ROLE OF LITERATURE IN THE CULTURAL SCENARIO OF JEWISH SOCIETY

1.Yehuda Amichai has been widely extolled and universally accommodated for the simplicity and
national integrity that is subtly knitted in his poetry. His writings serve as the point of departure and as a
model and metaphor for reflection on the significance of literature in the cultural life of the Jewish
society besides the construction of individual and national identity. The turmoil of living in a country
that is frequently at war and the conflicting memory of the blessed childhood and the terrible holocaust
have always been a major impact on Amichai as a poet. Although the holocaust is not the thematic
centre of Amichai’s poetry, he does continually reflect upon this decisive caesura of Jewish history.
Literature is one memorial medium of contributing to the larger discussion of the ways in which
societies recollect their past. For the Jews cultural memory is also the remembrance that has been
preserved in the scriptures. This sacred literature has been treated with reverence not only because it
chronicles the origin and gives direction and identity to the Jews, but most importantly because it is the
medium through which cultural memory is transmitted.

Amichai’s artistic proclivity, according to Ted Hughes, takes into account the unique intensity of Jewish
religious feelings, the prophets, Biblical history, the supernatural world of Jewish mystical tradition, and
the symbolic role of Israel itself, and in particular of Jerusalem. throughout his poetic career he
promoted nationalism and sung the praises of cosmopolitan militarism that impulsively inspired national
unity and integrity. His aspiration and desire is focused on the disconcerted condition of the entire
Jewish race at the birth of their independent state and also at the moment of frantic search for
something that could keep them one and unified. It is also worth mentioning that he seeks to display
through his poetry something that cradles the entire race that would ultimately recompense for the lost
and diversion of their culture and heritage. For Amichai and the Jewish people, that primary place is
Israel and ‘Jerusalem the cradle city that rocks’ (“Time: 52”, A Life of Poetry, 289) him, is its centre. This
city therefore is the fulcrum of the songs of lamentation and praise. Much to the tone of the Psalmist
who seeks in the favour of humanity to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6; Ezra 7: 15: the
dwelling of God is in Jerusalem) are Amichai’s poems of Jerusalem. He indirectly satirises the ensuing
conflict and tension over the city between the Jews and the Muslim communities. He also seeks to
project his cherished love for this city of unrest and predicament through his eternal lines of poetry. As
far as Jewish history is concerned, the faculty of imagination is a double-edged sword, but when refined
and structured by the creative mind it can assume a positive ontological power.

Jewish literature includes works written by Jews on Jewish themes, literary works written in Jewish
languages on various themes, and literary works in any language written by Jewish writers. Ancient
Jewish literature includes Biblical literature and rabbinic literature. Medieval Jewish literature includes
not only rabbinic literature but also ethical literature, philosophical literature, mystical literature,
various other forms of prose including history and fiction, and various forms of poetry of both religious
and secular varieties. The production of Jewish literature has flowered with the modern emergence of
secular Jewish culture. Modern Jewish literature has included Yiddish literature, Ladino literature,
Hebrew literature(especially Israeli literature), and Jewish American literature. Jewish culture is the
culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is
not a faith-based religion, but orthoprax, pertaining to deed and practice. Jewish culture covers many
aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine
and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, and family, social customs and lifestyles, music and
dance.
Throughout history, from the ancient Hellenic diaspora and Judaea to modern-day Israel and the United
States, Jewish communities have seen the development of variegated cultural phenomena. Some come
from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations, and others still from the
inner social and cultural dynamics of the community. Before the 18th century, religion dominated
virtually all aspects of Jewish life, and infused culture. Since the advent of secularization, wholly secular
Jewish culture emerged likewise. There are no restrictions about who writes about what. White authors
can write about black characters, Chinese authors about Jewish characters, male authors about female
characters etc. It seems that by the end of the twentieth century, the approach to religion and to
identity, which in case of Judaism overlap, has taken a new turn. Many novels are being written by
writers knowledgeable in Jewish tradition and lore, using Jewish languages, figures of Jewish folklore
and religious notions. Jewishness is not something to be ashamed of anymore.

Today, the Jewish American writers write in English, their native language, a language of Christian
culture, which adapts to the Jewish view of the world, changing and absorbing ideas and words from
Hebrew and Yiddish. They write for the mainstream American audience, the majority of which are non-
Jewish readers, using notions and ideas which are rooted in the Jewish culture and religion, without
explaining or translating them, assuming that their audience is able to understand them without
translation. A book that is written by Jewish-Americans metamorphoses into a kind of a metaphysical
place for them to explore the impact of identity, be it religious or ethnic. The defining feature of rabbinic
literature is its ongoing interpretation of history. Literature becomes the faith for secular contemporary
Jews, a tool to understand and interpret history for future generations. The Jewish American writers
have become the theologians of the contemporary Jewish American culture. Nancy Haggard-Gilson
argues that Jewish fiction mirrored the concern with ethnic identity and the flight from Judaism as a
response to the pressure to assimilate.

