SOURCE: "Hard and Soft," in New Statesman, Vol. 86, No. 2232, December 28, 1973, p. 978.

In the following review of Not of This Time, Not of This Place, Pickford praises Amichai's evocation of "survivor's guilt" and his protagonist's ambiguous response to post-war Germany but, finds the novel somewhat disjointed and meandering.

There is … a strong vein of autobiography in Yehuda Amichai's novel, newly translated, from the Hebrew by Shlomo Katz. But its impact is less urgent and direct than that of [Wolfgang] Borchert's stories, partly perhaps because Amichai was the luckier of the two—he left Germany before the war started. Not of This Time, Not of This Place is, in a sense, two novels running parallel with each other. One is a first-person account of a Jew's return from Israel to the German town where he was brought up. The other, in the third person, describes the same man's love affair...