I CLOSE-UP
Words Of
Fire And Lace
For Israel's leading poet, Yehuda Amichai,
Hebrew is the language of prayer,
love and the smell of a new bicycle.
ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Features Editor
IlL
ooking slightly dishev-
eled and carrying a
pipe in his rough hand,
Yehuda Amichai, Is-
rael's prominent poet,
walks into a room. Over
his shoulder is a black
bag resembling those
which airlines give away.
Then he opens a book of his
writings. Poems he will read this
afternoon for a group of students are
marked with scraps of paper torn in
thin strips. He begins to read:
On the wide stairs that descend to
the Kotel
A beautiful woman came up to me
and said:
"You don't remember me. I am
Shoshana in Hebrew.
Others in other languages. All is
vanity..."
"What are you doing here
Between the promised and the
forgotten
Between what is hoped for and
what is imagined?
What are you doing here
In this hiding place of happiness
With your beautiful face
And your soul as rent and torn as
mine?"
She answered me: "My soul is rent
and torn like yours,
But it is also beautiful, like lace."
Amichai is the protagonist in this
and many of his poems, for which he
received the Israel Prize for Poetry.
His soul is rent and torn -- he fought
in three wars -- yet his words are
delicate like lace. He reads them as
24
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1989
if they were songs that reveal all of
his secrets.
Amichai was in Detroit last week,
the guest of the B'nai B'rith Hillel
Foundations of Metropolitan
Detroit.
Born in Wurzburg, Germany, in
1924, Amichai was raised in an Or-
thodox, Zionist home. He learned
Hebrew in kindergarten. His family
settled in Palestine in 1935.
"Nobody stayed behind for the
worst."
When he was 18, Amichai vol-
unteered with the British army's
Jewish Brigade in World War II.
Then he fought with the Palmach,
the commando unit of the Haganah
underground. Later, he would fight
in Israel's War of Independence and
in the campaign for. Sinai. "From
the time I was 18 to the time I was
25, I was always in wars," he says.
It was while fighting that Amichai
wrote his first poem at the age of 24.
He had never set out to be a poet, but
was driven by "the need to work out
my war and love experiences."
Impressed by the piece, his friends
sent Amichai's poem off for publica-
tion. He would not have done it
himself. "I thought writing poems
was a nice activity, but it wasn't se-
rious for me," Amichai says.
The first work was followed by a
small book of Amichai's poetry,
published in 1955. Several years
later, he already was a major figure
on Israel's literary scene.
Amichai was a poet like Israel had
never known: He was the poet of
everyday Hebrew.
"Hebrew had become very lofty,"
he says. "But for me it was different.
I knew it was the language of God
and of prayer, but it also was an
everyday language for me.
"And in fact, the difference bet-
ween modern Hebrew and ancient
Hebrew is very little. People in King
David's time could still understand
a lot of conversations in the street in
Israel today."
For Amichai, Hebrew is the lan•
guage of cars and the "smell of a
new bicycle" and "the sharp heels of
party shoes" and the crash of a
broken bottle and "mad graffiti and
the writing on the wall in toilets"
and soldiers dying and the agony of
life.
`Come again, next summer' or
words like that,
Hold my life,
Take away my days,
Like a line of soldiers passing over
a bridge marked for exploding.
`Come again, next summer.'
Who hasn't heard these words?
But who comes again?
Amichai says writing is like fall-
ing in love. "And you don't say,
`Well, I'm going to just sit here and
wait until I fall in love.' So I never
press myself into writing; I leave it
to my inner self."
Nor is Amichai's writing done
with any regularity. "It comes in
waves," he says, "though there are
certain periods when everything I
touch can become material for my
poems. It's like the seasons."
The inspiration for "Lying In Wait
for Happiness," the poem above in
which the protagonist encounters a
woman at the Kotel, was an actual
event, Amichai says.
It began by chance. One day while
walking in Jerusalem, Amichai saw
a woman he had known years before.
At first, he did not recognize her.
The woman approached him. She
told him her name, in Hebrew, was
Shoshana.
"And then I had a memory of us
standing together, and suddenly
everything came back."
Amichai used the images of the
moment, like the flash of tourists'
cameras, in the poem. He used the
sights and sounds near the Kotel
and the very words the woman
spoke.
In the poem, he says, the words
"rent and torn soul" seem negative.
Yet this same soul is like lace,
"which means that beauty must
come out of real life," he says. "To
have a whole soul doesn't mean that
it must be beautiful. Beauty is not
just peace and good; life eventually
makes souls beautiful, even torn
souls."
Amichai says the complete idea for
the poem came to mind almost im-
mediately. He went home, wrote it,
then set it aside for review.
Sometimes he puts poems away for
years; sometimes for longer. Then he
goes back and, if necessary, makes
changes.
When the poems are finished,
Amichai knows, instinctively. "It's
like a woman ripe to give birth," he
says. "Or a good cook. He knows