Open Closed Open

by Yehuda Amichai, Chana Bloch, Unknown Author

In poems marked by tenderness and mischief, humanity and humor, Yehuda Amichai breaks open the grand diction of revered Jewish verses and casts the light of his own experi­ence upon them. Here he tells of history, a nation, the self, love, and resurrection. Amichai’s last volume is one of medi­tation and hope, and stands as a testament to one of Israel’s greatest poets.

Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are.

—from “I WASN’T ONE OF THE SIX
AND WHAT IS MY LIFE SPAN? OPEN CLOSED OPEN”

Genres: Poetry, Jewish, Israel, Judaism, Theology, Judaica, Middle East

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew: יהודה עמיחי‎; ‎3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.

Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s.

(The Times, London, Oct. 2000)

He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.

Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.

Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.

After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.

In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It was about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the war of Independence in Israel, he visits his hometown in Germany, recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.

Amichai was invited in 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read from his poems at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

"God has pity on kindergarten children" was one of the poems he read. This poem is inscribed on a wall in the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv. There are Streets on his name in cities in Israel, and also one in Wurzburg.

Amichai was married twice. First to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.

He died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yesterday, while I was stopped at a red light at an intersection, a man and a woman crossed the street in front of my car. What was unique about these two pedestrians: the man was walking alongside the woman while holding a parasol over her head.

It wasn't a clumsy umbrella, too big or partially broken, it was an honest-to-goodness parasol, and the man's demeanor, as I studied his face as his passed by, wasn't romantic, it was reverent.

There was reverence, deep respect for someone or something in his face as he passed my car, and I honestly couldn't tell if his female companion was his wife, his sister, or his mother, but he exhibited great attentiveness in shielding her from the sun.

Yesterday was a scorcher here, and even as I sat in my air-conditioned car, I was sweating like a goat at a petting zoo. As I watched the two of them drift gracefully by, I thought. . . who is this guy, Yehuda Amichai??

(Which is funny, because a month ago, if you would have asked me what a Yehuda Amichai was, I might have answered. . . a spicy drink?)

Yehuda Amichai, it turns out, was a German/Palestinian/Israeli poet, who died in 2000, and I have gone from not knowing him to ordering half of his poetry collection.

Poetry is very personal, and you can like it, hate it, or love it, despite the poet's skills, but, without trying to be arrogant here. . . you can trust me when I tell you that this man is a poet of THE HIGHEST CALIBER.

I am stunned that the ugly ass cover of my copy of this book and the massive, lengthy poems offered here captured me so completely.

Amichai's reverence for everything around him is evident on every page.

What a master of language, a man who didn't mind admitting his love of Judaism in one sentence and his total disdain for religion in another. So refreshingly honest.

And what reverence for all women! My God, I was ready to climb into bed with him and his wife and eat them both like buttered flatbreads.

Sensual, decadent, honest. . .

And, though I loved and dog-eared a passage on almost every page, this was the one that left me almost breathless:

Whoever put on a tallis when he was young will never forget:
taking it out of the soft velvet bag, opening the folded shawl,
spreading it out, kissing the length of the neckband (embroidered
or trimmed in gold). Then swinging it in a great swoop overhead
like a sky, a wedding canopy, a parachute. And then winding it
around his head as in hide-and-seek, wrapping
his whole body in it, close and slow, snuggling into it like the cocoon
of a butterfly, then opening would-be wings to fly.
And why is the tallis striped and not checkered black and white
like a chessboard? Because squares are finite and hopeless.
Stripes come from infinity and to infinity they go
like airport runways where angels land and take off.
Whoever has put on a tallis will never forget.
When he comes out of a swimming pool or the sea,
he wraps himself in a large towel, spreads it out again
over his head, and again snuggles into it close and slow,
still shivering a little, and he laughs and blesses.

Oh, my God. My God. I feel sorry for all other poetry.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Maybe now after so much horror, so many shattered ideals, we can start anew—now that we’re well armored for disappointment. I think my sense of history and God, even if I am against history and God, is very Jewish. ….It’s an ancient Jewish idea to fight with God, to scream out against God.”
The Paris Review, 1992.

