between perspectives of space: a reading in yehuda amichai's jewish travel and israeli travel

Between Perspectives of Space: A Reading in Yehuda Amichai’s “Jewish Travel” and “Israeli Travel”

Vered Shemtov

“My body is in the East, my heart in the extreme West”

The Land knows where the clouds come from and whence the hot wind

Where hatred and whence love.But its inhabitants are confused, their

heart is in the East And their body in the far West.Like migratory birds who lost their sum-

mer and winter,Lost in the beginning and the end, and

they migrateTo the end of pain all their days.1

michai’s poetic sequences “Jewish Travel: Change Is God andDeath Is His Prophet” and “Israeli Travel: Otherness Is All,Otherness Is Love”2 seem to touch a controversial issue regard-

ing Jewish space. To what extent did the Zionist movement succeed increating a Jewish identity that bridges the gap between physical and

AVered Shemtov, “Between Perspectives of Space: A Reading in Yehuda Ami-chai’s ‘Jewish Travel’ and ‘Israeli Travel,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3(Spring/Summer 2005): 141–161

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mental space? Does this new identity completely replace the conceptof “the wandering Jew” with a new Jew who is rooted in his land? Isthere really a substantial difference between a Jewish and an Israeli-Jewish concept of place?

In his introduction to A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, Eli Barnaviclaims that the Jewish consciousness “constantly shifts between aware-ness of physical spaces (the birth place, for example) to spaces of ref-erence (the ancestral homeland, Hebrew, etc.), a shift which actuallyconstitutes the Jewish spatial experience.” This definition, he argues, in-cludes the perspective of the Israeli Jew, “My body is in the East, myheart in the extreme West—an inversion of Halevi’s verse seems mostappropriate to the inhabitants of Israel” he writes. “The present pro-tagonist in the mental drama created by a differential and discontinu-ous space is no longer the Diaspora Jew but the Israeli.”3

Since the 1990s, we find that—even among the many scholars whoclaim that the establishment of a Jewish center in Israel created a funda-mental shift “from an existence outside time and space to an existencewith space”4—there have been growing tendencies to view Israeli cul-ture (especially after the 1970s) as reflecting a tension between a nomadidentity and a “native’s identity.” Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, intheir oft-quoted article “Al ha-makom” (About the Place), revealed thegap between mental and physical place in Jewish and Israeli culture.5

Risa Domb looked at the increasing number of novels in which theIsraeli protagonist travels abroad in search of self. These journeys reflectmore than the “state of mind of the modern humanity, which has lostthe sense of belonging.” Domb puts these travels also in the specific con-text of the Jewish-Israeli search for locus, and she refers to works by DanMiron and others, including A. B. Yehoshua, who, as she claims, arguesthat “Zionism failed to tie Jewish consciousness to one place.”6

A number of recent novels written by authors who were born inIsrael (or who are second or third generation) also question the exist-ence of one personal and national geographical center. RonitMatalon’s novel The One Facing Us takes place outside Israel, followingpictures from a family album, and does not locate “home” necessarilyin Israel. Maya Arad’s Makom aher ve-ir zarah (A Different Place) endswith the protagonist’s acknowledgment that his home is not in Israel.7

Sidra DeKoven Ezrakhi argues that “there are growing signs of disloca-tion, shifts in the center of gravity corresponding to increasingly mo-bile boundaries of the Hebrew self. ‘Exile’ as the repressed otherbecomes the critique of a culture of the static and the whole. The stag-nant waters and mirrors that reflect an ossified relationship to sacredspace are beginning to show ripples and cracks.”8 Although Israeli lit-

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erature has always reflected the tension between different (and oftenconflicting) definitions of identity and homelessness/home/home-land, these recent cracks expose a more critical version of the issue.

Thus, though it is probably much too early to conclude whetherZionism succeeded in establishing a wholly new perspective of place inthe Israeli-Jewish consciousness, we can already witness the process ofrethinking “Jewish Space” in Israeli literature. Yehuda Amichai’s poemspresent a particularly interesting example of this process. In the poeticsequences I will discuss in this article, Amichai looks at the Israeli per-spective of place from a “Jewish” standpoint, then turns to look at theJewish perspective from an Israeli point of view. Amichai writes from“between” conflicting perspectives of place and reflects not only theshift from a “Jewish” to an “Israeli” relation between place and identitybut also, to some extent, a shift back from a Zionist negating of the “Jew-ish” and of “Exile” to a realization that they cannot (and maybe shouldnot) be completely negated.

I will argue that Amichai’s concept of place and, more specifically, hisliterary map of Israel as both “place” and “the place” are key factors in un-derstanding his popularity in different generations of Israelis with oppos-ing ideological and political agendas. From reading the many articles andcommentaries on his work, one cannot easily determine whether Ami-chai is a revolutionary, post-Zionist, or antinational poet.9 Is he the poetof the personal and the homey, as Amos Oz argues,10 or is he the nationalpoet, the poet of Jerusalem, of Zion/Israel, the poet whose work is recitedin many national ceremonies11 and who is seen as representing the na-tional experience of longing for the land and living in it?12 My reading ofthe two sequences will offer an explanation as to why Amichai’s poemscan be endorsed by readers with opposing ideological views.

Jewish Travel: “Lord of the Places”

I think . . . about the migration of Jewswho do not follow summer and winter,

life and deathas birds do, but instead they obey the

longing of the heart. That’s why they are so dead, and why they call their God Makom, “Place.”

