I bent down, sifting through the dirt until my fingers landed upon a smooth stone. It felt heavy for its size, weighing down my hand and coating it with dust. Stone in tow, I walked back to the group. Their bodies were small, overshadowed by towering hills.
“Rimon,” the tour guide said in Hebrew. The group listened closely, peering at the pomegranate in his hand. It was overripe, bursting with blood-colored seeds. The guide’s voice trailed off, the faint rhythm of faraway bombs detonating to the north in Syria distracted me. I turned the stone over in my hand again before pocketing it: my small token of a tired land.
Days later, I went through my souvenirs one by one. A salt crystal from the Dead Sea, a leaf from Jerusalem, a sliver of concrete from a crumbling apartment complex in Tel Aviv. The heavy rock from the Golan, once Syria, now Israel, covered in dust.
Three years later, I lingered after hours at my college Jewish center. Its small library, usually full of bright chatter, was silent. I walked along the rows of books, trailing my fingers on Hebrew and English volumes and wiping the dust on my jeans. Landing upon a worn collection by celebrated Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, I removed it and sat down. I flew through one poem, then another.
My trip to Israel had been a blur. Moving through Amichai’s verse for the first time, I was struck by the intensity of my recollections. Israel’s rolling hills, which I had observed in my adolescence, became illustrated in my mind by Amichai’s poem “God Full of Mercy.” Amichai writes, “I, who plucked flowers in the hills / And looked down into all the valleys, / I, who brought corpses down from the hills.” The hills brimming in his poems with flowers and optimism, also once produced corpses. As I moved through the lines, I felt both hollow and whole.
That morning in the Golan, I remember that my grandmother stood solemnly, wearing a thin jacket and donning wide brown sunglasses which contrasted her Ashkenazi complexion. She read a poem off a laminated sheet, probably the type handed to every tourist. Tears streamed down her face, mixing with beige foundation.
I forget the poem’s title, and its words. I like to think it could easily have been Amichai’s poem, “Jews in the Land of Israel,” in which he writes, “We forget where we came from / Our Jewish names from the Exile give us away.” Amichai was born into the rising Third Reich in Germany as Ludwig Pfeuffer, dying in Israel with his adopted name, which roughly translates to “Praise, my people live.” I thought of my own name: Jacob, an anglicization of Ya’acov, a hint of ancient roots. For two thousand years my ancestors had lived outside of the land of Israel; they too lost themselves in exile and history. Their names and rituals became reminders of their origin.
In “Temporary Poem of My Time,” Amichai calls out the stones of Israel, describing the land as a place of endless battle, of constantly thrown rocks which predate and outlast us. Naturally, I thought of my stone from the Golan. “Is there in this land / A stone that was never thrown / And never built and never overturned … And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders / And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers.” Where had my stone been? I sat and thought about it. I imagined it being trampled by young Israeli soldiers, clad in green and imprinted with passion, boots kicking up dust. Or had it once been laid upon by young lovers under a knowing sky, or shoveled over a forgotten grave?
Amichai returns to the motif of youth to note the common humanity of Israel’s diverse, and often sparring, inhabitants. In “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion,” Amichai writes of his search for his “little boy,” noting an Arab Shepherd searching for his goat on the opposite hill. The two join briefly in their “temporary failure.” Both cry out for their charges, their voices “meet above.”
The verses moved me to the Golan, its tall hills which carry the echoes of bombs while smothering cries in different languages to the same Divine presence, lingering “above.” In a land divided by violence, Amichai provides a moment of poetic respite, stripping different peoples down to a common search in the same Eastern landscape. Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch notes in Tablet that Amichai wrote in a world reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust, meditating not on “God’s power” but instead on, “His absence, or indifference, or simple debility.” Amichai provokes my own quiet anger at Divine futility in his writing with his mentions of mourning and suffering children, caught in the “wheels” of the “machine.”
That day in the Golan I had seen smiling children; we had whirred by them on a 4×4. Some had flaxen hair, all had toothy grins, brightened with naïveté. They played by a stream adjacent to their farm, jumping off idle military equipment stored on the bank. Battleground, turned playground. Children damned before birth, and if born, taken too early by war. Amichai hovers on the sobering nature of conflict; he wonders, perhaps in anguish, if “behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
In “Memorial Day for the War Dead,” Amichai speaks to youthful innocence: “Children with a grief not their own march slowly / like stepping over broken glass.” Here, the children lack a nationality: they could be Israelis, “broken glass” bringing forth collective memories of Kristallnacht or Intifadas, or Palestinians, wandering among the ruins of a house destroyed by conflict out of their control. Before I discovered Amichai, a rosy Israel had filled the blurred memories of my youth. That day in the library, Amichai did not seek to change my mind about Israel’s beauty and its singular importance to “Am Yisrael,” the Jewish people. In highlighting the child’s innocence broken by conflict, Amichai replaced my boyhood understanding of a complicated land with a mature one.
In “Memorial Day for the War Dead,” Amichai also mocks the land of milk and honey mentioned annually at my family’s Passover seder. He laments, “Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread, / in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.” The precious land promised to the Jews in Exodus is here soaked with childrens’ pain, in front of an aging and decaying G-d. Yes, the land of Israel is sweet. It had stung my grandmother to tears and filled me with pride in a wandering people, restored. So too may tanks once again thunder across the soil where I found the stone in my youth, another effort to settle grievances formed before my birth.
Amichai rounds out the poem, “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion,” by associating children with the birth of new faith, noting that, “Searching for a goat or for a child has always been / The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.” Armed with Amichai’s tender verse, I wonder what my next visit to the Golan or other places in Israel will be like. Though my experiences may fall short of the poetic or prophetic, perhaps I will find new beliefs in my budding adulthood, or lose old ones anchored to my youth.
A year after I wrote this story, I learned enough Hebrew to translate one of Amichai’s poems on my own. Check it out.
Works Cited
https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/yehuda_amichai_2004_9.pdf