A Jewish language is a particular form that a language takes when used by Jews, sometimes termed a
‘religiolect’. This term focusses on the social, ethnic and religious identity of the speakers, rather than
linguistic differences. Indeed, the speakers of these languages view themselves as apart from their
neighbours, and fill their speech with the spirit and images, formulations, concepts and icons from their
reservoir of religious traditions. All Jewish languages are primarily written in Hebrew script and contain a
layer of Hebrew and Aramaic that easily identifies them as such. They vary in their intelligibility to
outsiders; some languages can differ by just a few words, whilst others are incomprehensible to the
surrounding population. Literature has been the home of Jewish artistic activity throughout the ages.
The Hebrew Bible is a work of monumental artistry, exhibiting grandeur of form and language in
historical narrative, poetry, rhetoric, law, and aphorism. The extra-scriptural writings of the period
disclose literary genius of a high order in translation, though in many cases the original works have
vanished. Although the documents of the rabbinic tradition are not often regarded as having great
literary worth, much of the material, particularly the Haggadic portions of the Midrashim, reveals a
noteworthy sensitivity to language.

In the medieval period, much attention was given to the production of piyyuṭim, liturgical poetry with
which to embellish the siddur (prayer book), itself a collection containing much imaginative as well as
pedestrian writing. In the Islamic world, under the influence of Arabic poetry, Hebrew poetry rose to
great heights in both liturgical and secular forms. Important works of history written in the medieval
Rhineland chronicled and commented on Jewish suffering during the Crusades. The beginnings of the
Jewish form of Middle High German also appeared in this period; through the centuries it developed
into an autonomous Jewish language, Yiddish, which became a literary vehicle of very high order in the
19th century. The re-creation of Hebrew was a literary language also began in the 19th century; it
became the basis of the spoken vernacular of the State of Israel and of a flourishing literature. After the
emancipation at the end of the 18th century, Jews in western Europe and later in the United States
turned to literature in the vernaculars of their countries and produced writers of note who dealt with
both Jewish and general themes.

Jerusalem figures in an astonishing number of the late Yehuda Amichai’s poems precisely because the
poet himself found it impossible to write the definitive Jerusalem lyric. In the city’s embodiment of both
the highest achievements of the human spiritual imagination and the rocky altar to which human beings
and their ancestors have returned to sacrifice one another again and again, Jerusalem is necessarily the
beating and wounded heart of his parabolic and beguiling poetic practice. Amichai continually tests the
notion of ‘belonging’ to Jerusalem (with all its political, social, religious, and cultural complexity), against
alternative avenues of identity in ways that ultimately implicate the reader as well, particularly in their
original Israeli context. At the same time, the poems frequently pay heed to the indelible ways that
Jerusalem’s cycles of destruction cohabit with diasporic continuity; each Jewish realm ultimately
sustaining and at times interrogating the reality of the other.

2. “NATIONAL THOUGHTS” AS THE MANIFESTATION OF CULTURAL MEMORY

Yehuda Amichai has been widely extolled and universally accommodated for the simplicity and national
integrity that is subtly knitted in his poetry. His writings serve as the point of departure and as a model
and metaphor for reflection on the significance of literature in the cultural life of the Jewish society
besides the construction of individual and national identity. The manifestations of cultural memory in
Amichai’s poetry reveal new dimensions of the parameters of the catastrophe following the perpetual
atrocities of the Jewish race. The reminiscence of the past, the present and all of time is
vividly captured within the ambit of cultural memory and hence a sophisticated study of Amichai’s
enormous contribution is obligatory. Amichai’s poetry emphasizes the individual who is conscious and
integrally part of the “collective memory,” (Eshel, 151) from which, according to Eril Astrid and Ann
Rigney, cultural memory has evolved.

