Yehuda Amichai Critical Essay | Critical Review by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

Critical Review by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

SOURCE: Bloch, Chana, and Chana Kronfeld. “Amichai's Counter-Theology: Opening Open Closed Open.” Judaism 49, No. 2 (Spring, 2000): 153-67.

In the following review, Bloch and Kronfeld discuss Amichai's perspective on God and Judaism, as expressed in his poetry.

On the cover of Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichai's new collection of poems, there is a fragment of a broken gravestone with the word “Amen” carved on it. The stone, from a Jewish cemetery destroyed nearly a thousand years ago in his birthplace, Wirzburg, Germany, was given to Amichai by a German professor of theology who has devoted himself to reassembling the broken pieces and reconstructing the gravestones. That “toy of history and fate” is now a decorative object on his writing desk, “a thing of beauty, weighing down papers so they won't fly away.” Five poems referring to the Amen stone are situated at intervals throughout the volume, and other poems...
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