Open Closed Open: Poems [Hardcover]

Yehuda Amichai (Author), Chana Bloch (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0151003785 | ISBN-13: 978-0151003785 | Publication Date: April 1, 2000 | Edition: 1st

Amichai writes of the language of love, and tea with roasted almonds, of desire and love. Of a Jewish cemetery whose groundskeeper is an expert on flowers and seasons of the year, but no expert on buried Jews; of Russian shirts embroidered in the colors of love and death; of Jerusalem, the city where everything sails: the flags, the prayer shawls, the caftans, the monks' robes, the kaffiyehs, and young women's dresses. The poet tenderly, mischievously, breaks open the grand diction of the revered Jewish verses and supplications and suddenly discovers the light that his own experience casts upon them. Here, the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting, nostalgia for God and a better world, dust and heat, and tamarisk trees that stand as flight attendants for the next millennium, saying, "You can still get a seat on the third millennium before liftoff." Open Closed Open-poems at once meditative and playful, anxious and full of hope, sung in a language of biblical directness and meaning, that through the microcosm of the everyday give us the gift of the world at large.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the centerpiece of Open Closed Open, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai ponders his most treasured keepsake, "a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed / many generations ago." This object is, needless to say, more than a souvenir: throughout the zigzagging lines of "The Amen Stone," it allows Amichai to reconstruct bits and pieces of the past, "fragment to fragment, / like the resurrection of the dead, a mosaic, / a jigsaw puzzle. Child's play." The ensuing narrative leads the poet directly into his nation's history. Yet this is not merely a political but a personal resurrection, for Amichai sees himself as the stone's well-weathered counterpart, a byproduct of time. And he, too, has experienced an inevitable erosion: "Jewish History and World History / grind me between them like two grindstones / sometimes to a powder."

Throughout the collection, Amichai returns again and again to this convergence. In "Once I Wrote 'Now and in Other Days.' Thus Glory Passes, Thus the Psalms Pass," for example, he chronicles the destruction of Huleh swamp, an open ecosystem drained by the Israeli government during the 1950s to fight malaria and provide arable land:

Now half a century later they are filling it with water again
because it was a mistake. Perhaps my entire life
I've been living a mistake

Indeed, Amichai's misgivings seem to extend to the very foundations of the modern Israeli state. Might not the "bright-colored birds" who fled the swamp "for their lives" be figures for the displaced Palestinians? Huleh, we learn, was eventually restored. But sowing the seeds of peace is as precarious an enterprise as rebuilding a fragile ecosystem.

Elsewhere, "My Son Was Drafted" records a father's concern and fear for his military-age child. Amichai wishes his son were joining an army without a war, where soldiers serve as decorations around monuments, where the ornate and impractical replace the camouflaged and tactical. But here, too, the father has a few spiritual heirlooms to pass on to his son, which incidentally allow him to open up yet another closed system:

I would like to add two more commandments to the ten:
the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not change,"
and the Twelfth Commandment "Thou shalt change. You will change."
My dead father added those for me.

A man, Amichai suggests, is more pliable once he has been opened up, refreshed, newly defined. Cultures, alas, are not so flexible. But the rich language of Open Closed Open, which has been meticulously translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, holds out the hope that nations, too, might submit to the Twelfth Commandment. --Ryan Kuykendall

From Publishers Weekly

Constructing a lineage in which to place himself, Amichai begins these verses of personal and cultural history with a stone from a destroyed Jewish graveyard; and moves on to enact the story of David, recall poems by Ibn Ezra, and even consider Jesus as an instance of "Jewish Travel." Within this vast context, the 25 longish poems of the collection, originally written in Hebrew, offer everyday acts of alternately joyous and somber reverence for God, "with the same body/ that stoops to pick up a fallen something from the floor." Amichai, who emigrated to Palestine in 1936 and is now 76, places imagined Holocaust memories ("I wasn't among the six million who died in the Shoah./ I wasn't even among the survivors") adjacent to irreverent reconfigurations of Torah characters, investigates "The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds," and asks "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem." The English-only text is generally well-rendered by poet Bloch and Hebrew scholar Kronfeld, but the rhymes can show jingly signs of strain: "Our father Jacob, on the beaten track/ carries a ladder on his back// like a window washer to the VIPs./ He does God's windows, if you please." Despite the moments of levity, mortality dominates each anecdote, whether it be a story of romantic, familial or ancestral love: "The memorial forest where we made love/ burned down in a great conflagration// but the two of us stayed alive and in love in memory of the burnt ones the forest remembered." The book becomes more personally confessional as it progresses (poem 22 is titled "My Son Was Drafted"), as the poet reminisces on his youth, first love and adoration of children. Death, finally, becomes a form of remembrance, where "not even a single act of remembering will seep in/ and disturb memory's eternal rest." This is a searching late book from a writer who acknowledges the high stakes of writing and of life as lived daily.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151003785
• ISBN-13: 978-0151003785
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #777,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #41 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Middle Eastern > Hebrew

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry for the soul, March 13, 2000

By 

Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Open Closed Open: Poems (Hardcover)

The English translation of Yehudah Amichai's 1998 book of poetry. This is a magnum opus. A poet would be needed to describe the genius of his words. I never "get" poetry. It doesn't work for me. But then I read a poem by Yehudah Amichai and it made sense. Then I went to hear him at a reading at NYU several years ago, and it clicked. One wants to fall in love for the sole reason that one could then use one of his poems. Then I read an excerpt from this book last Fall in "The Forward," and for the past 6 months I have been anxious for this book's release. I bought this book and I consumed it. Reading his poems is like praying, like meditating. Here is one tiny excerpt that is reprinted with permission. If it clicks for you, get the book. "Tova's brother, whom I carried wounded from the battle at Tel Gath, / recovered and was forgotten because he recovered, and died / a few years later in a car crash, and was forgotten / because he died. And even if my bloodied hands / had been prophets then, my eyes saw not / and my feet knew not what the grain in the field knows, / that green wheat ripens yellow. / That's the life prophecy of a field of wheat."

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Perfect Ending, July 3, 2001

By 

BPD (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Open Closed Open: Poems (Hardcover)

This, the final of Yehuda Amichai's works, lays to rest a life and career memorable to no end. Open Closed Open is about the Israel that is and has been -- tensions that have not faded -- complexities that have not eroded -- and loves that remain in spite of it all. It is, in every sense, a book of poetry, of poetics unequalled. Please read Open Closed Open.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The violent or anonymous love of God for Israel? A translation mistake, January 9, 2007

By 

E. Reich "Indiana University of Pennsylvania" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Open Closed Open: Poems (Paperback)

There is a translation mistake on p. 45: "God's love for His people Israel is... almost violent", should be: 'almost anonymous' (note the continuation: "on a no-name basis"), as a look at the Hebrew original shows. The words sound similar in Hebrew, and, but for a crucial different letter, are also spelled similarly. Amichai may have intended the double entendre. In this part of the poem Amichai points to the physical, embodied and impersonal use of force on the part of God in the early part of the Exodus narrative, and contrasts this with the spiritual, dis-emboded, and personal God of later Judaism. While this latter God is conventionally rated higher, Amichai finds it "hopeless' to return love to such a dis-embodied God. Love has to be embodied to be real for him.