And now that they have returned to their place, the Lord has taken up wander-ing to different places, and His name will no longer be Place but Places, Lord of the Places.13

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From the very first lines of the sequence “Jewish Travel: Change Is Godand Death Is His Prophet,” the reader is presented with a spiritual andphysical journey as well as with a sharp distinction between two per-spectives of place:

Jewish travel [tiyul]. As it is written, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,From whence cometh my help”: not a hike [tiyul] to see a tall mountain

in all its glory,Nor a climb to rejoice in the vistas of Nature,But a hike with a purpose, to seek help from the high heavens.14

The structure of the first line calls attention to the constructed form ofthe title, “Jewish Travel.” The Hebrew word Amichai uses for travel,“tiyul,” immediately places these poems in the realm of the Israeli ex-perience. “Tiyul” is a relatively modern word that means “walk, trip,hike, excursion, tour, promenade”15 and seems to stand in opposition(almost creating an oxymoron) to the wandering of the Jews describedin the sequence. The word is associated with the creation of roots andconnection to the land, and, as Orit ben Daviv argues, it is “an act ofconsecration of the space” that was, and still is, considered by manyIsraelis as a way of “marking territory and declaring ownership of theland.” Ben Daviv focuses on the very popular hikes (tiyulim) that wereorganized by the Society of the Protection of Nature in Israel and be-came a major part of Israeli culture. But her conclusions are relevantfor a much larger phenomenon in Israeli culture. “Hikes,” she writes,“help the Israelis stress their bond with the country and their link tothe land.” The hikes are also “a kind of activity that enables individualsto emphasize both personal and national identity.”16

The juxtaposition of the Israeli and the Jewish experiences is devel-oped in the poems in several ways. One of them is the negation of theJewish self. Unlike other trips, the Jewish hike, according to Amichai, isnot a pleasurable physical activity in which one enjoys an outing in na-ture. Instead, it is done out of necessity, in search of help, and with thegaze directed not at the geographical location but rather at a spiritualpoint of reference. Given the Zionist criticism of Jewish life as notrooted in land, in nature, or in physical activity, the description of theJewish version of a hike is read as condemnation. Moreover, the Jewishhike is linked with death (rather than health). This association betweentravel and death is presented in the first poem and continues through-out the sequence; it is especially evident in the naming of places, such as“The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and in visiting or mentioningcemeteries and battle fields.17

In the second poem, which centers on the Jewish “game of hearts be-

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tween east and west, between self and heart,” like “the trip Freud theJew took, wandering between body and mind, between mind and mind,only to die between the two,” the speaker detaches himself from the“Jews,” referring to them as “they” (“they call their God Makom,‘Place’”) and expressing a slight criticism of the Jews as living in oneplace and dreaming of another (“what a world this is, where the heart isin one place and the body in another?”). The first lines of the sequencequoted above also reveal another Zionist criticism of the Jewish life inexile. The exiled Jew is portrayed as weak and helpless, someone whorelies on God to save him instead of trying to save him- or herself. He isdescribed as passive rather than active and independent. The tiyul as asearch for help rather then as a physical activity is read in the under-lying Zionist characteristics of the exiled Jew as mockery.18

Although the poem begins with a statement about the gap betweenthe Israeli tiyul and the journeys of Jews in their personal and collectivehistory, it continues with a dialogue that exposes the many similaritiesbetween the two.19 A common aspect of the Israeli/Jewish perspectivesis the role of memory in creating a connection between place and iden-tity. The sequence describes several trips to specific places, which have aconcrete existence (name, location, description), and they serve as a ve-hicle for remembering people and special events in one’s life. The con-nection to the place is established in two stages: first, through a life-changing experience in the place; and then by revisiting the places andtelling the next generation the story of the events that occurred there(turning the personal into the collective memory). Poem 5 includes anexample of how this defines both the Israeli and the Jewish relation-ships to place:

Every year OUR father Abraham would take his sons to Mount Moriah The way I take my children to the Negev hills where I once had a war,Abraham hiked around with his sons. “This is where I left The servants behind, that’s where I tied the donkey.. . . When Abraham died, Isaac started taking his sons to the same place.20

This connection between place and memory is also described inpoem 8, which is dedicated to “Jewish travel of another kind” in whichthe speaker takes his wife and children to the village of his grand-mother in Germany. The “marking” of territory is extended throughthe poetic tiyul beyond the borders of Israel, and the trip metamor-phoses into a hike in the mental Jewish space, rendering the claims forownership over the place visited in the hike meaningless.21

The Jewish aspect of Amichai’s Israeli identity and its relations to

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place shift from remembering one place to remembering the manyplaces Jews have traveled to (or will travel to). Amichai’s “JewishTravel,” then, affirms Barnavi’s argument (quoted above) that “thepresent protagonist in the mental drama created by a differential anddiscontinuous space is no longer the Diaspora Jew but the Israeli.”

The sequence ends with a sentence about God. When looking at theconcept of time in Amichai’s work, Amir Eshel argues that, for Amichai,

God is not there to be worshipped or feared but rather signifies the Godof the “fathers” and the “sons” and thus the symbolic string of zikaron thatholds the community together through time and calamities. The dia-logue with “God of the Fathers” is therefore a search for the sources ofcontinuity that are embodied in the collective memory.22

It is this search for the sources of continuity between the “Israeli” andthe “Jewish” perspectives that leads Amichai’s speaker at the end of thesequence to conclude that “Change is God and Death is his prophet.”This continuity with the Jewish concept of place becomes part of theIsraeli identity even though this identity is criticized.