Yehuda Amichai does argue with and scream out against God, his father and his Orthodox upbringing. His pain in this wrestling is palpable and everpresent in this volume of poems which took Amichai 10 years to write. There are also poems on the history of his nation, on Jerusalem and love. He draws deeply upon religious, biblical and historical sources in most of these poems.

The most noticeable aspect of his writing is his interweaving of opposites- of the sacred and the profane, the extraordinary with the everyday, remembering with forgetting, hope and despair, happiness and sorrow, war and peace, life and death, love and longing. He searches for meaning even though he rails at how illusory it is; he searches for wholeness while decrying the fragmented nature of the world. His poems on Jerusalem, his home for many decades, are painful laments.

This volume of powerful poems has more pain, sorrow and longing in it than the two previous volumes I recently read. Some of them I could relate to, but mostly I felt like I was empathizing with Amichai's pain. It's not all sorrow and longing. There is also love but even love is often joined with loss.

I will let Amichai's poems speak for themselves. I chose poems which I found to be the most relatable, with the fewest biblical references:


The memorial forest where we made love
burned down in a great conflagration

but the two of us stayed alive and in love
in memory of the burnt forest
and in memory of the burnt ones the forest remembered.


At night I walked again along the row of weeping willows
whose branches reach down. I sat on the same bench
where I waited many years ago, when I was a little boy.
Two generations of remembering have passed,
now the first generation of forgetting has come. The circle
was closed, the circle was broken. But there I was again, sitting
and waiting
near the weeping willows, sitting and waiting for the man, for the other.
Tears drew silver threads from the streetlight to my eyes.
If there are weeping willows there ought to be
joyful willows and hoping willows too, whose branches reach up.
(And when we the last time you cried?) Rings in a tree trunk reveal
how old the tree is, as tears tell the lengh of a human life.
And when was the last time you cried?


Shirts and dresses hung up to dry - right away you know
it’s a holiday. White panties and undershirts mean peace and quiet.
But when flags are flying, you never can tell if it’s a sign of peace
or of war, if they are left over from a festival
or a memorial for the dead. War and peace look the same
from a distance, as galaxies of new-formed stars look like
old stars that imploded and died.
We can be fooled. No, we cannot be fooled.
What summons us to prayer? The wail
of the fire engine, the police car, the ambulance.
And when prayers ascend on high, they fall
back down like shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells
That have missed their target. Then once again, a siren
summons us to prayer.


Straight from the fear of loss I plunged into the fear of being lost.
I couldn’t stay long enough between them
In the sweet litttle no man’s land of my everlsting passings days. My hands are the hands of search and test,
Hands of hope, hands of gloom,
always fumbling among papers on tables
or in drawers, in closets and in my clothes
which have seen their share of loss.
With hands that search for what is already lost, I caress your face,
and with hands afraid of loss I hold you close
And like a blind man feel my way around your eyes your mouth,
Wandering, wondering, wandering, wondering,
Because hands afraid of loss are the only hands for love.


After Auschwitz, no theology:
From the chimneys of the Vatican, white smoke rises-
a sign the cardinals have chosen themselves a pope.
From the crematoria of Auschwitz, black smoke rises-
a sign the conclave of God has not yet chosen
the Chosen People.
After Auschwitz, no theology:
the numbers on the forearms
of the inmates of extermination
are the telephone numbers of God,
numbers that do not answer
and now are disconnected one by one.

After Auschwitz, a new theology:
the Jews who died in the Shoah
have now come to be like their God,
who has no likeness of a body and has no body.
They have no likeness of a body and they have no body.

[Atri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The years of my life I have broken
into hours, and the hours into minutes
and seconds and fractions of seconds.
These, only, these
are the stars above me
that cannot be numbered.

***

I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment
millions of human beings are standing at crossroads
and intersections, in jungles and deserts,
showing each other where to turn,
what the right way is,
which direction.

