SOURCE: "Two Jewish Ironists," in New England Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer 1995, pp. 187-92.

In the following review, Slavitt examines Amichai's characteristic use of irony.

The language of Jews, the real mother tongue, is not Yiddish or Hebrew, as it certainly is not Russian, or Polish, or English, but … irony. The complicated experiences of five millennia have elicited a series of emotional and linguistic postures by which we Jews express ourselves, and it is these double messages that American Jews have always found particularly interesting as well as demanding. Until Korea, the United States had never lost a war, and there was a sappy optimism, part positive thinking, part togetherness, part Chamber of Commerce boosterism, that seemed unrecognizable to us and, with a particular force, made us aware of our foreignness. Only the Southerners, who had lost the Civil War, had any notion of the mysterious ways of history...