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 migrate
To the end of pain all their days.1

michai’s poetic sequences “Jewish Travel: Change Is God and

A Death 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 in
creating a Jewish identity that bridges the gap between physical and

Vered 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
 mental space? Does this new identity completely replace the concept
of “the wandering Jew” with a new Jew who is rooted in his land? Is
[142] there really a substantial difference between a Jewish and an Israeli-
Jewish concept of place?
Jewish In his introduction to A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, Eli Barnavi
Social claims that the Jewish consciousness “constantly shifts between aware-
Studies ness of physical spaces (the birth place, for example) to spaces of ref-
erence (the ancestral homeland, Hebrew, etc.), a shift which actually
constitutes the Jewish spatial experience.” This definition, he argues, in-
cludes the perspective of the Israeli Jew, “My body is in the East, my
heart in the extreme West—an inversion of Halevi’s verse seems most
appropriate 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 who
claim that the establishment of a Jewish center in Israel created a funda-
mental shift “from an existence outside time and space to an existence
with space”4—there have been growing tendencies to view Israeli cul-
ture (especially after the 1970s) as reflecting a tension between a nomad
identity and a “native’s identity.” Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, in
their oft-quoted article “Al ha-makom” (About the Place), revealed the
gap between mental and physical place in Jewish and Israeli culture.5
Risa Domb looked at the increasing number of novels in which the
Israeli protagonist travels abroad in search of self. These journeys reflect
more than the “state of mind of the modern humanity, which has lost
the 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 Dan
Miron and others, including A. B. Yehoshua, who, as she claims, argues
that “Zionism failed to tie Jewish consciousness to one place.”6
A number of recent novels written by authors who were born in
Israel (or who are second or third generation) also question the exist-
ence of one personal and national geographical center. Ronit
Matalon’s novel The One Facing Us takes place outside Israel, following
pictures from a family album, and does not locate “home” necessarily
in Israel. Maya Arad’s Makom aher ve-ir zarah (A Different Place) ends
with 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 other
becomes the critique of a culture of the static and the whole. The stag-
nant waters and mirrors that reflect an ossified relationship to sacred
space are beginning to show ripples and cracks.”8 Although Israeli lit-
erature has always reflected the tension between different (and often
conflicting) definitions of identity and homelessness/home/home-
land, these recent cracks expose a more critical version of the issue. [143]
Thus, though it is probably much too early to conclude whether
Zionism succeeded in establishing a wholly new perspective of place in Between
Perspectives of
the Israeli-Jewish consciousness, we can already witness the process of
Space
rethinking “Jewish Space” in Israeli literature. Yehuda Amichai’s poems
present a particularly interesting example of this process. In the poetic •
Vered Shemtov
sequences I will discuss in this article, Amichai looks at the Israeli per-
spective of place from a “Jewish” standpoint, then turns to look at the
Jewish perspective from an Israeli point of view. Amichai writes from
“between” conflicting perspectives of place and reflects not only the
shift from a “Jewish” to an “Israeli” relation between place and identity
but 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 should
not) be completely negated.
I will argue that Amichai’s concept of place and, more specifically, his
literary 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 and
commentaries on his work, one cannot easily determine whether Ami-
chai is a revolutionary, post-Zionist, or antinational poet.9 Is he the poet
of the personal and the homey, as Amos Oz argues,10 or is he the national
poet, the poet of Jerusalem, of Zion/Israel, the poet whose work is recited
in 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 of
the two sequences will offer an explanation as to why Amichai’s poems
can be endorsed by readers with opposing ideological views.

