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PARTISAN REVIEW
always trying to understand her. In late September's frightening political
climate, the city seemed more vulnerable without the man who wrote:
A city that has a wall, as Jerusalem has,
is like children who have a father,
and neither wall nor father can protect them any longer.
For years, the poems and the poet protected the city, gave it strength
in times of deep and cutting hardship. But what about the writer of
those lines? I wanted
to
understand procedure,
to
understand etiquette
in a case like this. How is a poet mourned, anyway, and by whom?
On the front page. That was the first surprise, the "how" of mourn–
ing, which I discovered that Sunday, the first working-day after
Amichai's passing. A poet dies-true, a major world poet; true, a
national treasure-and his picture covers the front page of every news–
paper in the country.
Never have I felt more American than in the days immediately fol–
lowing Amichai's death. I realized then, walking around Jerusalem, that
the country we are born in determines how we look at poets, at writers,
and at remembering them. In Israel, a poet's death is personal stuff.
Housewives and storeowners streamed to Amichai's funeral. At the
bank, a key employee was out:
Amichai's funeral,
her co-worker told
me, as if I should have guessed . Hundreds of people were cramming into
Safra Square downtown
to
pay their respects.
My bank errand would have to wait, so I went for a coffee. In the
corner of the coffee shop, there was a large maroon armchair covered
with a ribbon. No one could sit there. "In memoriam, Yehuda
Amichai," read the cardboard sign on the chair.
People I met assumed I had heard. "You must be in mourning," a
journalist said to me on Saturday afternoon, over Shabbat lunch. This
is the first thing he said to me, his opening line. He did not bother to
introduce himself, all he knew was that the hostess told him I was inter–
ested in poetry.
You
must be in mourning?
Everyone was mourning. That was the "by whom" of mourning-the
assumption on the streets, on the buses, at dinner tables throughout the
country- that "the mourners" meant everyone. Before Shabbat, the
mourning was on the radio, since it was too late for newsprint. Meir
Shalev, the Israeli novelist, sobbed on the radio and said he "didn't know
how he could live without Amichai's poems." Later, the newspapers
sought out other poets for comment, and got novelists to write a few
paragraphs explaining Amichai's importance to all of Israeli literature.