The shift from “Place” to “Places” changed the journey from a move-ment forward toward the promised land to an undirected movementboth in physical and in referential space. This post-Zionist situationmoves the contemporary Israeli consciousness closer to the Jewish situ-ation in exile. As we move in the poem from one place to another inwhat the speaker defines as “the big Jewish journey,” we visit impossibleplaces: Yehudah Halevi in medieval Spain; contemporary Israel; the ex-odus from Egypt; the biblical Mt. Nevo; Jesus (“the Jew”) in Via Dolo-rosa; St. Petersburg; Germany; and the jungles of Burma. We movefrom one place to another as if they all exist in the same time and as ifpersonal and collective memories were one. “I live without before andafter,” Amichai said in an interview with Helit Yeshurun. “Everythingexists. Nothing is dead for me. This is a Jewish characteristic—in theTorah there is no before and after.”23

The dismissal of a diachronic dimension in the poems results in em-phasizing the synchronic movements from one space to the other. Themovement in space is a cyclic motion in which one leaves and returnsto locations on the literary map. Amichai describes—but does notcompletely “adopt” as part of his identity—this sense of movements inspace, and he creates a separate character in the poem who representsthe voice of wandering in space. This character does not have a nameor any specific qualities, and he seems to be part of an internal dia-logue, not an actual Other. He is “the exiled Jew” within the Israeli.When asked where he comes from and where he is going, this charac-

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ter says: “I am in transit, I have been traveling, I am in the cycle of de-parture and return, I come from those other days and I am headedtoward those other days, but the Now is always with me.”24 One way tounderstand this kind of movement in the poetic space is to see it as “fit-ting” with the idea that Jewish space exists mainly as a metaphoricalspace, as Barnavi suggests:

[D]id their multiple spaces render them over-sensitive to the problem ofspace, or, on the contrary, totally indifferent to the problem? One pos-sible hypothesis is that in order to be able to bear such extreme fragmen-tation, Jews have had to neutralize space in the physical sense and to livein metaphorical spaces: the past, the language, Scriptures, the destiny ofthe Jewish people, the Promised Land, as well as in socialism, physics, mu-sic, etc. It was precisely this existence in intangible “spaces” which enabledthem to survive. It would be wrong to attribute such a “mentality” only tolife in Exile.25

Amichai’s sequence takes place in literal and figurative representa-tions of place. The internal dialogue between the two becomes ex-tremely evident toward the end of the poem. The character Amichaicreated is associated with exile and death (and most likely with the Ho-locaust), and in poem 14 he takes off and dramatically leaves thescene. Left behind are “the suitcases on top of the closet. They are allthat remains, like suitcases floating on the water after a ship is down.Until they too —-” (end of poem 14).

It is not clear whether the main poem’s speaker got home andplaced the suitcases (and all the memories they include) on top of thecloset. Amichai does not provide a clear answer in this sequence. Butcomparing “Jewish Travel” to his earlier travelogue “The Travels ofBenjamin the Last from Tudela” presents some major changes in hisperspective. The poem has strong ties to the Zionist narrative, and thepoems include references to geographical locations as well as to textsabout place (mainly about Zion/Israel). “The Travels of Benjamin” isa story of childhood, of coming of age, and of homecoming. Thespeaker’s personal/national journey has a clear sense of direction,from Europe to Israel; within Israel he moves from “Israel the nationalhomeland” to “Israel the personal home”:

I didn’t kiss the groundWhen they brought me as a little boy to this landBut now that I have grown upon her,She kisses me,She holds me,

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She clutches me in loveIn grass and thorns, in sand and sand,In wars and in this springTill the final kiss.26

The poem describes a love of the land that is not a love of “the promisedland” but a love that is developed by living in a place. Although the re-lations to the land here are presented as personal rather than national,they follow the social Zionist quest of becoming part of the geographi-cal place, of a strong connection between the land and the people. Theland turns into a mother/lover figure (an inversion of the poetic con-ventions in which the protagonist is the active lover) until the time ofdeath in which the man unites with the land “in the final kiss.”

In “Jewish Travel” the journey ends very differently. The cyclic mo-tion in time and place does not lead, in the final poems of the sequence,to any specific place. Much like Moses’ journeys, which are described inpoems 1 and 3, death, rather then Canaan or Israel, becomes the lastdestination in the journey. If in “The Travels of Benjamin” Amichailooks at new beginnings and childhood, in “Jewish Travel” he takes thefinal journey. But the difference in perspective goes beyond the per-sonal journey to an inner dialogue between negation and acceptance of“Jewish travel” as part of an Israeli consciousness.

Amichai defines the difference between Jewish and Israeli perspec-tives of place by introducing a voice other than the speaker’s to repre-sent the lack of center, by referring to the speaker’s travels to Europefrom Israel as “a different kind of journey,” and by criticizing the “Jew-ish tiyul” and not completely accepting it as an integral part of thespeaker’s identity. But the latter term becomes less of an oxymoron asthe sequence progresses and the relations between space and identitygradually shape the Jewish Israeli identity as a dialogue between twoways of thinking and living in space. The sequence is a search not forthe boundaries between the two but for similarities and developmentsin the Jewish-Israeli dependence in both referential and geographicalspace. Amichai’s “tiyul,” in Jewish space, puts Jewish travels in the con-text of Israeli culture, consecrating into the mental literary map all theplaces that are part of the collective/personal memory and emphasiz-ing the role of both “homecoming” and “wandering” in the creation ofcontemporary Israeli identities.