Jewish Travel: “Lord of the Places”

I think . . . about the migration of Jews

who do not follow summer and winter,
life and death
as 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
 From the very first lines of the sequence “Jewish Travel: Change Is God
and Death Is His Prophet,” the reader is presented with a spiritual and
[144] physical journey as well as with a sharp distinction between two per-
spectives of place:
Jewish
Social Jewish travel [tiyul]. As it is written, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
Studies 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 of
the 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 described
in the sequence. The word is associated with the creation of roots and
connection to the land, and, as Orit ben Daviv argues, it is “an act of
consecration of the space” that was, and still is, considered by many
Israelis as a way of “marking territory and declaring ownership of the
land.” Ben Daviv focuses on the very popular hikes (tiyulim) that were
organized by the Society of the Protection of Nature in Israel and be-
came a major part of Israeli culture. But her conclusions are relevant
for a much larger phenomenon in Israeli culture. “Hikes,” she writes,
“help the Israelis stress their bond with the country and their link to
the land.” The hikes are also “a kind of activity that enables individuals
to 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 the
Jewish self. Unlike other trips, the Jewish hike, according to Amichai, is
not 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 the
gaze directed not at the geographical location but rather at a spiritual
point of reference. Given the Zionist criticism of Jewish life as not
rooted in land, in nature, or in physical activity, the description of the
Jewish version of a hike is read as condemnation. Moreover, the Jewish
hike is linked with death (rather than health). This association between
travel 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 mentioning
cemeteries and battle fields.17
In the second poem, which centers on the Jewish “game of hearts be-
tween east and west, between self and heart,” like “the trip Freud the
Jew took, wandering between body and mind, between mind and mind,
only to die between the two,” the speaker detaches himself from the [145]
“Jews,” referring to them as “they” (“they call their God Makom,
‘Place’”) and expressing a slight criticism of the Jews as living in one Between
Perspectives of
place and dreaming of another (“what a world this is, where the heart is
Space
in one place and the body in another?”). The first lines of the sequence
quoted above also reveal another Zionist criticism of the Jewish life in •
Vered Shemtov
exile. The exiled Jew is portrayed as weak and helpless, someone who
relies on God to save him instead of trying to save him- or herself. He is
described as passive rather than active and independent. The tiyul as a
search 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 between
the Israeli tiyul and the journeys of Jews in their personal and collective
history, it continues with a dialogue that exposes the many similarities
between the two.19 A common aspect of the Israeli/Jewish perspectives
is the role of memory in creating a connection between place and iden-
tity. The sequence describes several trips to specific places, which have a
concrete 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 and
telling the next generation the story of the events that occurred there
(turning the personal into the collective memory). Poem 5 includes an
example 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 in

poem 8, which is dedicated to “Jewish travel of another kind” in which
the speaker takes his wife and children to the village of his grand-
mother in Germany. The “marking” of territory is extended through
the poetic tiyul beyond the borders of Israel, and the trip metamor-
phoses into a hike in the mental Jewish space, rendering the claims for
ownership over the place visited in the hike meaningless.21
The Jewish aspect of Amichai’s Israeli identity and its relations to
 place shift from remembering one place to remembering the many
places Jews have traveled to (or will travel to). Amichai’s “Jewish
[146] Travel,” then, affirms Barnavi’s argument (quoted above) that “the
present protagonist in the mental drama created by a differential and
Jewish discontinuous space is no longer the Diaspora Jew but the Israeli.”
Social The sequence ends with a sentence about God. When looking at the
Studies concept 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 God
of the “fathers” and the “sons” and thus the symbolic string of zikaron that
holds the community together through time and calamities. The dia-
logue with “God of the Fathers” is therefore a search for the sources of
continuity that are embodied in the collective memory.22

