Yehuda Amichai

The Making of Israel's National Poet

Nili Scharf Gold

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781584658122
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century's (and Israel's) leading poets. In this remarkable book, Nili Scharf Gold offers a profound reinterpretation of Amichai's early works and reconstructs his poetic biography. Her close reading of his oeuvre, untapped notebooks, and a cache of unpublished letters to a woman identified as Ruth Z. that Gold discovered convincingly demonstrates how the poet's German past infused his work, despite his attempts to conceal it as he adopted an Israeli identity.

1 Introduction

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CAMOUFLAGE AS THE KEY TO THE POETRY OF YEHUDA AMICHAI

One evening in 1997, I went to a university lecture in New York City with Yehuda Amichai, Israel's best-known poet. We sat in a back row at the end of a crowded hall and waited for the speaker to begin, when suddenly he touched my arm and said, almost in a whisper, “Do you see, three rows in front of us, near the aisle, a woman sits? Her name is Ruth Z. Do you remember the poem about the one who ‘ran away to America’? I wrote it about her.”

I knew the text. “The Rustle of History's Wings, as They Said Then” is a bitter poem from 1980 fraught with details about a bygone love during curfew in Jerusalem, a love that eventually ended with a betrayal.¹ I wanted to know more, yet something in the sound of the poet's voice prevented me from asking any questions. I wondered why he revealed the subject of the poem to me, but in our subsequent meetings before his death in 2000, I did not dare inquire about the woman we had seen in the lecture hall.

As fate would have it, two years after Amichai died, I sat face to face with the woman whose name and features were forever etched in my memory. A friend introduced me to her, saying, “You two have something in common. You both knew Amichai.”

“I know,” I said.

“How do you know?” asked Ruth, startled.

“Amichai told me who you were some years ago.” I omitted Amichai's reference to the poem about the woman who had deserted Israel for America. Later, however, it became clear to me that Ruth Z. knew “History's Wings” very well. As a matter of fact, she alone knew the private history to which the poem's lines allude.

This time, I decided not to suppress the urge to investigate. “Would you be willing to tell me what happened between the two of you?”

“Yes. Come see me and I'll tell you.”

A few months later, I went to Ruth's home in New York.

We sat in her apartment for many hours while she unveiled a story that had been kept hidden for half a century. As I listened to her, little by little a chapter opened in front of me about the love affair of Ruth Z. and Amichai, Amichai's emergence as a poet, and the history of Israel and its people. After we became closer, Ruth confided to me that she had a stack of letters from Amichai that she had not touched in almost sixty years.

The letters had been sealed in a dark tin box since April 1948.

When Ruth opened the box, my heart skipped a beat. In front of me lay over one hundred pages filled with cramped handwriting, as well as a faded blue, hand-bound notebook and a tiny booklet held together by a rusty safety pin. I knew that these papers, strewn on Ruth's coffee table, represented the earliest substantial body of Amichai's writings in existence and that I was the first to see them besides Ruth.

The magnitude of this finding overwhelmed me. I had spent the previous year at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (where Amichai had deposited his papers shortly before his death), struggling to read tiny, ripped pads, and attempting to decipher lines that the poet had jotted to himself.² The earliest documents in the archive are dated 1954, when Amichai was already thirty years old and was about to publish his first book of poems.³ And behold, there in Ruth's living room, dozens of pages in meticulous Hebrew script, written by the poet when he was twenty-three, were spread in front of my eyes. The letters are numbered, as though Amichai wanted to facilitate scholarly citation or to maintain control over the continuity of his narrative.⁴ When Ruth and I started reading the densely written aerograms, I realized that they chronicled not only the days before the poet became a poet, but also the historical times before the State of Israel became a state.

Over the weeks that followed, I felt as if I were participating in a séance. I heard the tale of those momentous months in two intersecting voices: the feminine voice of Ruth Z. at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the resurrected voice of Amichai, inscribed in blue ink on the face of lightweight paper, from the middle of the twentieth.

Amichai's love affair with Ruth Z. lasted from January 1947 to April 1948, and the poet's name still bears the mark of their love story. In the summer of 1947, after they had both graduated from the teachers' college in Jerusalem, they decided to build their life together in the port city of Haifa. The teaching position that Amichai found at the Geula Elementary School there required that he replace his German surname, “Pfeuffer,” with a Hebrew one. The couple started looking for a Hebrew name that would melodically complement both “Yehuda” and “Ruth.”⁵ They had been trying unsuccessfully to find a nice-sounding name beginning with “P” to match “Pfeuffer” when Ruth finally called out, “Amichai! Yehuda Amichai!” She thought that the name “Amichai,” which means “my nation is alive” (ami, my nation; chai, is alive), mirrored their patriotic hopes and feelings.