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The Literary Map of Israel

Caught in a homeland trapTo talk now in this tired tongue,Torn out of its sleep in the Bible:

Blinded,It tooters from mouth to mouth. In a

tongue that describedMiracles and God, now to say: automo-

bile, bomb, God.27

A reading of the sequence “Israeli Travel: Otherness Is All, Otherness IsLove” can provide insight into Amichai’s literary map of Israel in a pe-riod when God is no longer “Place” but Lord of the places. Whereas“Jewish Travel” is a journey mostly outside the boundaries of Israel,“Israeli Travel” takes place in contemporary Israel, with a strong senseof past and present. Even the references to other texts are limited pri-marily to those written in or about modern Israel. Much like “JewishTravel,” it is a nostalgic journey that questions the ties between mentaland physical space as well as between place and identity, and it reflectson the Zionism of the pre-state and early statehood. The tiyul in this se-quence is a way of looking back at life through visiting places that weresignificant to the speaker. The importance of the places lies mostly inthe interactions the speaker had with other people who were with himor who lived in these specific locations. The tension between Israel as a“mental space” and Israel as a “physical space” is expanded throughthese visits to include the role of the social place (the place as the centerof social interaction) in shaping individual identity. The following dis-cussion of “Israeli Travel” begins with the description of Israel as a phys-ical place, then as a mental place, and finally as a social place.

In her farewell speech to Amichai upon his death in 2000, Nili Levi,then the head of the literature unit in the Israeli Ministry of Education,described Amichai’s poetry as writing that caresses the landscapes ofIsrael with intimacy and love.28 Indeed, numerous titles of Amichai’spoems refer to specific cities, streets, or landmarks in Israel. Several al-bums, such as Open Eyed Land (Nof glui eynaim) and Achziv, Cesarea andOne Love (Akhziv, Keisaryah ve-ahavah ahat),29 include pictures or pho-tographs of places in Israel next to poems about these places. These al-bums present, and sometimes create, ties between Amichai’s poetryand Israel as a geographical place. The same can be said about the re-cently published edition of the complete poetry of Yehuda Amichai;the cover of each of the five volumes includes a photograph from placesin Israel such as the Dead Sea, Tabor, and Achziv.30

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Amichai’s poetry is perceived as having a strong association with Is-raeli landscapes because it takes one of the most detailed poetic tours inthe Land of Israel, stopping mainly at places of national significance andcreating a literary map that reflects the “less disputed” national map.Amichai does not cross “the green line,” does not take his poetry to dis-puted borders, and does not even present the Tel Aviv/ Jerusalem di-chotomy found in so many other literary works in Hebrew. Jerusalem,the home city of the poet, keeps its central status of thousands of years. Itis at the heart of Amichai’s literary map not only in terms of the numberof poems dedicated to the city but also as stated in the poems themselves:

The Greater Land of Israel is like a fat and heavy womanAnd the state of Israel is like a young woman,Supple and thin-waisted,But in both of themJerusalem is always the count of the land,The unstated count,The throbbing and screaming orgasmWhich won’t end until the Messiah comes.31

Jerusalem is the location that connects contemporary Israel both to thebiblical life in the land and to the longing for the land from exile. InIsrael, as “the promised Land” and as “the small place,” Jerusalem hasthe loudest poetic voice. (But, whereas in Lamentations the city criesand weeps, in Amichai’s poetry it is “screaming orgasm.”)

When describing other places in Israel, Amichai often mentionslandscapes related to Israeli wars, especially the War of Independence.Glenda Abramson comments on this in her article “Portrait of the Poetin a Landscape”:

[Amichai’s] method of “writing” the landscape provides a topography ofwar in which the entire country is able to be “read” . . . as a verbal map ofbattle sites and war memorials, sites that have significance only as battle-fields of 1948. Place names provide the geographical locations and spe-cific signs within the poems indicate their memorial nature even whenthe poem itself is devoted to personal memory.32

The sequence “Israeli Travel” is presented as a personal tour ofplaces that were meaningful to the speaker, but a look at the map cre-ated by the place names mentioned in the poems reveals a journeyacross the land from the Golan and the Galilee, through the Plain ofSharon to the desert, and then back to the coast. Much like the literarymap of Amichai’s entire body of work about Israel, this sequence stays

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away from controversial areas, on the one hand, and attempts tocapture the entire place, on the other.33 The descriptions are often con-ventional, almost touristy; we find grapes, palms, orchards, “Kfar,”“Moshav,” and “Kibutz.” Some of the places mentioned are related toJewish and Israeli history, such as Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named afterMordechai Anielewitz (one of the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto), andthe location of a major battle in the War of Independence.

The “Greater Land” and the actual “state of Israel” are integral partsof any description of the landscape in the poems. In poem 6, thespeaker is looking for a high hill from which he can scout his life and hisjourney. He concludes that he is always located both high and low,much like Jerusalem, which is both heavenly and earthly. In another se-quence, the poet complains of the existence of two Jerusalems and theimpossibility of one person living in a place “that is always two.”34 Themental place (“ha-makom,” “the big place,” or “heavenly Jerusalem”)and the physical place are, as he writes in poem 7, “glued together will-ingly or unwillingly in the centrifugal movement of time which turnsand turns.”

Throughout the sequence “Israeli Travel,” Amichai describes theplaces he tours as both texts and geographical locations. At times, hehimself turns the place into text by finding metaphorical relations be-tween the landscape and the human condition. When he sees rows ofpines and fruit, for example, he says “people are also rows of pines andfruit” (poem 7);35 when he passes next to the old water conduit in thewestern Galilee, he compares it to himself, saying that they are bothtransferring things from one place to the other (poem 16); and, whenhe sees barbed wire in the Arava desert, he says to himself, “Hopeneeds to be like barbed wire to keep out despair” (poem 3). The poetis aware now of his power to turn his personal life into part of the textabout the place. “And I didn’t know” he writes in poem 9, “that my fea-tures and the lines of my face will become a map for someone’s travels,or for wars, perhaps, long after my time.”