It is this search for the sources of continuity between the “Israeli” and
the “Jewish” perspectives that leads Amichai’s speaker at the end of the
sequence to conclude that “Change is God and Death is his prophet.”
This continuity with the Jewish concept of place becomes part of the
Israeli 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 movement
both in physical and in referential space. This post-Zionist situation
moves the contemporary Israeli consciousness closer to the Jewish situ-
ation in exile. As we move in the poem from one place to another in
what the speaker defines as “the big Jewish journey,” we visit impossible
places: 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 move
from one place to another as if they all exist in the same time and as if
personal and collective memories were one. “I live without before and
after,” Amichai said in an interview with Helit Yeshurun. “Everything
exists. Nothing is dead for me. This is a Jewish characteristic—in the
Torah 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. The
movement in space is a cyclic motion in which one leaves and returns
to locations on the literary map. Amichai describes—but does not
completely “adopt” as part of his identity—this sense of movements in
space, and he creates a separate character in the poem who represents
the voice of wandering in space. This character does not have a name
or 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-
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 headed
toward those other days, but the Now is always with me.”24 One way to [147]
understand 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 metaphorical Between
Perspectives of
space, as Barnavi suggests:
Space

[D]id their multiple spaces render them over-sensitive to the problem of •

Vered Shemtov
space, 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 live
in metaphorical spaces: the past, the language, Scriptures, the destiny of
the Jewish people, the Promised Land, as well as in socialism, physics, mu-
sic, etc. It was precisely this existence in intangible “spaces” which enabled
them to survive. It would be wrong to attribute such a “mentality” only to
life 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 Amichai
created is associated with exile and death (and most likely with the Ho-
locaust), and in poem 14 he takes off and dramatically leaves the
scene. Left behind are “the suitcases on top of the closet. They are all
that 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 and
placed the suitcases (and all the memories they include) on top of the
closet. Amichai does not provide a clear answer in this sequence. But
comparing “Jewish Travel” to his earlier travelogue “The Travels of
Benjamin the Last from Tudela” presents some major changes in his
perspective. The poem has strong ties to the Zionist narrative, and the
poems include references to geographical locations as well as to texts
about place (mainly about Zion/Israel). “The Travels of Benjamin” is
a story of childhood, of coming of age, and of homecoming. The
speaker’s personal/national journey has a clear sense of direction,
from Europe to Israel; within Israel he moves from “Israel the national
homeland” to “Israel the personal home”:

I didn’t kiss the ground

When they brought me as a little boy to this land
But now that I have grown upon her,
She kisses me,
She holds me,
 She clutches me in love
In grass and thorns, in sand and sand,
[148] In wars and in this spring
Till the final kiss.26
Jewish
Social The poem describes a love of the land that is not a love of “the promised
Studies land” 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. The
land turns into a mother/lover figure (an inversion of the poetic con-
ventions in which the protagonist is the active lover) until the time of
death 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 in
poems 1 and 3, death, rather then Canaan or Israel, becomes the last
destination in the journey. If in “The Travels of Benjamin” Amichai
looks at new beginnings and childhood, in “Jewish Travel” he takes the
final 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 Europe
from Israel as “a different kind of journey,” and by criticizing the “Jew-
ish tiyul” and not completely accepting it as an integral part of the
speaker’s identity. But the latter term becomes less of an oxymoron as
the sequence progresses and the relations between space and identity
gradually shape the Jewish Israeli identity as a dialogue between two
ways of thinking and living in space. The sequence is a search not for
the boundaries between the two but for similarities and developments
in the Jewish-Israeli dependence in both referential and geographical
space. Amichai’s “tiyul,” in Jewish space, puts Jewish travels in the con-
text of Israeli culture, consecrating into the mental literary map all the
places that are part of the collective/personal memory and emphasiz-
ing the role of both “homecoming” and “wandering” in the creation of
contemporary Israeli identities.
The Literary Map of Israel

Caught in a homeland trap [149]

