Looking through Moment’s poetry archive—half a century of dreamwork, meditation, song and lived history—I came across 18 poems by Yehuda Amichai. Born in Germany in 1924 and raised in Jerusalem after his family fled Europe, he fought in wars and advocated for peace.
In a 2016 issue of The American Poetry Review, poet and critic David Biespiel described Amichai’s work in terms of its emotional alchemy: “He translates the hardness of existence into new tenderness; tenderness into spiritual wonder that is meant to quiet outrage; and outrage into a mixture of worry and love and warmth…”
Instead of avoiding difficult truths, he revealed them. The two poems we’ve reprinted here confront complexities of kinship and conflict without insisting on their pathos; instead, they enact it. In “This Is My Mother’s House,” a grown man contemplates the decades-old vine that clings to his childhood home and senses the way his mother’s footsteps still sound within him “like heartbeats.” “On the Day of Atonement” narrates a passing encounter between an Israeli Jew and an Arab shopkeeper on Yom Kippur in 1967, the year of the Six Day War. Standing outside a shop of “threads and buttons,” the Israeli is moved by its resemblance to his father’s shop in Europe long ago. Although he never speaks to the shopkeeper, he feels he has “explained…in my heart” the ways in which their ruptured histories reflect one another’s.
One might ask what role poetry plays in a magazine like this, what it adds to Moment’s ongoing engagement with Jewish life and culture. One needn’t agree with Shelley that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” to believe that poems speak and sing and argue in ways that are distinct from other uses of language. That distinction is impossible to define but easy to recognize. What poetry can offer—image by image—is different from, and more intimate than, knowledge. It lets us almost understand what is hard to see or say—a form of revelation that’s both deeply familiar and strikingly new. —Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
THIS IS MY MOTHER’S HOUSE
This is my mother’s house. The plant
which started to climb on it
in my childhood has grown since and
clings to its wall. But I was
torn away long ago.
Mother, in pain you gave birth to me,
in pain lives your son.
His sadness is combed and groomed,
His happiness well dressed.
With his dream he earns his bread
and with his bread his dream.
The average annual rainfall
does not touch him
and degrees of temperature will
pass by him in weeping shade.
Oh my mother, who presented
me with a first welcome drink
in this world: L’chaim, l’chaim,
my son!
I haven’t forgotten a thing, but my life
has become calm and deep
like a second gulp deep in the throat,
not like the first one, with sucking
smacking, happy lips.
Your steps on the stairs
have always stayed in me,
never coming nearer and never going away,
like heartbeats.
ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT
On the Day of Atonement in 1967, I
put on my dark holiday suit and went
to the Old City in Jerusalem. I stood,
for some time, before the alcove of an
Arab’s shop, not far from Damascus
Gate, a shop of buttons and zippers
and spools of thread in all colors, and
snaps and buckles. A glorious light and
a great many colors like a Holy Ark
with its doors ajar.
I told him in my heart that my father,
too, had such a shop of threads and
buttons. I explained to him in my
heart all about the tens of years and the
reasons and the circumstances because
of which I am now here and my
father’s shop is in ashes there, and he
is buried here.
By the time I had finished, it was the
hour of “the locking of the Gates.” He
too pulled down the shutter and locked
the gate, and I went back home with
all the worshippers.
“This Is My Mother’s House” translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes
[Reprinted from Moment Magazine, January 1979]
“On The Day of Atonement” translated from the Hebrew by T. Carmi
[Reprinted from Moment Magazine, September 1980]
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the most widely read Israeli poet of the 20th century, whose poems have been translated into some 40 languages. Among his honors and awards are the Shlonsky Prize (1957), the Brenner Prize (1969), the Bialik Prize (1976) and the Israel Prize in 1982. Author of 11 volumes of poetry, two novels, numerous plays and a book of short stories, Amichai was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.
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