***

Because hands afraid of loss are the only hands for love.

***

her eyes are the color of our chances,
and the color of sunset is like
the color of her new love.
....
peace to the words that will not
come back to our mouths,
words like migratory birds that
have no Europe, no Africa,
only the Here
...
Here and now and in other days.

***

I stood near the school building.
This is the room
where we sat and studied.
Classroom windows always open
to the future, but in our innocence
we thought it was landscape
we were seeing through the window.
The schoolyard was narrow, paved
with large stones.
I remember the brief tumult of the two of us near the rickety steps, the tumult that was the beginning of a first great love.
Now it outlives us, as if in a museum,
like everything else in Jerusalem.

***

The dancers and the danced have all gone now,
the photographers along with the photographed.
The cameras are hidden away in the gloom of closets
and rolls of undeveloped film will remain forever
in the darkrooms of the world.
The last to leave greet the first to pray at dawn -
some at the synagogue,
others at the prayer houses of remembering and forgetting.

***

The sun changes colors at sunet, like someone
shifting from one language to another, or from song
to speech and from speech to murmurs,
then whispers, then silence.

***

What remains? The sense of expansion
and the sense of contraction,
expansion like a night of stars,
contraction like a mouth puckering
at the taste of lemon.
What was and what might have been.
Deeds and the empty gestures of deeds
along the roadside like rows of trees
lining the boulevard.

***

Now his face has joined the faces
of those who say goodbye to me
from the passing windows of the buses
and trains of my life,
faces in the streaming rain,
faces squinting in the sun.
And now his face.
In the corner of the window,
like a stamp on an envelope.

***

The upturned gaze to see if clouds -
what does it light upon along its way:
walls, balconies, the laundry of longings
hung out to dry, wistful windows, rooftop sky.
The open hand stretched out to see if raindrops -
that is the most innocent hand of all,
the most believing, more prayerful
than all the worshippers in all the
houses of prayer.

***

the autumn squill blooms long after
its leaves come up in the spring,
but it knows what happened
in the long dry summer between.
Its brief eternity.

***

Forgotten, remembered, forgotten.
Open, closed, open.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to sing a psalm of praise to all that remains
here with us and doesn't leave, doesn't wander off like migratory birds,
will not flee to the north or the south, will not sing "In the East is my heart,
and I dwell at the end of the West." I want to sing to the trees
that do not shed their leaves and that suffer
the searing summer heat and the cold of winter,
and to human beings who do not shed their memories
and who suffer more than those who shed everything.
But above all, I want to sing a psalm of praise
to the lovers who stay together for joy, for sorrow and for joy.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this compulsively readable in a way that few poetry collections are to me. These are poems told from the perspective of a life lived and pondered; of working through hardships to come to a kind of peace. The craftsmanship is impeccable; line after line is devastatingly beautiful. The book cover of this edition--a simple fragment of brown carved stone set against a faded larger image of the same--nicely sums up many of the themes therein in visual terms.

Almost involuntarily, I shook my head in admiration and sighed often while reading this on the bus. Bus rides to and from work seem to create a unique frisson when reading, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because, while one is in transit, one is in a suspended state, in limbo, in a state of transition; one is left alone to ponder without distraction, and one is unreachable. There is nothing between you and the author. And, of course, the to-and-fro nature of being in transit -- with others, and yet not with them -- has a ritualistic, vaguely communal quality, a sense of life passing, yet also in stasis.

Amichai was a giant in Israeli arts and letters, and, of course, religion is a major theme here. In these works, he has a kind of faith; or at least has come to some sort of acceptance, not just about God but everything, as much as one can. I am not a believer, and religious poetry does not appeal to me, but Amichai's musings do not suffer the heavy hand of dogma; his voice is individual, and his concerns are the most deeply human ones. There is something for everyone to appreciate in these variable length masterpieces. Although he was nominated many times (deservedly) for the Nobel, I had never heard of this guy when I picked up this volume for $1.00 on a clearance shelf--cast off like one of the fragments of stone about which Amichai muses.