One lifetime in Israel is presented as a sufficient period of time notonly for becoming part of the collective memory but also for seeingchange. The old places from the days of the poet’s childhood and ado-lescence are turned into part of history. The school that the speakerattended as a young boy turns into a museum to the past, and a crum-bling deserted casino or an old spilling swimming pool become whatAmichai defines as “young archaeology.”

But while Amichai “creates” the place as text, he also references pre-existing texts. One of the ways in which he responds to the mental rep-resentations of the place is through a deconstruction of the language

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about Zion and/or Israel. In the sequence “Israeli Travel,” we find atour of Israel through the “songs of the land” (shirei moledet)— songsthat represent the Zionist experience of building the land, of creatinga culture that captures or conquers the space. In one of the poems(found only in the Hebrew original text),36 the speaker’s voice istrapped in these songs of the land: through the first lines of some ofthe most famous shirei moledet we move from Tel Aviv to the hills ofSeikh Abrek and to Jerusalem. These songs, as Amichai writes in poem4, “remained as flags that we left hanging after the holiday, like writtentombstones in an old cemetery.” Poem 5 is a web of quotations fromthese patriotic songs (words in boldface emphasize the quotes frompopular folk songs):

And there were songs from which only the first line remainedIn our heart, like the first words of a young boy, like the last words of a

dead man,The rest is only a tune: la,la,la, va’va’va, bambam’In a tongue and lips and eyes closed: between the mountains The sun is burning, look and see, oh silly pioneer What are you doing there, who will build a house in Tel Aviv.And first lines glued together in the pain of the present and the excite-

ment of the past,Lines glued together, like sticky candy in a pocketOf a young boy, turning into a sticky ball of many colors.Hurray, Hurray, little garden, on the hills of Sheik Abreck,Dad went to work, over the hills of the Mt. Scopus,Carry the flag to Zion, great summer nights,Nights Summer Nights, who should be thanked and blessed(And do not say thanks, to say thanks isTo accept the judgment, to surrenderTo surrender and sing). The Jordan river will whisper in the valleyAnd its pure water and its pure water, of the secret talesOf Jordan, of the secrets of Jordan.

This poem is perhaps Amichai’s most extreme and rebellious reactionto the feeling of being “caught in a homeland trap” and having tospeak about life in Israel in “a tired tongue.”37 The songs seem to takeover the speaker’s voice. Between the lines from the different songs,the poet resists “surrendering and singing” but seems to be controlledby the songs and goes back to singing.

In previous collections of poems, Amichai deconstructs texts aboutIsrael in many different ways. In one of his most famous works, “If I for-get thee oh Jerusalem,” Amichai dismantles the phrase from Psalm 137,puts it in a new personal context, and associates it with remembering

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exile (rather than Jerusalem)—all in a playful tone and manner thatcan be read as a language of negotiation. “If I forget thee oh Jerusalem”is the phrase best known for describing the two thousand years of Jewishlonging for Zion. Similarly, the phrase “It is good to die for our country”captures nationalism in Israel in its early years. In poem 12 of the se-quence “Poems of Zion and Jerusalem,” Amichai trivializes this sen-tence and places it in a new context, which he also does to the phrasefrom the national hymn in poem 13.38 Through deconstructing thetexts about place, and in “Israeli Travel” reconstructing them into a col-lage of quotes, Amichai presents the Zionist construction of the mentalplace as anachronistic, part of a past perspective of the place. The songsabout the land, he writes in poem 4, “had already turned into geologi-cal layers” waiting for “the earthquake that will blow them up and crushthem to pieces.”

Finally, mental and physical places interweave when events that tookplace in a certain location continue to exist as memory, as part of theplace’s “geology,” or as “a museum.” In poem 8 (poem 4 in the Englishedition), for example, a “picture of a plowman and horse from the turnof the century in one of those early settlements” is remembered andjudged from the perspective of the present. In poem 11 (poem 7 in theEnglish edition), the speaker, having returned to his school in Jerusa-lem, says:

I stood near the school building. This is the roomWhere we sat and studied. Classroom windows always open To the future, but in our innocence we thought it was landscape We were seeing through the windows.The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones.I remember the brief tumult of the two of usNear the rickety steps, the tumultThat was the beginning of a first great love.Now it outlives us, as if in a museum,Like everything else in Jerusalem.

These lines are a good example of how each place becomes content forpersonal and philosophical reflections about the land. In most of thepoems in the sequence, the place itself does not change much; it servesas the scenery for a story from the past (poem 15 [poem 11 in the En-glish edition]), an anchor for remembering, and a place for judgment(poem 8 [poem 4 in the English edition]). But these places are “back-grounds” to life and not the main players in the narrative. There is afeeling of estrangement, as though the geographical landscape is not asfamiliar as it had been (poems 2 and 17 [poems 2 and 12 in the English

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edition]), and a distance is presented both from the mental place (es-pecially in the revisiting of the shirei moledet in poems 4 and 5) andfrom the place as the location of social interaction. The people that thespeaker knew and would like to visit in his journey are not there any-more (poem 2); the people who live now in the places visited in the tourare strangers (“Years ago I visited that neighborhood; now I don’t knowa soul there,” poem 17 [poem 12 in the English edition]).

