Amichai's Open Closed Open was praised as deeply spiritual

Person: Yehuda Amichai
Lived: 1924–2000
Field: Poetry
From: German-born Israeli

The story

Yehuda Amichai was born in 1924 into an Orthodox Jewish family in Würzburg, Germany, and recalled growing up in a very religious household. The language of prayer, he said in an interview with The American Poetry Review, became a kind of natural language for him, and biblical and liturgical echoes came into his poems without effort. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggled with religious faith all his life, and he never stopped arguing with God.

That argument runs through nearly half a century of his poetry. His poems are full of references to God and religious experience, often startling ones: in one, God lies under the world like a mechanic under a car, vainly trying to fix it, and some readers found such images sacrilegious. Critics have described him as a philosopher-poet in search of a humanism after theology, always putting the living person before the symbol and human experience before myth.

His last major book brought these questions together on a grand scale. Its English translation by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, Open Closed Open, was published in New York in 2000, the year of his death from cancer at 76. The book was shortlisted for the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize, and the literary scholar Nili Scharf Gold has written about the poetic dialogue between it and his very first collection of 1955, Now and in Other Days.

The American poet Anthony Hecht, writing in 2000, called it as deeply spiritual a poem as any he had read in modern times, setting it beside T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and assured readers that it was full of humour and a rich sense of comedy. He went further, judging that the book alone would have merited a Nobel Prize.

Open Closed Open stands as the summation of his work, a final, ambitious meditation on the Bible, Jewish tradition, love and mortality by a poet who believed that doubt and faith could live side by side.