Along with Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa and Zbigniew Herbert, Yehuda Amichai is a member of that generation of poets who were late adolescents or young adults during Hitler's war and were deeply affected by it and by its contingent social, political, psychic and ontological consequences. Amichai is a deeply and unashamedly emotional poet, imbued with a strong streak of Jewish melancholy, yet able to be ironic about it and sometimes even to laugh. He always avoids the attendant dangers of bathos and sentimentality. His melancholic temperament naturally informs his relationships and his memories of them. It is reinforced and deepened by a historical sadness shaped in the crucible of the Jewish experience over centuries. That experience includes the Holocaust Amichai avoided by three years.

The voice that speaks in his poems, a voice with a striking resemblance to Amichai's own, is that of an affectionate if world-weary everyman...