The estrangement in the place and arbitrariness of one’s destiny(poems 9 and 17) develop toward the end of the poems to a descrip-tion of Israel not as “the Place,” the only place that could have beenhome, but as “a place.” This small place shapes the individual’s identitynot because of a dialogue between makom and ha-makom (as in “Jew-ish Travel”) but because of the social interaction one happened tohave in the places in which he lived and visited. In a poem about BatGalim, the last of the sequence, the speaker walks around the neigh-borhood and sees the same death notice in several locations. “By nowI am quite familiar with the dead man’s name and the name of his wifeand children, his workplace . . . and his burial place” he says. “If I lin-ger another day or two in Bat Galim, I will discover that we’re related.I will become someone else.” The small place in which we live, with thelocal social interactions, is what defines us. Place changes us, makes usan “Other,” different from the self we could have been had we lived ona different street or in a neighborhood. But, according to Amichai, weare also different from the other people who had the same experi-ences in this same place. We create not a national identity but, rather,a personal identity; our private and mutual experiences in the placeturns each one of us, as Amichai says in the first poem, into an“Other”—and this Otherness (which in Hegelian terms both negatesand creates us) becomes everything and, as such, becomes love.

In the first poem of the “Israeli Travel” sequence, which takes placein Petach Tikva (the first of the new settlements to be built by pioneers),the speaker describes a scene from his past: “Nearby there was a big or-chard that two of us entered. The two of us. We came out others: he-other and she-other together, he-lover and she-lover together, and Isaid to myself: Otherness is all, Otherness is love.” The place, therefore,does not define a national identity but enables the individuals who arepart of the community inhabiting the place to define an identity as in-dividuals, as Others. This kind of individualism is possible in the con-text of “Israeli travel” within the boundaries of the state and was notpossible in “Jewish travel” where the lack of spatial boundaries necessi-tated defining the self only as part of the community.

In the last sentence of “Israeli Travel,” the protagonist returns to the

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Haifa harbor. Amichai had arrived there in a boat from Germany whenhe was a young child. As he now looks at the port, he makes a blessing;he is thankful for not having to set sail from this place (“from here”).Despite his estrangement from the place and the feeling of beingcaught in the “choir” of statehood Zionism, the speaker feels that Israelis his place, his “here,” the place from which he does not need, or want,to move.

Writing from “In Between”

This place will not console us.(The place [Ha-makom, God] will not

console us)This place.On the ground of a great thirstLie the houses of the city. Great rifts in

the earthFrom my screaming your name.Till my eyes hurt.39

Anita Shapira, in her article “Whatever Became of ‘Negative Exile,’”follows the shift in Israeli society from a negation of exile to a situationin which “exile is back in fashion.” Shapira argues that Israelis nolonger define themselves as a uniform society but as a multiculturalplace, not because Israel strives or is being directed to become one butas a result of the many waves of immigrants that did not negate exile.According to Shapira, as the population of people who were raised inIsrael increases, we see more of the natural connection between thenative and his/her surroundings; Israelis tend to stay in the land notbecause of ideology but because this is their home and their culturaland social environment. The Jewish identity, Shapira argues, is in aconstant dialogue with the Jewish past, with religion, and with tradi-tion. The dialogue comes sometime out of conflict and at other timesout of identification, but this dispute takes place within the bound-aries of Jewish-Israeli identity and without any attempt to deviate fromit or to create an alternative identity.40

Amichai’s “Jewish Travel” and “Israeli Travel” do not completely re-flect these changes in Israeli society, but they seem to present a move-ment toward them. “Jewish Travel” recognizes the fact that change,movement, and wandering will continue to be part of the Jewish iden-tity in Israel. Yet Amichai is far from presenting exile as desirable. Thedialogue between past and present, between the Jewish and the Israeli,

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and between the national and personal takes place without the need tojustify the connection to the place or the relations between self andplace. This is a step that Amichai takes beyond (or away from) the Zion-ism of 1948. His claims resemble Shapira’s description of Israelis whostay in Israel not out of ideology but because it is their home. This leadsin “Israeli Travel” to a shift away from defining one’s identity as part of acollective that belongs to the land to perceiving oneself as an individualwho is part of a collective, who “naturally” forms a community withothers within the same geographical and cultural boundaries.

But these ideas remain “suggestions” or “desires” and are never pre-sented as Amichai’s clear direction. The speaker himself is not alwaysable (or willing) to accept the post- (not anti-) Zionist ideas, and he re-turns to singing the national songs; in the poem “And there were songsfrom which only the first line remained,” he seems to be trapped in thelanguage of the old consensus, and his poetry remains in the bound-aries of the undisputed map of Israel.

The critical and the conformist perspectives in Amichai’s sequencesdo not create a polyphonic reality or a dialogue between the differentperspectives of place even when they stand in opposition. What Ami-chai does, instead, is to present the differences as reflected inside onevoice, to combine them into one poetic unity and one language andthus to create, within his speaker’s voice, a place in which the conflict-ing perspectives meet. This is reflected also in the repeated theme inAmichai’s poetry of a self that is constructed from diverse parts, each adifferent textual and physical representation of the place in which he/she lived. As in “The Travels of Benjamin the Last from Tudela,” for ex-ample, he writes:

I sit here with my father’s eyes and my mother’s graying hair on my head, in a house

That belonged to an Arab who bought it From an Englishman who took it from a German . . . I am an alloy of Many things, I was collected in different times, I was composed of transient parts of material that decompose, words that wear out.41

A similar idea is expressed in the last stanza of an earlier poem (1963–68) called “This Place”:

He who changes himself changes his place,Even if he stays there. This place

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Will not console us.The light patches on the dark, ancient reconstructed vase:What is new in me and what is from my forefathers?For we are yesterday, for we are of others.Shadows pass over our faces, shadows passThrough us. This night tooIs the shadow of another.42

To the idea that we are shaped by the place, Amichai adds the conceptthat one has the power to change the place. But this power does notlead to action or optimism; the following line repeats the pessimisticsentence that was introduced in the first stanza: “this place will not con-sole us.” The poem ends with a self that continues to reflect on the men-tal place, his heritage, and is left, once again, “caught in the homelandtrap.”

