit, that insists on questioning even what it loves:
People were always telling me:
`You've got to live
parents and teachers.
To live in the real world, like a
could these souls have committed
that their lives in this world
should begin with a verdict:
You are sentenced to reality for life
With no possibility of parole.
The parole is death.
Amichai's ways of seeing were both from the inside and outside, balancing tenderness with irony that reflected his experiences in the two worlds of Europe (the family migrated to Palestine in 1936) and the convulsive struggle of Israel to become a state and then to survive and define itself. There is therefore a jumble of meditations upon remembering and forgetting which are interspersed with the personal and biographical aspects of his life and times: "A childhood grown old — that's my maturity/ The cold shivers, `the shower of all my days'/ as Dylan Thomas said. That's high tide."
The first autobiographical poem was "Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tuleda", that has appropriately been compared with Wordsworth's "The Prelude" sub-titled "Or The Growth of a Poet's Mind". "Not to understand is my happiness,/ to be like stupid angels,/ eunuchs soothing with their psalms," Amichai says at the end of the 1960s. Open Closed Open, which took him 10 years to write and regarded as Amichai's magnum opus and which made him Israel's "candidate for the Nobel Prize" is an enlargement of the earlier poem, a kind of a spiritual journey, the piecing together of the poet's soul. The book's title as the useful explanatory notes tell us, derives from a passage in the Talmud: "Unto what may the fetus in its mother's womb be likened? Unto a notebook that is folded up. Its hands rest on its temples, elbows on thighs, heels against buttocks, its head lies between its knees. Its mouth is closed and its navel is open. When it comes forth into the air of the world, what is closed opens and what is open is closed."
Open Closed Open is composed of 22 sections, each with its own title; these sections, in turn, are sub-divided into varying numbers of parts. The whole is introduced by a "prelude" called The Amen Stone (which means "May it come to pass") and closes with a postlude about the same stone. The 22 sections do not quite make up a narrative but rather fragments of a narrative that reflects the life of the poet, the history of Jews, their lives and still more movingly their deaths. The very first section is called, "I Wasn't One of the Six Million: And What is My Life Span? Open, Closed Open." What we have then are memories but events are remembered not in a chronological order but as free association brings them to mind.
To the confession `We have sinned, we have betrayed,' I would add the words, `We have forgotten, we have remembered' — two sins that cannot be atoned for. They ought to cancel each other out but instead they reinforce one another. Yes, I'm kosher.
(As the above passage and some others quoted earlier show, Amichai had a tremendous stylistic range — long poems and short, rhymed and unrhymed, informal verse and in free verse; poem cycles and prose poems, poems of overflowing abundance and poems of a tightly coiled concision.)
These encounters with the ghosts of the past, the descents into the underworld that could be identified with the classics — Homer, Virgil and Dante — could well make you believe that these are grim, sonorous passages that could sully a Sunday morning's reading. But they all have a serious levity, a depth of feeling and richness even in its most solemn moments:
When God packed up and left the
country, He left the Torah
with the Jews. They have been looking for Him ever since,
shouting, `Hey, you forgot
something, you forgot,'
and other people think shouting is
the prayer of the Jews.
Since then, they've been combing
the Bible for hints of His whereabouts.
as it says: `Seek ye the Lord while
He may be found,
Call ye upon Him while he is
near. But He is far away.
And a few lines later:
These are days when everyone
Says, I was there.
I'm ready to testify, I stood a few
feet from the accident,
from the bomb, from
the crucifixion, I almost got hit,
almost crucified..
And then there are days when
everything is an alibi: wasn't there, didn't hear,
heard the explosion only from a
distance and ran away, saw smoke but
was reading a newspaper, was
staying in some other place.
I didn't see God, I've got
witnesses.
If a healthy irreverence underlines all his poems, there are also provocative allusions ("The army jet makes its peace with the sky"), attention to small details like his wife's shoes or a woman's hair which includes his advice to his 20-something daughter: "Don't forget the tremendous power of hair that fans out free and open, and the tremendous power of hair pulled back, coiled tight like a dancer's."
The Israeli novelist and essayist, Amos Oz, in his tribute to Amichai emphasised the accessibility of his work. "When we read Amichai," he said, "we feel as if he has written his verse in our kitchen, in our living room, in our bedroom." God, the Jews say, resides in the detail. Amichai got his details from the nitty-gritty of our everyday lives.
Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfield, Harcourt, First published 2000, $25.
Selected Poems, Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, Penguin International Poets, 1986 edition, £5.99.
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