To talk now in this tired tongue,
Torn out of its sleep in the Bible: Between
Blinded, Perspectives of
It tooters from mouth to mouth. In a Space
tongue that described •
Miracles and God, now to say: automo- Vered Shemtov
bile, bomb, God.27
A reading of the sequence “Israeli Travel: Otherness Is All, Otherness Is
Love” 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 sense
of past and present. Even the references to other texts are limited pri-
marily to those written in or about modern Israel. Much like “Jewish
Travel,” it is a nostalgic journey that questions the ties between mental
and physical space as well as between place and identity, and it reflects
on 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 were
significant to the speaker. The importance of the places lies mostly in
the interactions the speaker had with other people who were with him
or who lived in these specific locations. The tension between Israel as a
“mental space” and Israel as a “physical space” is expanded through
these visits to include the role of the social place (the place as the center
of 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 of
Israel with intimacy and love.28 Indeed, numerous titles of Amichai’s
poems refer to specific cities, streets, or landmarks in Israel. Several al-
bums, such as Open Eyed Land (Nof glui eynaim) and Achziv, Cesarea and
One 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 poetry
and 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 places
in Israel such as the Dead Sea, Tabor, and Achziv.30
 Amichai’s poetry is perceived as having a strong association with Is-
raeli landscapes because it takes one of the most detailed poetic tours in
[150] the Land of Israel, stopping mainly at places of national significance and
creating a literary map that reflects the “less disputed” national map.
Jewish Amichai does not cross “the green line,” does not take his poetry to dis-
Social puted borders, and does not even present the Tel Aviv/ Jerusalem di-
Studies 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. It
is at the heart of Amichai’s literary map not only in terms of the number
of poems dedicated to the city but also as stated in the poems themselves:

The Greater Land of Israel is like a fat and heavy woman

And the state of Israel is like a young woman,
Supple and thin-waisted,
But in both of them
Jerusalem is always the count of the land,
The unstated count,
The throbbing and screaming orgasm
Which won’t end until the Messiah comes.31

Jerusalem is the location that connects contemporary Israel both to the

biblical life in the land and to the longing for the land from exile. In
Israel, as “the promised Land” and as “the small place,” Jerusalem has
the loudest poetic voice. (But, whereas in Lamentations the city cries
and weeps, in Amichai’s poetry it is “screaming orgasm.”)
When describing other places in Israel, Amichai often mentions
landscapes related to Israeli wars, especially the War of Independence.
Glenda Abramson comments on this in her article “Portrait of the Poet
in a Landscape”:

[Amichai’s] method of “writing” the landscape provides a topography of

war in which the entire country is able to be “read” . . . as a verbal map of
battle 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 when
the poem itself is devoted to personal memory.32

The sequence “Israeli Travel” is presented as a personal tour of

places that were meaningful to the speaker, but a look at the map cre-
ated by the place names mentioned in the poems reveals a journey
across the land from the Golan and the Galilee, through the Plain of
Sharon to the desert, and then back to the coast. Much like the literary
map of Amichai’s entire body of work about Israel, this sequence stays
away from controversial areas, on the one hand, and attempts to
capture the entire place, on the other.33 The descriptions are often con-
ventional, almost touristy; we find grapes, palms, orchards, “Kfar,” [151]
“Moshav,” and “Kibutz.” Some of the places mentioned are related to
Jewish and Israeli history, such as Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named after Between
Perspectives of
Mordechai Anielewitz (one of the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto), and
Space
the location of a major battle in the War of Independence.
The “Greater Land” and the actual “state of Israel” are integral parts •
Vered Shemtov
of any description of the landscape in the poems. In poem 6, the
speaker is looking for a high hill from which he can scout his life and his
journey. 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 the
impossibility of one person living in a place “that is always two.”34 The
mental 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 turns
and turns.”
Throughout the sequence “Israeli Travel,” Amichai describes the
places he tours as both texts and geographical locations. At times, he
himself turns the place into text by finding metaphorical relations be-
tween the landscape and the human condition. When he sees rows of
pines and fruit, for example, he says “people are also rows of pines and
fruit” (poem 7);35 when he passes next to the old water conduit in the
western Galilee, he compares it to himself, saying that they are both
transferring things from one place to the other (poem 16); and, when
he sees barbed wire in the Arava desert, he says to himself, “Hope
needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair” (poem 3). The poet
is aware now of his power to turn his personal life into part of the text
about 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 not
only for becoming part of the collective memory but also for seeing
change. The old places from the days of the poet’s childhood and ado-
lescence are turned into part of history. The school that the speaker
attended as a young boy turns into a museum to the past, and a crum-
bling deserted casino or an old spilling swimming pool become what
Amichai 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
 about Zion and/or Israel. In the sequence “Israeli Travel,” we find a
tour of Israel through the “songs of the land” (shirei moledet)— songs
[152] that represent the Zionist experience of building the land, of creating
a culture that captures or conquers the space. In one of the poems
Jewish (found only in the Hebrew original text),36 the speaker’s voice is
Social trapped in these songs of the land: through the first lines of some of
Studies the most famous shirei moledet we move from Tel Aviv to the hills of
Seikh Abrek and to Jerusalem. These songs, as Amichai writes in poem
4, “remained as flags that we left hanging after the holiday, like written
tombstones in an old cemetery.” Poem 5 is a web of quotations from
these patriotic songs (words in boldface emphasize the quotes from
popular folk songs):

