Yehuda Amichai Critical Essay | Critical Review by David Biespiel

Critical Review by David Biespiel

SOURCE: Biespiel, David. “‘A Final Hard Amen’: Yehuda Amichai, 1923-2000.” Parnassus 25, No. 1-2 (2001): 126-35.

In the following review of Amichai's Open Closed Open, Biespiel offers a favorable assessment of the poet's accomplishments.

For nearly half a century, Yehuda Amichai was Israeli poetry's patriarch, a man embodying and embracing his revolutionary time. His followers will remember a period, especially in the Seventies and Eighties, when Amichai seemed to be everywhere. Here in the United States, he gave readings, interviews, and lectures at synagogues, Jewish community centers, Hadassah meetings, and college campuses, from Cleveland's Shaker Heights to Houston's Meyerland, from Yale to Iowa. With his Old Country accent, he presented himself as a regular guy, just your ordinary poet. But he still came across like a prophet from the Promised Land, singing in a language reborn.

I remember seeing him at Dartmouth in the mid-Eighties, after the publication of Chana...
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