“Jewish Travel” and “Israeli Travel” take place within a literary mapparallel to that of the establishment, in a language that “shakes” orquestion the relations between mental and geographical representa-tions of the place and in a voice that internalizes contemporary andold voices in and about the place. These aspects of the poem createsnot a hybrid text but an “in between” reality.

In “The Location of Culture,” Homi Bhabha argues that writing “in-between” can create the moment of aesthetic distance and difference:

Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social develop oninterstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisionsthrough which such spheres of social experience are often spatially op-posed. These spheres of life are linked through an “in-between” tempo-rality that takes the measure of dwelling at home, while producing animage of the world of history. This is the moment of aesthetic distancethat provides the narrative with a double edge . . . a difference “within,” asubject that inhabits the rim of the “in-between” reality. And the inscrip-tion of this borderline existence inhabits a stillness of time and strange-ness of framing that creates the discursive “image” at the crossroads ofhistory and literature, bridging the home and the world.43

This place of “in-between” describes Amichai’s position in the twotravel poems. In these poems Amichai is not “rewriting the place”; in-stead, he presents us with a new “reading” of the cultural texts about theplace—or, as he writes in one of his poems, he “recycles” the old lan-guage.44 He questions, criticizes, brings new doubts and meanings, andin some cases revives literal meanings of metaphors and phrases aboutplace. He is at home in this language, writing from “within” the lan-guage of both longing to Zion and materializing the Zionist dream even

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as he negates it as a national text and tries to bring into it the personaland mundane experience. The deconstructed or “decomposed” textsremain part of the language of the poems and part of the poetic voice ofthe speaker. The bridging between the national map and the home isdone through in inclusion of both places within the same voice.

My reading of Amichai’s concept of place presents his poems ascreating an allusion of an extra-ideological location. In this I followRoberto Dainotto’s criticism of cultural studies’ and literary theories’“return to place”:

Place, as much as we see its theories claiming to the contrary, is funda-mentally a negation of history. To claim that culture springs from a placemeans, after all, to naturalize a process of historical formation. And alongwith history to negate the historical process, struggles, and tensions thatmade a culture what it is.45

Politics of inclusion, exclusion, occupation, struggle for existence(or whatever you would like to name the history of Israel) are almostinvisible in Amichai’s poetry. Otherness, deconstruction, negation areall created within a detailed and national map of Israel, in the lan-guage that is recycled from previous mental representations of place,and where Otherness becomes love. Israel, in the poems, becomes apostmodern hybrid place through the constructed voice of thespeaker. And thus, for a culture preoccupied with history and ideolog-ical struggles—in a place that cannot console anyone—and for thecurrent Israeli generation that feels Israel is home because it is theirsmall personal place, reading Amichai’s poetry creates a glimpse ofhope, of something beyond history and politics. And as such, even ifonly for an instant, his poetry does console his readers.

Notes

1 From “The Land Knows,” in Yehuda Amichai, Yehuda Ami-chai: A Life of Poetry, trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (New York, 1995).

2 Both poems are in Yehuda Ami-chai, Open Closed Open, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kron-feld (New York, 2000). The original Hebrew edition was

Yehuda Amichai, Patuah, sagur, patuah (Tel Aviv, 1998). Some poems were not included in the English edition, and as a result the numbering of the poems in the translated text do not follow the original Hebrew. The poem numbers in this article will fol-low the Hebrew text.

3 Eli Barnavi, A Historical Atlas of

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the Jewish People (New York, 1992), vi, ix.

4 Risa Domb, Home Thoughts From Abroad: Distant Visions of Israel in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction (London, 1995), 1.

5 Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, “Al ha-makom (antropol-ogyah yisreelit),” Alpayim 4 (Tel Aviv, 1992). For a description of the Zionist ideology as includ-ing, from the beginning, the conflict between wandering and belonging to one place, see Zali Gurevitch, “The Double Site of Israel,” in Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience, ed. Ben-Ari Eyal and Bilu Yoram (Al-bany, N.Y., 1997).

6 Domb, Home Thoughts From Abroad, 8–9.

7 Ronit Matalon, The One Facing Us, trans. Marsha Weinstein (New York, 1998); Maya Arad, Makom aher ve-ir zarah (Tel Aviv, 2003).

8 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley, 2000), 237.

9 This perspective was expressed, for example, in lectures that Chana Bloch and Chana Kron-feld gave following the publica-tion of their translation of Open Closed Open.