And there were songs from which only the first line remained
In 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 pocket
Of 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 is
To accept the judgment, to surrender
To surrender and sing). The Jordan river will whisper in the valley
And its pure water and its pure water, of the secret tales
Of Jordan, of the secrets of Jordan.

This poem is perhaps Amichai’s most extreme and rebellious reaction

to the feeling of being “caught in a homeland trap” and having to
speak about life in Israel in “a tired tongue.”37 The songs seem to take
over the speaker’s voice. Between the lines from the different songs,
the poet resists “surrendering and singing” but seems to be controlled
by the songs and goes back to singing.
In previous collections of poems, Amichai deconstructs texts about
Israel 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
exile (rather than Jerusalem)—all in a playful tone and manner that
can 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 Jewish [153]
longing 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- Between
Perspectives of
quence “Poems of Zion and Jerusalem,” Amichai trivializes this sen-
Space
tence and places it in a new context, which he also does to the phrase
from the national hymn in poem 13.38 Through deconstructing the •
Vered Shemtov
texts about place, and in “Israeli Travel” reconstructing them into a col-
lage of quotes, Amichai presents the Zionist construction of the mental
place as anachronistic, part of a past perspective of the place. The songs
about the land, he writes in poem 4, “had already turned into geologi-
cal layers” waiting for “the earthquake that will blow them up and crush
them to pieces.”
Finally, mental and physical places interweave when events that took
place in a certain location continue to exist as memory, as part of the
place’s “geology,” or as “a museum.” In poem 8 (poem 4 in the English
edition), for example, a “picture of a plowman and horse from the turn
of the century in one of those early settlements” is remembered and
judged from the perspective of the present. In poem 11 (poem 7 in the
English edition), the speaker, having returned to his school in Jerusa-
lem, says:

