AVIYA KUSHNER
615
How unusual, I found myself thinking, how un-American. I read all the
newspapers that Sunday, openmouthed at the amount of coverage.
Here, then, is a brief summary of what the newspapers had to say.
Israel's three major papers have different readerships, ranging from
Ha 'aretz,
considered the most intellectual and basically the
New York
Times
of Israel, to
Ma'ariv
and
Yediot Aharonot,
both middle-of-the–
road tabloids that are written in simple Hebrew. Amichai was on the
front page of all three. Imagine any American poet-living or dead-on
the front page of the
New York Times,
the
New York Post,
and
New
York Newsday
on the same day. (I squinted hard, tried to imagine it,
and could not.)
In
Ha'aretz,
the headline read "The Bread and Water of Poetry." It
noted that though Amichai was considered in many ways a "national ·
poet," he succeeded in discarding that label and remaining an "inti–
mate" poet, a writer who always wrote in singular, not in plural.
The prime minister, Ehud Barak, issued a press release which
Ha'aretz
quoted: "We have lost one of the greatest creators in the State
of Israel and in the Jewish nation." Barak said, "Amichai will be
remembered not only for his writing but for his love of mankind, his
deep tie to homeland, and his description of the horrors of war." Would
an American president ever issue such a release? Could any of our recent
presidents name three characteristics of any of our major poets' work?
There was something else, something critical which
Ha'aretz
noted,
between its expected remarks calling Amichai "the father of modern
Hebrew poetry" and "Israel's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize."
Amichai was a symbol of his generation of poet-soldiers. This was the
generation of Jews who were born outside Israel-in Amichai's case, in
Germany-and came and built the country both physically and cultur–
ally, to the point that they represent what an "Israeli" is. Yitzhak
Rabin's Nobel acceptance speech, which included a line from an
Amichai poem, is an example of Amichai and his generation's impor–
tance
to
the nation, which the newspaper noted.
Ma'ariv,
the second major newspaper, also emphasized the parallels
between Amichai's life and the life of the State. A German emigrant
from an Orthodox home, the poet came to Jerusalem at age eleven, fell
in love with the city, and never left it. He served in the British Army,
then the Palmach-the pre-State fighting unit-and, of course, fought in
the War of Independence. Amichai often drew on his war experiences
to
create what became classics of contemporary Hebrew poetry.
Yediot Aharonot
emphasized the accessibility of Amichai's work.
"When we read Amichai, we fee l as if he has written his verse in our