10 See, e.g., the article Amos Oz wrote after Amichai’s death: “More than 40 years ago [he] ap-peared on the Israeli literary scene—Yehuda Amichai as a young poet whose poems spoke in a mundane language he made ‘a civil revolution’ and changed our value system. After

the era of ‘the Silver Tray’ or ‘We were all drafted for life, only death will release us from duty’ suddenly comes an unknown young man and writes : ‘I would like to die in my bed.’ It was a very courageous act, one that changed worlds. . . . In his revo-lution, Amichai led his poetry from the national, the historical, the militant, the general to inti-macy, to the homely, the pro-saic, the daily. And so, when we read Amichai’s poems, we feel as if he is writing in our own kitchen or in the children’s room or the bedroom, or the garden or the living room. Today it seems natural, but then it was a real revolution” (in Amos Oz, Be-etsem yesh kan shetei milhamot [Jerusalem, 2000], 79–80). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from foreign-language sources (excluding the translations of Amichai’s poems) are mine.

11 See, e.g., the selected reading for Independence Day on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/History/Modern+History/Israel+at+50/Selected+Readings+for+Indepndence+Day.htm.

12 “It is strange that he is so univer-sally admired in Israel. We are divided about everything except on Yehuda Amichai” (Shlomo Grodensky, quoted in Boaz Arpali, “The Political Signifi-cance of Amichai,” in The Experi-enced Soul, ed. Glenda Abramson [Colorado, 1997], 45).

13 Poem 2 from “Jewish Travel,” in Amichai, Open Closed Open, 118.

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14 Ibid.15 Reuven Alcalay, The Complete

Hebrew-English Dictionary (Ramat Gan, 1981).

16 Orit ben Daviv, “Tiyul (Hike) as an Act of Consecration of Space,” in Eyal and Yoram, Grasping Land.

17 In addition to “Jewish Travel” and “Israeli Travel,” the book Open Closed Open includes one more travelogue, “Valley of the Ghost Street.” On the relations between geographical place, the metaphorical, and death, see Nili Rachel Scharf Gold, “Ami-chai’s Open Closed Open and Now and in Other Days: A Poetic Dia-logue,” in History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts, ed. William Cutter and David C. Jacobson (Providence, R.I., 2001), 466–67.

18 Amichai, Open Closed Open, 117.19 In poem 4, we can find another

example of using “Israeli He-brew” to talk about Jewish travels. Moses is described as an army commander who is preparing to take his troops for a military drive. The word Amichai uses to describe the journey is masa (translated in the English edi-tion as “trek”; it can also mean “travel,” “journey,” or “drive”), but in this context it places the reader inside the Israeli experi-ence of military campaigns.

20 Amichai, Open Closed Open, 119.21 This raises the question of

whether the Israeli hikes are acts of claiming the physical land or are mapping the mental place.

22 Amir Eshel, “Eternal Present: Poetic Figuration and Cultural Memory in the Poetry of Yehuda

Amichai, Dan Pagis, and Tuvia Rübner,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 154.

23 Quoted in ibid., 155.24 Poem 13 in Amichai, Open Closed

Open, 123.25 Barnavi, Historical Atlas of the Jew-

ish People, ix. See also Jean Chris-tophe Attias and Esther Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, 2003), 230. Attias and Benbassa see the similarities between Jewish and Israeli iden-tities as indicating the impossi-bility of turning Israel from an idea and a myth into a reality. In the last chapter, they look at Israeli literature, art, and poli-tics and conclude that there is no substantial difference be-tween the Jewish and the Israeli concepts of place. Much like the Jews, the Israelis carry exile within them. It is a retentive ex-ile, which “pushes them con-stantly toward a ‘promised land,’ a Book/land.” Attias and Benbassa argue that the true place of the Jew is the Book, thus stressing the continuation of the Jewish perspective of space in Israel rather than seeing the change. I argue that Amichai does not completely erase the physical space, and his vivid de-scription of places and the con-tinuous dialogue between the mental and physical spaces are reminders of it. The emphasis on the personal and the mun-dane are ways of returning from “the book” to the reality outside the book.

26 Yehuda Amichai, “The Travels of Benjamin the Last from

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Tudela,” in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, , 188.

27 From “National Thoughts,” in ibid., 94.

28 For the full Hebrew text of Nili Levi’s speech, go to www.snunit.k12.il/shireshet/amichai/nili.html.

29 Yehuda Amichai, Nof glui eynaim (Tel Aviv, 1992) and Akhziv, Keisaryah ve-ahavah ahat (Tel Aviv, 1996).

30 Yehuda Amichai, Shirei Yehuda Amichai, 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 2003).

31 From “The Land Knows,” in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 464.

32 Glenda Abramson, “Portrait of the Poet in a Landscape,” in Abramson, The Experienced Soul, 59–60.

33 It is interesting to compare the attempt to create an illusion of encompassing the entire land in one sequence to the description of the land in the poem “Love of the Land.” There it is “a pack-aged land” that is neatly wrapped and small enough to be envisioned in its entirety in one’s memory: “And the land is very small / I can encompass it inside me. . . . Hence I can feel

all of it / With my eyes closed: see-valley-mountain. / Hence, I can remember all that hap-pened in her / All at once, like a person remembering / His whole life in the moment of Dy-ing” (Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 338).

34 See “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, why Jerusalem?” poem number 9 (which was not included in the English edition).

35 On nature images in the poetry of Amichai, see Nili Scharf Gold, Not as a Cypress (Jerusalem, 1994).

36 Amichai, Patuah, sagur, patuah, 66–76.

37 See the epigraph at the begin-ning of this text section.

38 Amichai, Shirei Yehuda Amichai, 2: 197, 3: 14–15.

39 From “This Place,” in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 111.

40 Ibid., 53.41 Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry,

177.42 Ibid., 111.43 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of

Culture (London, 1994), 13.44 Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry,

294.45 Roberto Dainotto, Place in Litera-

ture (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 2.

between perspectives of space: a reading in yehuda amichai's jewish travel and israeli travel

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