The Experienced Soul: Studies in Amichai (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 143 plays, and biblical narrative, is radically "nontraditional," because anti-mythic and antisacrificial in the commentary it is and offers. To expel it as a scapegoat, as something guilty, is to silence the witness of conscience. Ann W. Astell Department of English Purdue University The Experienced Soul: Studies in Amichai, edited by Glenda Abramson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 136 pp. $59.00. Few Israeli writers have received as much attention from the English speaking world as Yehuda Amichai. Considering how well-known he is in translation, considering his frequent and well attended speaking engagements outside of Israel, and considering all the public speculation that he may someday win a Nobel prize, remarkably little serious analysis and commentary on his work is available in English. Glenda Abramson's The Writing of Yehuda Amichai: A Thematic Approach appeared in 1989 and remains the only book-length study of Amichai for English-reading audiences. Abramson has followed up on that effort with an edited collection, The Experienced Soul, which presents a number of essays on various aspects of Amichai's work. The collection emerged from a conference held in Oxford in 1994 on the occasion of Amichai's seventieth birthday, and it includes contributors from Britain, Israel, the U.S. and Italy. Among the virtues of this volume is the diversity of its offerings. Though mostly concerned with Amichai's poetry, it contains pieces on his fiction (by Risa Domb and Leon Yudkin) and on his drama (by Gabriella Moscati Steindler). Also included is an essay (by Menucha Gilboa) on the literature Arnichai has written for children, an aspect of his creativity rarely recognized in English. Within these diverse discussions, several patterns of interest recur. One is a preoccupation with the balance of personal and collective emphasis in Amichai's writing. His poetry, renowned for its attention to the individual, values the world of everyday experience over ideological abstractions and decries the indifference of history to the private concerns of ordinary people. At the same time, Amichai has been celebrated for speaking on behalf of a whole generation and expressing its communal aspirations and disillusionments. (This, after all, is the poet who wrote: "When I was young, the whole country was young. . .. when I fought, she fought, when I arose/ she arose too and when I sank/she began to sink with me.") Critics have gravitated toward the questions, to what extent is his writing confmed to private affairs?; how much is it of this time and this place, related to the particulars of the Israeli landscape?; or is it, finally, concerned more with mythic dimensions of life than with current political 144 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 debate? The conclusions reached have been varied (see, for instance, the essays by Glenda Abramson and Ziva Feldman). The most unusual assessment and the one most tied to a particular political moment is by an Egyptian scholar, Abd EI-Khalik Gobah, who has authored a book on Amichai that appeared in Arabic in 1986. His piece here, called "A Tribute to Yehuda Amichai," reports that Egyptian intellectuals see Amichai as a spokesperson for peace, one who was ahead of his time in developing an ideology not fully enough appreciated till the peace movements of the 1990s. In "The Political Significance of Amichai's Poetry," Boaz Arpali argues persuasively that Amichai's ideas have had widespread impact and helped change the political climate in Israel, precisely because they are not narrowly politicized. Neither closely allied with a protest movement nor tied to a party platform, seen by some Israelis as politically noncommittal , his restrained and empathetic poetry has been widely read and admired and so has had the (sometimes subversive) effect of promoting anti-war sentiments throughout Israeli society. Nili Scharf Gold brings a distinctly different perspective to the issue of the individual and the collective. She sees the valorization of private nurturance over grand historical schemes as an expression of "The 'Feminine' in Amichai's Poetics." Her take on Amichai's treatment ofparents and children leads to insightful readings informed by feminist criticism. (See, for example, her comments on the poem, "A Lettter of Recommendation.") A second area of interest...