Yehuda Amichai seems to have been well-named. With his surname suffix, chai (life), it was possibly odds on that his work would continue to outlive him.
While that was an adopted surname – he was born in Germany as Ludwig Pfeuffer – it may apply nonetheless. Amichai, Israel’s most popular poet, passed away in 2006 at the age of 82, which means he would now be 100 years old.
To mark his centenary, the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel is holding a tribute event on June 27 (8 p.m.) at its base, Beit Hasofer, in Tel Aviv.
In fact, this will be the last event there for some time as the building is about to undergo extensive renovations. It will also be available via Zoom.
The association chair, Zvika Nir, will preside over the proceedings, during which a glittering cast of academic and literary figures will discuss Amichai’s oeuvre and his towering contribution to Israeli poetry.
The cast for the evening features a cross-generational roster of women and men of letters, academics – including award-winning poet and Bar-Ilan University professor Miron Izakson – poet and author Lea Aini, Bialik Prize laureate writer Haim Be’er, and novelist-poet Yonatan Berg who, fittingly, is the youngest ever recipient of the Yehuda Amichai Prize for poetry, which he was awarded in 2013 when he was just 32 years old.
Nir, an acclaimed writer himself, was as good a person as any to ask why Amichai’s writing continues to attract people of all ages and cultures.
I was surprised by his answer. “I think part of that is because he has a lot of poems that are not too complex. Even someone who is not particularly educated in the field, or engaged in critiquing poems or literature, can connect with the poems, without looking for any hidden meanings and layers.”
That apparent simplicity, says Nir, was not always appreciated by the literary cognoscenti. “When I was at high school and I told my teacher that I like Amichai he reacted very negatively. He said Amichai wasn’t a real poet.”
That is a recurring theme throughout history whereby the established upper echelons of the artistic field in question do their damnedest to repel anything they deem to be the stuff of whippersnapper boarders.
The Impressionist painters of the latter half of the 19th century, for instance, also went through that baptism of fire. “Amichai wasn’t initially accepted, and the same happened to fellow German-born poet Natan Zach and, to a degree, to David Avidan,” Nir notes, referencing two other poets of Amichai’s generation who eventually gained public and official recognition.
That, he says, was down to their user-friendly approach. “They spoke to the young people of the day in their own language. If you read the works of the canonical poets you always felt they were somewhere above you.”
Amichai’s street-level take also served to make him accessible to readers from very different cultures and his poems were translated into a multifarious spread of languages, including Russian, English, Nepali, and Burmese.
Amichai's use of language
I WONDERED whether the fact that Amichai was not born here – even though he learned Hebrew at school in his birthplace, Würzburg, Germany – had any bearing on his use of the language.
Nir thinks not. “When I and my friends read Amichai the first time we had absolutely no idea where he came from, or what his previous family name was. It was the same with Natan Zach. He also came from Germany. We only related to him as a new young poet who spoke to us.”
I persisted with my line of inquiry. Surely, someone who adopts a language takes a different approach speaking or writing in it, whether in daily use or for creative literary purposes, compared to someone else who was born into it.
Nir made few concessions. “I can only say that these poets, like Amichai, were influenced by western poetry. Not the old Israeli poetry. At that time western poetry was more like everyday speech, less rhyming, less ordered and adhered less to the poetry standards we were used to.”
For Nir and his contemporaries, Amichai and his ilk were a breath of fresh air. “At school we read idyll poems by people like [Shaul] Tchernichovsky, and long poems.
Then these new poets came along that didn’t write idyll or long poems. They wrote relatively short poems, not more than a single page, which spoke to you. That’s why I think they appeal to young people to this very day.”
Of course the term contemporary has a transient nature to it, by definition constantly adapting to the fashions and trends of the day. “The language Amichai and the others of that time is a little archaic now,” Nir posits. “It is not the exact language of today.” This only serves to make Amichai’s enduring popularity even more impressive.
The backbone of the evolution of popular Israeli music, which began over half a century ago, was poems put to music. Texts by the likes of Zach, Dalia Ravikovitch, Avidan, and Amichai were picked up by young up-and-coming songsmiths such as Mati Caspi, Yehudit Ravitz, and Shlomo Artzi, as well as some of the older crowd like Sasha Argov, and turned into pop hits.
There will be musical renditions of some of Amichai’s poems, on June 27, courtesy of opera singer Shayish Baram accompanied by Avi Binyamin on piano.
“It is wonderful that Amichai lives on,” Nir happily observes. “Actually, he didn’t leave us that long ago,” he adds. That, naturally, is a matter of chronological perspective. Nir, 77 years young, has a very different angle on Amichai’s presence on terra firma compared with, say, Berg and his fellow forty-somethings, not to mention even younger poetry lovers.
Still, Nir does have an official role to play. “As chair of the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel it is my job to make sure we don’t forget writers like Amichai,” he states. Thankfully, for now at least, there doesn’t appear to be much chance of that happening.
Another Amichai centennial salute will be held at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem on June 26 (9 p.m.). This music-based program will feature popular artists such as Shlomi Shaban, Assaf Amdursky, Alon Eder, Shai Tsabari, and Rona Kenan.
The musical entertainment will be completed by a talk by Amichai’s daughter, Emanuela Amichai, who will speak about her father’s life and work.
For more information about the Hebrew Writers Association event, https://www.hebrew-writers.org
For more information about the National Library event: https://book-week.nli.org.il/