Over the last twenty years, the relationship between culture and memory has emerged in many parts of
the world as a key issue of interdisciplinary research, involving fields as diverse as history, sociology, art,
literary and media studies, philosophy, theology, psychology, and the neurosciences, and thus bringing
together the humanities, social studies, and the natural sciences in a unique way. The importance of the
notion of cultural memory is not only documented by the rapid growth, since the late 1980s, of
publications on specific national, social, religious, or family memories, but also by a more recent trend
that attempts to provide overviews of the state of the art in this emerging field and synthesize different
research traditions. The concept of cultural memory is originally derived from archaeological studies,
first introduced by an Egyptologist, Jan Assman in his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992) (Cornelius
Holtorf). Cultural memory therefore, is seen as a collective concept for all knowledge that directs
behaviour and experience in the interactive framework of a society which is repeated through
generations in societal practice and initiation.

Cultural memory in Amichai’s poetry implies the thread of cultural continuity. This continuity
manifests itself through the most decisive mode of transmission found in a community’s cultural
archives: language. Amichai has been striving to relocate the site of memory using poetry as a network
in which the past and all of time are closely knitted into one moment, the present. His poetry, though
circulated at later points in time, provides an important bridge between generations by making
remembrance observable and by establishing a memory of its own. Referring back to the cultural
memory of the Jews, Amichai shows that there is a unique combination of the profane and the sacred.
Amichai’s poetry illustrates how all generations are fused as one and how they are involved in the
ensuing material, spiritual, and even secular continuation.

For the Jews cultural memory is also the remembrance that has been preserved in the scriptures. This
sacred literature has been treated with reverence not only because it chronicles the origin and gives
direction and identity to the Jews, but most importantly because it is the medium through which
cultural memory is transmitted. As far as Amichai’s poetry is concerned there is a shift in the continuity
from the biblical into the secular. The memory of his childhood is the only remembrance that is warm to
his heart in the midst of the atrocities of the Jews: The dynamics of remembering and the functions of
collective memory in Amichai’s poetry are also reflected in the conclusive use of the image of
photography which captures the moment of time in the specific orbit of the frame. The nature of
memory that Amichai deals with in his poetry may be equated with the imaginative faculty.

3. USE OF BIBLICAL LANGUAGE IN NATIONAL THOUGHTS

Yehuda Amichai has been widely extolled and universally accommodated for the simplicity and national
integrity that is subtly knitted in his poetry. His writings serve as the point of departure and as a model
and metaphor for reflection on the significance of literature in the cultural life of the Jewish society
besides the construction of individual and national identity. An influential member of Israel’s first
literary generation, Yehuda Amichai synthesizes in his poetry the biblical rhythms and imagery of
ancient Hebrew with modern Hebraic colloquialisms to try to make sense of the dislocation and
alienation experienced by many Jews escaping genocide in Europe for perpetual war in Israel. He began
to write poetry seriously after the War of Independence in 1948.

In the years following the War of Independence, Amichai studied Hebrew literature and the Bible (it may
be mentioned that the terms “Biblical” and “Bible” are used by Amichai’s critics only to refer to the
Judaic scriptures) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was here that he published his first book of
poetry Now and in Other Days (1955) with the encouragement of one of his professors. For the Jews
cultural memory is also the remembrance that has been preserved in the scriptures. This sacred
literature has been treated with reverence not only because it chronicles the origin and gives direction
and identity to the Jews, but most importantly because it is the medium through which cultural memory
is transmitted. As far as Amichai’s poetry is concerned there is a shift in the continuity from the biblical
into the secular.

The memory of his childhood is the only remembrance that is warm to his heart in the midst of the
atrocities of the Jews: Amichai’s artistic proclivity, according to Ted Hughes, takes into account the
unique intensity of Jewish religious feelings, the prophets, Biblical history, the supernatural world of
Jewish mystical tradition, and the symbolic role of Israel itself, and in particular of Jerusalem. The
accumulated inner strength and wealth of Jewish survival throughout the Diaspora, and the peculiar
election, imposed on them by Hitler, constitutes the fact of the holocaust. It is clearly the drama of a war
of survival on every level, the culmination of a long Jewish history of fighting for survival on every level
of a garrisoned last- stand people (Amichai; Time) hence, the regeneration of a paradigmatic religion
which grows from primal fear, guilt and repression. Before the 19th century, Hebrew was almost
exclusively used for religious purposes and so ceased to exist in a modern sense. With the rise of
Zionism, Hebrew was pulled out of its sacred box, dusted off, and entirely new words had to be
fashioned from the whole cloth of archaic sources so that one could express the modernity of the last
two thousand or more years. Hebrew is now enshrined as the national language of Israel and Yehuda
Amichai was the first to compose poetry in this language hastily stitched together from the past and the
present.

