My Father's Death by Yehuda Amichai
"My Father's Death" is a poignant poem by Yehuda Amichai that explores the complex emotions surrounding the loss of a father. Featured in Amichai's first volume of poetry, the work exemplifies his recurring theme of how death intricately influences the human experience. The poem is characterized by its childlike diction, which serves to disarm adult readers and encourage a deeper reflection on grief. Through playful rhyme schemes reminiscent of nursery rhymes, Amichai juxtaposes innocence with the weight of profound loss, creating a striking emotional impact.
The speaker, representing the adult children grappling with their father's death, reflects on the challenge of reconciling their grief with the concept of a divine being who may have a role in this loss. The language used is intentionally simple yet deeply resonant, capturing the heartache and confusion of trying to comprehend both the finality of death and the omnipotence of God. As the poem unfolds, it conveys a sense of wonder at the mysteries of life and death, ultimately suggesting that both are intertwined in a miraculous way. This intricate melding of childlike simplicity and adult introspection invites readers to engage with the universal themes of love, loss, and the quest for understanding in the face of life's inevitable tragedies.
My Father's Death by Yehuda Amichai
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: “Mot Avi,” 1955 (collected in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994, 1994)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
Initially included in his first volume of poetry, Akshav u-ve-yamim aherim, the deftly concise but remarkably incisive poem “My Father’s Death” deals with one of Amichai’s most pervasive themes—the labyrinthine implications of death on the experience of life. The brilliant translation of the poem included by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav in their definitive retrospective, Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry: 1948-1994, preserves the whimsical, childlike diction of the Hebrew version but also reveals a poem that is remarkably seasoned and deeply introspective.
Rhyme schemes are rare in Amichai’s poetry, which, generally speaking, is pointedly modernistic in its avoidance of traditional poetic devices. However, “My Father’s Death,” although ominous in theme, employs a series of rhymes, such as “places/ spaces,” “bow/ now,” “soon/ moon,” and “endeavor/ forever,” that are more evocative of Mother Goose than of William Carlos Williams. Nonetheless, the effect is both stunning and appropriate; Amichai masterfully uses a child’s language to disarm his readers of their adult defenses. He then proceeds to reinform those readers’ reckoning of one of life’s most tragic but inevitable experiences—the death of a father—in deft and startlingly perceptive terms. Of himself and his grownup siblings, all struggling to make sense of their father’s passing, the speaker remarks “We went to call [our father’s] God, to bow:/ May God come and help us now.”
Although the language of the poem is remarkably childlike, its insights are the exclusive domain of the adult. Seeking to understand the profundity of the idea that an all-wise and all-knowing God has called his father away to Heaven, the speaker is utterly at a loss to express himself in adult terms. Instead he opts for a language that has never failed him, that of the heartbroken child. Of the God who has mysteriously taken his father, the speaker reflects “And God takes pains, is coming soon,” and in both a profound and conciliatory attempt to comprehend God’s omnipotence can say only that after returning to paradise God “hung His coat on the hook of the moon.” By the final couplet of the poem, the speaker remains admittedly inept in his ability to adequately understand either his father’s death or God’s purpose in authoring it. Death, like life, is ultimately viewed as a miracle because of its oblique power and indisputable finality: “But our father, who went out on this endeavor—/ God will keep him there forever.”
Bibliography
Abramson, Glenda, ed. The Experienced Soul: Studies in Amichai. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997.
Abramson, Glenda The Writing of Yehuda Amichai: A Thematic Approach. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Alter, Robert. After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing. New York: Dutton, 1969.
Alter, Robert. “Israel’s Master Poet.” The New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1986, 40.
Cohen, Joseph. Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Hirsch, Edward. “In Language Torn from Sleep.” The New York Times Book Review, August 3, 1986, pp. 14-15.
Hirsch, Edward. “At the White Heat.” In How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.
Lapon-Kandelshein, Essi. To Commemorate the Seventieth Birthday of Yehuda Amichai: A Bibliography of His Work in Translation. Ramat Gan, Israel: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1994.
Publishers Weekly. Review of Open Closed Open, by Yehuda Amichai. (March 20, 2000): 71.
Williams, C. K. “Yehuda Amichai” (obituary). The New Republic (October 9, 2000): 28.