(KevinR@Ky 2016; slightly amended and corrected)

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry as clear and deep as water, language that even in English translation keeps the sound of its Hebrew cadences. One of my favorite poets, and poetry books, ever. It tastes like Israel.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry and I have a rather fraught relationship, what with my rarely seeking it out and then, amongst those rare moments, even more rarely finding something that aligns with my tastes. As such, I tend to have an ill view of my own preferences, assuming that, because I don't know the language/reference/deep and minute context and, in all honesty, know better to devote more attention to such than it is worth, what ends up appealing to me might more due to the 'less complex' nature of the work, rather than equal footing on my part. When it comes to this work, the path that originally led me to it is lost in my remembrance, and the fact that I managed to snag a copy at a used bookstore (admittedly one of my personal favorite bookstores of all time) is still rather amazing. And then, to actually come out of the reading experience really liking it on top of that! Sure, the down to earth way of how the references transmitted their meaning helped a great deal, and I've read enough about being Jewish from the early 20th to the early 21st centuries, from the most modest of shtetls to the most thriving of kibbutzim, to have some inherent sense of the pathos, if not the exact sections from the Torah. In any case, this series of poems has something of the structure of a short story cycle to it, my preferred form of those briefer pieces due to the subtle interweavings building up (in my mind) to a greater holism. Couple that with an abiding brilliance in metaphor that successfully makes its way through translation again and again, and you have something tragic without being maudlin, affirming without being trite, and triumphant without glossing over the price. All in all, despite the fact that this is not the text that will convince me that Israel has any more right to exist than any other settler state (US, Canada, Australia, etc) does, I find a measure of closure at the end of this collection. Given how rare that is, especially in the case of poetry, especially in the case of poetry in translation, I'll take it with an open heart.

Twilight sobs down the side of the gray house
and is consoled.

-"Summer and the Far End of Prophecy"

[Naori · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would say closer to 2.5...

the poem that gives the title...

"Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That's all we are." (6)

"The body wants to lock up the soul as if in a safe,
not to be opened until the will is read.
The will is the soul. The body is the safe,
the key is in God's hands. Or simply lost." (150)
-from "Conferences, Conferences: Malignant Words, Benign Speech"

"Sometimes Jerusalem is a city of knives.
Even the hopes for peace are sharp, to cut through
the hard reality. After a while, they grow blunt or brittle.
Church bells keep trying to ring out a calm round tone
but they grow heavy, like a pestle in a mortar pounding
artillery shells - muffled, leaden, trampling sounds.
The cantor and the muezzin want to sweeten their tune
but in the end, a piercing wail cuts through the din...

...I always have to go in the opposite direction to whatever
is passing past. That's how I know I live in Jerusalem:
I go against the tide of pilgrims parading in the Old City,
brush by them, rub up against them, feel the weave of their clothes,
breathe in their smell, hear their talk and their song
as they fly past my cheeks like beautiful clouds....

...This could be the start of a new religion,
like striking a match to make fire, like the friction
that sparks electricity." (141-142)
-from "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?"

[Daniel Polansky]

A mention in the above led me to this collection of poems by the first poet to work in modern Hebrew. Hopeful and kind.

I want to sing to the trees
that do not shed their leaves and that suffer
the searing summer heat and the cold of winter
and to human beings who do not shed their memories
and who suffer more than those who shed everything.
But above all, I want to sing psalm of praise
to the lovers who stay together for joy,
for sorrow and for joy.
To make a home, to make babies, now and in other seasons.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

God it feels good to read something other than educational theory....lovely metaphors in this one. And nice rhythmic pacing...

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devastating, as always.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites books of poetry. The whole is more than the sum of its parts: not everything is great, but read in full it's overwhelming.

[Courtney Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite. "I Foretell the Days of Yore" is my personal favorite.
Someday I want to be able to read these in the original Hebrew.