The young man hesitated. “Yehuda Amichai? Isn't it too bombastic?”

Ruth answered, “You want to be a great poet, right? Yehuda Amichai sounds like the name of a great poet.” And so it came to pass.⁶

In the end, however, Ruth Z. did not move to Haifa, nor did she adopt the new, patriotic surname. On August 31, 1947, she boarded a ship for America, leaving Amichai longing for her and in total denial about the fact that she might never return to him. Her departure motivated an ardent correspondence that lasted for eight months. In the poem that he wrote about her thirty-three years later, Yehuda Amichai bemoans:

I paid five shillings and changed my ancestral name

from the Diaspora to a proud Hebrew name to match hers

… [she] fled to America…

and left me with my new name …⁷

With a “new name,” a rented room, and a “teacher's paltry salary,”⁸ Amichai began his life in Haifa. His letters to Ruth Z., he thought, would be the ideal repository for his observations, reflections, and lyrical musings. And, indeed, the forty-three aerograms he wrote from September through November 1947 document Amichai's poetic growth and his romantic image of himself as a poet writing to his beloved; but history soon reared its head. As the vote in the United Nations on the partition plan for Palestine approached, Amichai labored as a teacher and a poet under the shadow of escalating violence. After the resolution passed on November 29, 1947, and the conflict between Jews and Arabs intensified, he was drawn into military activities, ultimately becoming a teacher by day and a soldier by night. His life plan to be a poet and his national, patriotic duty pulled him in different directions. Yet through his grueling schedule, his fatigue, and the bloodshed that surrounded him, Amichai persevered in sending letters to Ruth. He stopped writing to her only after he found out that she was marrying another man; her “Dear John” letter arrived less than a month before the full eruption of the Israeli War of Independence.

In interviews he granted later in his life, Amichai rarely mentioned Ruth Z., and if he did so, it was only in passing, without saying her name. In these interviews, he also often left out the eight months he spent in Haifa, the time when he first blossomed as a poet.⁹ An omission of this kind occurs in the only monograph dedicated to him.¹⁰ In the list “Dates and Turning Points in Amichai's Life” at the end of that monograph, Yehudit Tzvik, the editor, disregards the poet's time in Haifa, lumping together his teaching there with the fifteen years that he taught at various schools in Jerusalem. Amichai, who was still living when this publication appeared, probably approved this biographical outline and decided to exclude that turbulent school year he spent in Haifa.¹¹ A more dramatic and deliberate erasure of his memories from that period is manifested in the fate of one early poem published in 1951, entitled “Other Evenings.”¹²

Amichai's poems, which began trickling into newspapers in 1949, often retain the imprint of his distant beloved and his unmistakable longing for her. Especially heartrending are these lines from “Other Evenings”: “Our love is embroidered on the room and on them, / and your blue dress and your red dress strewn with white dots.”¹³ Almost sixty years later, Ruth Z. pointed to a picture taken in Jerusalem in 1947; she was wearing the polka-dot dress that the poem so wistfully recalls. In Amichai's debut volume, Now and in Other Days, however, the dress was missing. Its polka dots were also absent from what is now considered Amichai's canonic collection, Poems: 1948–1962, where this first book was republished.¹⁴ This particular early poem was excised from Amichai's representative corpus, and although the poet later reinstated a few poems he had initially passed over, “Other Evenings” remained one of the outcasts. This poem of yearning was not the only remnant of the relationship to disappear. The story of Amichai's love for Ruth Z., and, with it, the record of his first steps as a poet all but vanished. The self-censorship that Amichai exercised with regard to this single poem is symptomatic of the way he confined the memory of that time and much of its poetic legacy to the subtext of his canonic verse. Amichai's own biographical accounts and, more significantly, the lyrical works that established him as a poet cover up his personal saga during these crucial years.

Thanks to Ruth's cooperation and the discovery of the letters, this book is the first to expose the deep impression that Ruth Z. made on the poet's life and early work. Most consequential to the understanding of Amichai's oeuvre is the reinterpretation presented here of Amichai's flagship collection, Poems: 1948–1962, in light of these new findings. Furthermore, the content of the letters confirms that Amichai suppressed his artistic and emotional origins in his poetry.

