SOURCE: "On Amichai's El male rahamin," in Prooftexts, Vol. 4, No. 2, May 1984, pp. 127-40.

In the following essay, Sokoloff examines the significance and use of language in El male rahamin as well as how the work fits into the modern Hebrew literary canon.

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In an essay that outlines some major trends in recent Israeli poetry and prose, Shimon Sandbank shrewdly assesses the unusual relationship to language that distinguishes modern Hebrew literature from other contemporary writing. Israeli literature comes only belatedly—with the New Wave writers of the 1950s and 60s—to a dismay at the inadequacy of words such as was typical of a variety of modernist movements at the start of the century. Hebrew fiction and lyric have undergone this special development, Sandbank argues, because they have had to grapple so strenuously with the "inbuilt sacred meanings" of the language itself.

For thousands of years Hebrew existed only...