Yehuda Amichai's Exilic Jerusalem

Abstract

Jerusalem figures in an astonishing number of the late Yehuda Amichai's poems precisely because the poet himself found it impossible to write the definitive Jerusalem lyric. In the city's embodiment of both the highest achievements of the human spiritual imagination and the rocky altar to which human beings and their ancestors have returned to sacrifice one another again and again, Jerusalem is necessarily the beating and wounded heart of his parabolic and beguiling poetic practice. Amichai continually tests the notion of 'belonging' to Jerusalem (with all its political, social, religious, and cultural complexity), against alternative avenues of identity in ways that ultimately implicate the reader as well, particularly in their original Israeli context. At the same time, the poems frequently pay heed to the indelible ways that Jerusalem's cycles of destruction cohabit with diasporic continuity; each Jewish realm ultimately sustaining and at times interrogating the reality of the other.