4. YEHUDA AMICHAI AS THE NATIONAL POET OF ISRAEL

Yehuda Amichai is recognized as one of Israel’s finest poets. An author, one of the first to write in
colloquial Hebrew. His poems, written in Hebrew, have been translated into 40 languages, and entire
volumes of his work have been published in English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, and Catalan.
Amichai was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel
Prize. He also won international poetry prizes and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of
references to God and the religious experience. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a
post-theological humanism. Many of Amichai’s poems were set to music in Israel and in other countries.
Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century’s (and Israel’s) leading poets. In this remarkable book,
Gold offers a profound reinterpretation of Amichai’s early works, using two sets of untapped materials:
notes and notebooks written by Amichai in Hebrew and German that are now preserved in the Beinecke
archive at Yale, and a cache of 98 as-yet unpublished letters written by Amichai in 1947 and 1948 to a
woman identified in the book as Ruth Z., which were recently discovered by Gold.

Gold found irrefutable evidence in the Yale archive and the letters to Ruth Z. that allows her to make
two startling claims. First, she shows that in order to remake himself as an Israeli soldier-citizen and
poet, Amichai suppressed (“camouflaged”) his German past and German mother tongue both in
reference to his biography and in his poetry. Yet, as her close readings of his published oeuvreas well as
his unpublished German and Hebrew notes at the Beinecke show, these texts harbor the linguistic
residue of his European origins. Gold, who knows both Hebrew and German, establishes that the poet’s
German past infused every area of his work, despite his attempts to conceal it in the process of adopting
a completely Israeli identity.

Gold’s second claim is that Amichai somewhat disguised the story of his own development as a poet.
According to Amichai’s own accounts, Israel’s war of independence was the impetus for his creative
writing. Long accepted as fact, Gold proves that this poetic biography is far from complete. By analyzing
Amichai’s letters and reconstructing his relationship with Ruth Z., Gold reveals what was really
happening in the poet’s life and verse at the end of the 1940s. These letters demonstrate that the
chronological order in which Amichai’s works were published does not reflect the order in which they
were written; rather, it was a product of the poet’s literary and national motivations. According to
Joshua Cohen, the name “Yehuda Amichai” as the sound carries, should communicate more than
identifying him as a person, a Jew or a poet. The name Yehuda which in Hebrew means Judah,
associates him to the Lion of Judah; symbol of ancient Israelite military and political strength (also
imperative of the promised Messiah) and Amichai combines Ami, which means “my nation” and Chai,
meaning “life”: ultimately forming “My nation lives”.

5. PALESTINIAN CULTURE VS ISRAELI CULTURE; HISTORY THROUGH THE LENS OF POETRY – A READING
OF AMICHAI'S POETRY
 The Culture of Palestine is the culture of the Palestinian people, who are located in the Palestine , and
across the region historically known as Palestine, as well as in the Palestinian diaspora. Palestinian
culture is influenced by the many diverse cultures and religions which have existed in historical
Palestine, from the early Canaanite period onward. Cultural contributions to the fields of art, literature,
music, costume and cuisine express the Palestinian identity despite the geographical separation
between the Palestinians from the Palestinian territories, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in
the diaspora.

Palestinian culture consists of food, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs,
customs, and comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of Palestinian culture. The folklorist
revival among Palestinian intellectuals such as Nimr Sirhan, Musa Allush, Salim Mubayyid, and others
emphasized pre-Islamic (and pre-Hebraic) cultural roots, re-constructing Palestinian identity with a focus
on Canaanite and Jebusite cultures.[3] Such efforts seem to have borne fruit as evidenced in the
organization of celebrations like the QabatiyaCanaanite festival and the annual Music Festival of Yabus
by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. The roots of the culture of Israel developed long before modern
Israel’s independence in 1948 and traces back to ancient Israel (c.1000 BCE). It reflects Jewish culture,
Jewish history in the diaspora, the ideology of the Zionist movement that developed in the late 19th
century, as well as the history and traditions of the Arab Israeli population and ethnic minorities that live
in Israel, among them Druze, Circassians, Armenians and others.

Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish culture and its culture encompasses the foundations of many Jewish
cultural characteristics, including philosophy, literature, poetry, art, mythology, folklore, mysticism and
festivals; as well as Judaism, which was also fundamental to the creation of Christianity and Islam.
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are considered the main cultural hubs of Israel. The New York Times has
described Tel Aviv as the "capital of Mediterranean cool," Lonely Planet ranked it as a top ten city for
nightlife, and National Geographic named it one of the top ten beach cities. With over 200 museums,
Israel has the highest number of museums per capita in the world, with millions of visitors annually.
Major art museums operate in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Herzliya, as well as in many towns and
Kibbutzim. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra plays at venues throughout the country and abroad, and
almost every city has its own orchestra, many of the musicians hailing from the former Soviet Union.
Folk dancing is popular in Israel, and Israeli modern dance companies, among them the Batsheva Dance
Company, are highly acclaimed in the dance world. The national theatre, Habima was established in
1917. Israeli filmmakers and actors have won awards at international film festivals in recent years. Since
the 1980s, Israeli literature has been widely translated, and several Israeli writers have achieved
international recognition.