I stood near the school building. This is the room

Where 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 us
Near the rickety steps, the tumult
That 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 for
personal and philosophical reflections about the land. In most of the
poems in the sequence, the place itself does not change much; it serves
as 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 a
feeling of estrangement, as though the geographical landscape is not as
familiar as it had been (poems 2 and 17 [poems 2 and 12 in the English
 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) and
[154] from the place as the location of social interaction. The people that the
speaker knew and would like to visit in his journey are not there any-
Jewish more (poem 2); the people who live now in the places visited in the tour
Social are strangers (“Years ago I visited that neighborhood; now I don’t know
Studies a 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 been
home, but as “a place.” This small place shapes the individual’s identity
not because of a dialogue between makom and ha-makom (as in “Jew-
ish Travel”) but because of the social interaction one happened to
have in the places in which he lived and visited. In a poem about Bat
Galim, the last of the sequence, the speaker walks around the neigh-
borhood and sees the same death notice in several locations. “By now
I am quite familiar with the dead man’s name and the name of his wife
and 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 the
local social interactions, is what defines us. Place changes us, makes us
an “Other,” different from the self we could have been had we lived on
a different street or in a neighborhood. But, according to Amichai, we
are 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 place
turns each one of us, as Amichai says in the first poem, into an
“Other”—and this Otherness (which in Hegelian terms both negates
and creates us) becomes everything and, as such, becomes love.
In the first poem of the “Israeli Travel” sequence, which takes place
in 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 I
said to myself: Otherness is all, Otherness is love.” The place, therefore,
does not define a national identity but enables the individuals who are
part 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 not
possible 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
Haifa harbor. Amichai had arrived there in a boat from Germany when
he 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”). [155]
Despite his estrangement from the place and the feeling of being
caught in the “choir” of statehood Zionism, the speaker feels that Israel Between
Perspectives of
is his place, his “here,” the place from which he does not need, or want,
Space
to move.
•
Vered Shemtov

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 thirst
Lie the houses of the city. Great rifts in
the earth
From 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 situation
in which “exile is back in fashion.” Shapira argues that Israelis no
longer define themselves as a uniform society but as a multicultural
place, not because Israel strives or is being directed to become one but
as a result of the many waves of immigrants that did not negate exile.
According to Shapira, as the population of people who were raised in
Israel increases, we see more of the natural connection between the
native and his/her surroundings; Israelis tend to stay in the land not
because of ideology but because this is their home and their cultural
and social environment. The Jewish identity, Shapira argues, is in a
constant dialogue with the Jewish past, with religion, and with tradi-
tion. The dialogue comes sometime out of conflict and at other times
out of identification, but this dispute takes place within the bound-
aries of Jewish-Israeli identity and without any attempt to deviate from
it 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. The
dialogue between past and present, between the Jewish and the Israeli,
 and between the national and personal takes place without the need to
justify the connection to the place or the relations between self and
[156] place. This is a step that Amichai takes beyond (or away from) the Zion-
ism of 1948. His claims resemble Shapira’s description of Israelis who
Jewish stay in Israel not out of ideology but because it is their home. This leads
Social in “Israeli Travel” to a shift away from defining one’s identity as part of a
Studies collective that belongs to the land to perceiving oneself as an individual
who is part of a collective, who “naturally” forms a community with
others 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 always
able (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 songs
from which only the first line remained,” he seems to be trapped in the
language 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 sequences
do not create a polyphonic reality or a dialogue between the different
perspectives of place even when they stand in opposition. What Ami-
chai does, instead, is to present the differences as reflected inside one
voice, to combine them into one poetic unity and one language and
thus to create, within his speaker’s voice, a place in which the conflict-
ing perspectives meet. This is reflected also in the repeated theme in
Amichai’s poetry of a self that is constructed from diverse parts, each a
different 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
 Will not console us.
The light patches on the dark, ancient reconstructed vase:
What is new in me and what is from my forefathers? [157]
For we are yesterday, for we are of others.
Shadows pass over our faces, shadows pass Between
Through us. This night too Perspectives of
Is the shadow of another.42 Space
•
To the idea that we are shaped by the place, Amichai adds the concept Vered Shemtov
that one has the power to change the place. But this power does not
lead to action or optimism; the following line repeats the pessimistic
sentence 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 homeland
trap.”
“Jewish Travel” and “Israeli Travel” take place within a literary map
parallel to that of the establishment, in a language that “shakes” or
question the relations between mental and geographical representa-
tions of the place and in a voice that internalizes contemporary and
old voices in and about the place. These aspects of the poem creates
not 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 on
interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisions
through 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 an
image of the world of history. This is the moment of aesthetic distance
that provides the narrative with a double edge . . . a difference “within,” a
subject 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 of
history and literature, bridging the home and the world.43

