SOURCE: A review of The World Is a Room and Other Stories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 4, Autumn 1985, pp. 652-53.

In the following review, Ramras-Rauch offers a favorable impression of Amichai's volume of short stories, noting Amichai's ability to suffuse ordinary experiences with extraordinary insights.

Amichai's prose is suffused with simile and metaphor, not unlike his poetry. Indeed, some of the present stories can be regarded as poetic presentations in prose. Amichai often breaks the narrative line, defying temporal succession with the immediacy of Homeric simile. One may even question whether the selections in The World Is a Room are "stories"; many of the episodes are without an axis of causality or sequence. The stream-of-consciousness technique and synoptic view allow the narrator to function at various layers of memory and figurative language. Despite the poetic looseness, however, there is a strong sense of place (e.g., Jerusalem...