The question, however, remains: Why would a poet who considered himself lyrical and autobiographical cover up this defining period of his life?¹⁵ Was the pain of Ruth abandoning him so great that he was unable to approach the affair or even its temporal and geographical background? A review of Amichai's poetic oeuvre and his self-portrayals in interviews reveals that concealing the memory of Ruth Z. was not an isolated incident. In fact, the poetic suppression of this trauma is a microcosm of an overarching behavioral, psychological, and literary force at the heart of Amichai's verse. In 1984, I identified this poetic pattern and later devoted a chapter to it in my dissertation (although I did not name it “camouflage” at the time).¹⁶ After reading an early draft of my dissertation, Amichai told me that I had made him aware of this behavior, and he tacitly acknowledges this admission in his 1989 poem, “What Did I Learn in the Wars.”¹⁷ Here, Amichai testifies that “camouflage” is a defense that has served him superbly in both art and life. Accordingly, in this book I refer to the underlying literary and psychological principle that determined so much of Amichai's poetry as “camouflage.” Amichai's relationship with Ruth Z., then, was only one of a number of significant facets of his life that he chose to camouflage in his verse.

Other areas that Amichai buried deep in his poems belong to the world of his childhood. Amichai lived his early years as Ludwig Pfeuffer, far from the Israeli sites that formed the setting for his affair with Ruth Z. He grew up in Wuerzburg, Germany, the ancient capital of Franconia, whose arching bridges and cobblestone alleys are adorned with statues of saints and ornate fountains. In his beautiful hometown, in the region of Bavaria, Amichai knew another Ruth, whom everybody called “Little Ruth.” The memory of her name undoubtedly resonated in his initial attraction to the striking Ruth Z. whom he met in Jerusalem in 1947. Little Ruth had blue eyes and chestnut hair; she was approximately the same age as Amichai and lived a few houses up the street. The two were so inseparable that the members of their community referred to them as “bride and groom.” They had a unique friendship, deep and “completely platonic.” ¹⁸

Little Ruth was the daughter of the revered Rabbi Hanover, and Amichai's father was one of the beloved leaders of Wuerzburg's Orthodox Jewish community. During services, Little Ruth's father delivered oratorical sermons in German, draped in his majestic robe, while Amichai's father coddled his son under his fuzzy prayer shawl.

The commanding synagogue was housed in the same building complex as the German-Jewish school the children attended. Little Ruth Hanover and Amichai had been classmates since kindergarten and, starting in second grade, Little Ruth would pick up Amichai from his house every morning.¹⁹ The path to school took the children through Wuerzburg's most magnificent landmarks. Rennweg, the broad boulevard that stretches from the train tracks toward the center of town, led them to a pair of gigantic, intricate wrought-iron gates. These gates guard the Hofgarten, the elaborate, terraced garden surrounding Wuerzburg's grand palace, the Residenz.²⁰ Inside the garden, the two friends passed the baroque fountains, whose bubbling waters cascaded around copper statues of sensual nymphs and wild animals, but they could not stop there in the morning lest they be late for school.

Some of these scenes unfolded in front of my eyes when I visited Wuerzburg in 2001 and 2004 and walked in the footsteps of the two Jewish children on their way to school.

In his apartment in Washington Heights, Norbert Hellmann, an eighty-year-old classmate of the two friends, remembered that Little Ruth and Amichai were the brightest students in their class. She was studious and took school seriously, and, although Amichai was the class clown and loved to make people laugh, he was entranced by the stories and poems they read with their teachers.²¹ Paralleling the study of Jewish texts, German language and culture formed the core of the secular curriculum that the Jewish school shared with the Bavarian system.²² Its goal was to instill the students with a love of the German homeland, its language, literature, and culture.²³

Even after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, everyday life for the young students at the Jewish school continued with relative normalcy. In the winter of 1934, their main preoccupation was the school's traditional and highly celebrated Hanukkah play. On a snowy day, Little Ruth and Amichai got into a heated argument about the casting of the lead role of Judah Maccabee. During recess, the ten-year-old girl borrowed another boy's bike, rode off, and got into a life-threatening accident. Her leg had to be amputated, and she was bedridden for almost a year. Amichai visited her in the hospital, and when she recovered and had been fitted with a prosthesis, they again walked to school together, but their world had changed. By 1935, Nazi youths had begun assaulting students from the Jewish school. The hounded children learned to dodge stones and glue themselves to the walls of buildings, skipping from doorway t...