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"At the end of his life, as he felt death pressing in on him, he was obviously moved by a sense of sadness. Yet it is a touching expression of his lifelong enterprise that he could be playful in contemplating the end and that he could, in his final writings, celebrate women...."
"The best of them are among the finest love poems written in the twentieth century."
-Robert Alter - The Jewels of the Endtime - Yehudah Amichai at 100 in TLS Times Literary Supplement, May 3, 2024
[MS: Robert Alter, born 1935 is age 89.
Yehuda Amichai born in Germany May 3, 1924, passed away in September 2000.
Alter writes an essay in May 2024 in appreciation of Amichai's love poetry, on the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday .
Alter's essay is here, but behind a pay wall. For a small fee, the whole essay is available from TLS. Edits and formatting or comments are supplied below.
Amichai's poetry is the subject of a Sefaria Sheet (here) in the Robert Alter MS Sefaria Sheet Collection here.
As we struggle with the sadness of the war against Hamas and with the torment of the hostages and their families, we look for comfort from Alter and Amichai. The approach of death, ie aging is always tough, but now, on top of that: How do they find the emotional calm to write and think about poetry and the courage to keep hope alive, until better times.]
A Selection From Alter's Essay in May 2024 TLS
"One delightful poem attempts to cross the gender gap, imagining what it feels like to be a woman – to slip on a dress like a woman, to move like a woman, to experience the world like a woman. A poem in his last collection, published in 1998, begins, “King David loves many women. He has an ark of love / full of beautiful women, like a holy ark filled with Torah scrolls” ....
"Another in that volume announces: “When I die, I want only women to handle me in the Chevra Kadisha / and to do with my body what they please: cleanse my ears of the last / words I heard, wipe my lips of the last words I said, / erase the sights I saw from my eyes, smooth my brow of worries, / and fold my arms across my chest like the sleeves of a shirt after ironing” .... The Chevra Kadisha is the traditional burial society, always composed of men only. These fanciful lines were written by a poet in old age, surely pondering the imminence of his own death. As his poems had put reverse spins on traditional ideas and texts for his entire career, he imagines the preparation of the body for burial joyfully.
One function of the Chevra Kadisha before the burial is to wash the body. Here that act of what is called in Hebrew “purification” is an almost erotic pleasuring by gently solicitous women. The image of the arms folded “like the sleeves of a shirt after ironing” is one of those amusingly witty enlistments of the quotidian that Yehuda Amichai had used from the beginning. ...
At the end of his life, as he felt death pressing in on him, he was obviously moved by a sense of sadness. Yet it is a touching expression of his lifelong enterprise that he could be playful in contemplating the end and that he could, in his final writings, celebrate women, the recipients of his delighted contemplation and, for some, of his passion all his life."
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Alter often highlights how Yehuda Amichai brought together modern Hebrew poetry and the Bible, for example, the references above to King David and to Traditional rituals like prayers of death and mourning .
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[MS:Revised May 24, 2024]