Even a fist was once an open palm with fingers: Recent poems

by Yehuda Amichai

The author shares his thoughts about childhood, history, love, war, and his everyday experiences in this collection of recent poetry

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

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 4 out of 5]

I've decided I can't compare Yehuda Amichai's poems with other works of poetry (that would be cruel!), so I am, from now on, comparing his collections to his other works. It's the only fair and proper thing to do.

So, four stars for this one, when compared to Open Closed Open and
Love Poems

Words accompany me. Words accompany my life
like a melody. Words accompany my life
like the words at the bottom of a movie screen,
subtitles
translating their language into mine.

I remember, in my youth
translation sometimes
lagged behind the words, or anticipated them,
the face on the screen was sad, even crying,
and the words below were joyful, or things lit up
and laughed and the words spelled great sadness.
Words accompany my life.
But the words I say myself
are now like stones I fling
into a well in the field, to test
if it is full or empty,
and its depth.

[Théo d'Or]

" In the morning it was still night and the lights were on
when we rose from happiness like people
who rise from the dead,
and like them in an instant each of us remembered
a former life.That's why we separated.



You put on an old fashioned blouse of striped silk
and a tight skirt, a stewardess of goodbyes
from some earlier generation, and
already our voices were like loudspeakers ,announcing times and places.


From your leather bag with its soft folds, like an old woman's cheeks,
you took out lipstick ,a passport and a letter sharp -edged as a knife ,
and put them on the table.
Then you put everything away again.


I said I'II move back a little , as at an exhibition,
to see the whole picture.And
I haven't stopped moving back.


Time is as light as froth,
the heavy sediment stays
in us, forever. "

[Caterina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little Ruth

Sometimes I remember you, little Ruth,
we were separated in our distant childhood and they burned you in the camps.
If you were alive now, you would be a woman of sixty-five,
a woman on the verge of old age. At twenty you were burned
and I don’t know what happened to you in your short life
since we separated. What did you achieve, what insignia
did they put on your shoulders, your sleeves, your
brave soul, what shining stars
did they pin on you, what decorations for valor, what
medals for love hung around your neck,
what peace upon you, peace unto you.
And what happened to the unused years of your life?
Are they still packed away in pretty bundles,
were they added to my life? Did you turn me
into your bank of love like the banks in Switzerland
where assets are preserved even after their owners are dead?
Will I leave all this to my children
whom you never saw?
You gave your life to me, like a wine dealer
who remains sober himself.
You sober in death, lucid in the dark
for me, drunk on life, wallowing in my forgetfulness.

Now and then, I remember you in times
unbelievable. And in places not made for memory
but for the transient, the passing that does not remain.
Like in an airport, when the arriving travelers
stand tired at the revolving conveyor belt
that brings their suitcases and packages,
and they identify theirs with cries of joy
as at a resurrection and go out into their lives;
and there is one suitcase that returns and disappears again
and returns again, ever so slowly, in the empty hall,
again and again it passes.
This is how your quiet figure passes by me,
this is how I remember you until
the conveyor belt stands still. And they stood still. Amen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Written when Amichai too was in his sixties, these poems flow like a stream of consciousness through eroding islands of memory.

Since I can’t read Hebrew, and since Amichai is known as a master of word play and even word-creation, there’s also sometimes the feeling of reading through a veil. How brightly they must shine in the original. Yet not with the shininess of the new, but as with glints of light reflected from a stream flowing suddenly through a harsh desert.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Like the Streams in the Negev

I sit in a café in the afternoon hours.
My sons are grown, my daughter is dancing somewhere else.
I have no baby carriage, no newspaper, no God.

I saw a woman whose father was with me in the battles of the Negev,
I saw his eyes gaping in a time of trouble
and dread of death. Now they are in the face of his daughter,
quiet, beautiful eyes. The rest of her body—
from other places, her hair grew in a time of peace,
a different genetics, generations and times I didn’t know.

I have many times, like many watches
on the walls of a clock shop, each one shows a different time.
My memories are scattered over the earth
like the ashes of a person who willed before his death
to burn his body
and scatter the ashes over seven seas.

I sit. Voices talking around me
like fine ironwork on a banister,
beyond it I hear the street. The table before me
is built for easy access like a bay,
like a dock in a port, like God’s hand, like bride and groom.

Sometimes suddenly tears of happiness well up in me
as an empty street suddenly fills up with cars
when the light changes at a distant intersection,
or like the streams in the Negev
that suddenly fill up with torrents of water from a distant rain.
Afterward, again silence, empty
Like the streams in the Negev, like the streams in the Negev.

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[Inverted · Rating 4 out of 5]

1.

When one comes across a gifted poet, it is easy to take for granted poems that do not match his reputation, those that show cracks in his style. Then you read another poet, and realize the former’s caliber.

I’m in the middle of reading another Israeli poet, and he seems to be nowhere near Amichai.

2.

Amichai seems to be a master of the everyday. His artillery is packed with mundane details that (every now and then) are transformed into exceptional and precise metaphors. For instance, in Little Ruth (p. 43):

“...there is one suitcase that returns and disappears again
and returns again, ever so slowly, in the empty hall...
This is how your quiet figure passes by me”

Sometimes, it is during that shift where the problem occurs. The connections, although apt, sometimes seem redundant, labored, as in “My Son” (p. 49):

“Furtively he eavesdrops on his parents’ talk,
he doesn’t understand but he grows on those words
as a plant grows without understanding
oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements.”

Despite such excesses, this book is a good collection about a poet retrospecting about life. Clocks and watches are all over the poems, and so are childhood and death. I think my old man will love this collection.