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators continue to engage in a long, difficult dialogue about the final status
between Israel and a new Palestinian state. Poetry, by its nature, is a form of dialogue, and that poems
are attempts to communicate. And in the Palestinian-Israeli arena, the poet’s need to communicate
across political and cultural boundaries is particularly intense. Yehuda Amichai has acknowledged: "I
have no illusions. It’s quite difficult for poets to communicate with one another in a society that is
politically torn apart the way ours is." Nevertheless, because of the geographical, linguistic, and political
barriers inhibiting communication between Palestinians and Israelis, many poets, including Amichai,
have used poetry as a means to convey messages to "the other side," or to explore their feelings about
the conflict.
Communication through poetry is particularly important to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, where
literature and poetry are highly valued for giving voice to the deepest feelings and concerns of the
people. Not only does poetry maintain a central role in Palestinian society as the time-honoured art
form of the Arabs, but also Palestinian poets carry the additional role of being spokespersons, who must
articulate the struggles, desires, and political views of the people. Poetry had also played a central role
in the development and survival of Israeli cultural identity. The interchange between the two cultures
and the daily interactions between Israelis and Palestinians have infused the work of many poets. Since
the dispute over the land is the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s not surprising that many
poets have dedicated poems to the country, to the land itself, or to a particular place. Jerusalem - which
both peoples claim as their capital and which pulls at the heartstrings because of its holiness in Judaism
and Islam - is often used in poetry to represent the land of Israel, or Palestine as a whole. For example,
Yehuda Amichai play on the words of Psalm 137 ("If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,/let my right hand
forget...")1 as a means to express their love for the land: the poet express a deep, personal connection
to Jerusalem, associating the city with their own blood, their bodies, and their closest family members. It
gives a sense of danger and imminent pain at the possibility of losing or forgetting Jerusalem, and it
imply that the act of "forgetting" or not fighting for Jerusalem would be a disgrace to their brothers and
mothers.

The poet use the same metaphor to address the same theme, and writes in the context of his own
society, culture, and poetic tradition. Amichai, born in Germany and raised as an Orthodox Jew, has lived
most of his life in Jerusalem. In his youth, he served in the British Army and in Israel's Palmach force in
the 1948 war. In "If I Forget Thee," Amichai uses Psalm 137 as a lens through which to reflect on his own
behavior and his personal relationship to Jerusalem, the land, and God. The poem exemplify the basic
difference between the aesthetics of Israeli and Palestinian poetry: Palestinian poetry is and always has
been political, while Israeli poetry is predominantly apolitical. In fact, Arab literary critics consider
political poetry the highest form of the art. According to literary scholar Samira Meghdessian,
Palestinian literature is "the most politicized among all writings by Arabs," and Palestinian writers find it
"impossible to avoid" dealing with politics in their writings. Most Palestinian poets write with the
urgency of the "oppressed," using poetry as a means to express their suffering under occupation (or
their longing for the land from the exile), their anger towards their Israeli oppressors, and often their
desire for political resistance. Yehuda Amichai describes himself as "a moralist poet who deals with
political realities [rather] than a poet who writes out of political context." Like Amichai, most Israeli
poets use their art to explore the effects of the conflict on their own lives or their own society.

Amichai, as a former soldier, also feels that ultimately there will be nothing left but peace. In his poem
"Wildpeace" (written in the early 1970s), Amichai hopes that both sides will soon simply get tired of
fighting and allow peace to emerge: it highlight the deep historic desire for peace held by both the
Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Amichai’s perspective, on the one hand, is a desire for peace coupled
with a "great weariness," a sense that all the continual violence is futile and unnecessary. The poet
stand on common ground in expressing the desire for a "true peace,". Poet's belief does not stem
merely from negotiations or from an end of war. Poet intimate that neither the fighting nor lack of
fighting will lead to a true peace. Amichai forswears "the peace of a cease-fire" and implies that "the big
noise of beating swords into ploughshares" may be too forceful a peace, or may be more of an empty
clatter than an actual achievement of peace.