This place of “in-between” describes Amichai’s position in the two

travel poems. In these poems Amichai is not “rewriting the place”; in-
stead, he presents us with a new “reading” of the cultural texts about the
place—or, as he writes in one of his poems, he “recycles” the old lan-
guage.44 He questions, criticizes, brings new doubts and meanings, and
in some cases revives literal meanings of metaphors and phrases about
place. He is at home in this language, writing from “within” the lan-
guage of both longing to Zion and materializing the Zionist dream even
 as he negates it as a national text and tries to bring into it the personal
and mundane experience. The deconstructed or “decomposed” texts
[158] remain part of the language of the poems and part of the poetic voice of
the speaker. The bridging between the national map and the home is
Jewish done through in inclusion of both places within the same voice.
Social My reading of Amichai’s concept of place presents his poems as
Studies creating an allusion of an extra-ideological location. In this I follow
Roberto 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 place
means, after all, to naturalize a process of historical formation. And along
with history to negate the historical process, struggles, and tensions that
made 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 almost
invisible in Amichai’s poetry. Otherness, deconstruction, negation are
all 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 a
postmodern hybrid place through the constructed voice of the
speaker. And thus, for a culture preoccupied with history and ideolog-
ical struggles—in a place that cannot console anyone—and for the
current Israeli generation that feels Israel is home because it is their
small personal place, reading Amichai’s poetry creates a glimpse of
hope, of something beyond history and politics. And as such, even if
only for an instant, his poetry does console his readers.

Notes

1 From “The Land Knows,” in Yehuda Amichai, Patuah, sagur,

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
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
 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’ [159]
suddenly comes an unknown
young man and writes : ‘I would Between
like to die in my bed.’ It was a Perspectives of
very courageous act, one that Space
changed worlds. . . . In his revo- •
lution, Amichai led his poetry Vered Shemtov
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.
 14 Ibid.
15 Reuven Alcalay, The Complete
[160] Hebrew-English Dictionary (Ramat
Gan, 1981).
16 Orit ben Daviv, “Tiyul (Hike) as
Jewish
an Act of Consecration of
Social
Space,” in Eyal and Yoram,
Studies 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
 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 34
(Tel Aviv, 1992) and Akhziv,
Keisaryah ve-ahavah ahat (Tel
Aviv, 1996).
30 Yehuda Amichai, Shirei Yehuda 35
Amichai, 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 2003).
31 From “The Land Knows,” in
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 36
464.
32 Glenda Abramson, “Portrait of 37
the Poet in a Landscape,” in
Abramson, The Experienced Soul, 38
59–60.
33 It is interesting to compare the 39
attempt to create an illusion of
encompassing the entire land in 40
one sequence to the description 41
of the land in the poem “Love of
the Land.” There it is “a pack- 42
aged land” that is neatly 43
wrapped and small enough to
be envisioned in its entirety in 44
one’s memory: “And the land is
very small / I can encompass it 45
inside me. . . . Hence I can feel
all of it / With my eyes closed:
see-valley-mountain. / Hence, I
can remember all that hap- [161]
pened in her / All at once, like a
person remembering / His Between
whole life in the moment of Dy- Perspectives of
ing” (Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Space
Poetry, 338). •
See “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, why Vered Shemtov
Jerusalem?” poem number 9
(which was not included in the
English edition).
On nature images in the poetry
of Amichai, see Nili Scharf Gold,
Not as a Cypress (Jerusalem, 1994).
Amichai, Patuah, sagur, patuah,
66–76.
See the epigraph at the begin-
ning of this text section.
Amichai, Shirei Yehuda Amichai,
2: 197, 3: 14–15.
From “This Place,” in Yehuda
Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 111.
Ibid., 53.
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry,
177.
Ibid., 111.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of
Culture (London, 1994), 13.
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry,
294.
Roberto Dainotto, Place in Litera-
ture (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 2.