SOURCE: Hirsch, Edward. “Yehuda Amichai: Poet at the Window.” In Responsive Reading, pp. 140-52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Hirsch explores central themes in the poetry of Amichai, such as love, war, history, and Jewish identity.

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For more than thirty years Yehuda Amichai has been conducting his own highly personal war on forgetfulness and silence. He has the unique ability to render and enact the complex fate of the modern Israeli, the individual man locked in and responding to history. Amichai is a historical poet of the first order, a political writer in the deepest sense of that term. At the same time, he is a writer who always speaks of his own concerns, his private love pangs and personal questions, his parents' history and his own intimate secrets. Part of the achievement of Amichai's work has been the conjoining of these two...