[Matthew Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amichai's poems are saturated with place - sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings of the land of Israel - and juxtaposed images (hence the title). I love how certain phrases repeat through the collection, each time with new valences. Too many faves to list, but just a taste of his style:
A night drive to Ein Yahav in the Arava Desert,
a drive in the rain, yes, in the rain.
There I meet people who grow date palms,
there I saw Tamarisk trees and risk trees,
there I saw hope barbed as barbed wire.
And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be
like barbed wire to keep out despair,
hope must be a minefield. - from "Israel Travel: Otherness is all, Otherness is love"

[Michael Bacon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was impressed by how Amichai's poetry feels at once accessible--open--and allusive. He talks about the broad matter of life and death with a specificity that opens moments out into their widest readings while keeping them concentrated and contained. The poems in this collection are all multi-part, poems within poems speaking across their borders and speaking across the collection as a whole. A particular highlight for me of this choral effect was the poem 'Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem', which you should read (if you can find it) even if you don't read all the rest.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful and profound in the most quiet and humble sense. Beautiful. Spirituality that speaks to the soul rather than to religion. Poems with their hearts cut open. You are human. This is humanity. This is poetry.

[Jessica Samuelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge 2017: Task 23--Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love

[Sarah Serota · Rating 3 out of 5]

these poems were very well written and I would have given the collection a much higher rating if I didn’t have to do the l poetry journal 🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲

[Jocelyn H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning. Beautiful and profound. Poetry.

[Charles Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Hebrew scholar came to visit once and recited a few lines from Yehuda Amichai, leaving me star-struck. Upon buying this book I gobbled it up multiple times and still frequently return to key selections. This book proved incredibly expansive to my theology, teaching me things like God is like a magician, who won't give away His secrets. Or that God is like a revolving door. And so much more.

[Alisha Bruton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for a poetry class I'm taking. It is done in format that felt restrictive and repetitive; a poem title, and then ten-twenty individual little poems, some related, and some not. He had some moments of lyricism and emotion; the rest of the lines read like a journal, and seemed banal and (dare I say?) unpoetic.

Not knowing much about Palestine/Israel relations in the early 20th century, or about life in Germany during this time, I didn't understand the heresy implicit in his work. I think a lot is lost in the translation from Hebrew to English; he has also been criticized in Israeli literary circles for being too informal and "street," if you will. Perhaps a Hebrew Bukowski? Learning about Amichai, and his life, I've come to respect him and the newness and courage of his work, even if it's not the type of poetry I read most.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't expect to like this book. Even as I began feeling more and more admiration for some of the passages and lines, I still wanted to dislike it. But by the end, I had to admit to being completely impressed. Although Amichai focuses a lot on his own ego and mortality, there are still so many brilliant turns of phrase and twists on biblical passages, so many references to Israeli life and death, Jewish life and death as to render this an important book in Jewish literature of the 20th century.

Some of my favorite pieces are: The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy; In My Life, on My Life; Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?; Conferences, Conferences: Malignant Words, Benign Speech.

[Seth the Zest · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found most of the poems to have flat language that calls little attention to itself. Repeated lines like "What remains? The suitcase in top of the closer,/ that's what remains." offer moderately interesting, if shallow, philosophies.

The best moments in this book are surprises and they come infrequently. Retelling the story of Gideon choosing his army is masterful. So is a tiny section on page 103 "At a pay phone, I saw a woman making a call,/
and crouching at her feet, a large musical instrument in a black case,/ like a dog."

Mostly though, the book has flat language and some interesting, though rarely surprising, ideas in it.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want a god who is like a window I can open
so I'll see the sky even when I'm inside.
I want a god who is like a door that opens out, not in,
but God is like a revolving door, which turns, turns on its hinges
in and out, whirling and turning
without a beginning, withtout an end.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing amazing amazing - the hebrew is actually fairly accessible.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amichai's magnum opus! I worked in a bookstore when this came out in hard copy and immersed myself for long periods reading this gem.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am really, really glad I bought this book before it went out of stock haha.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

not sure if poems are my cup of tea

[Farkas Library]

6 mc8