SOURCE: Hadary, Amnon. “A Yad for My Friend Yahuda.” Judaism 49, No. 4 (Fall, 2000): 411-15.

In the following essay, Hadary offers a general assessment of Amichai's poetry, at the time of his death in the year 2000.

At Jerusalem's Safra Square on September 24th, we went to say Shalom Haver to yet another general, Yehuda Amichai, the reluctant poet laureate of Israel, felled by cancer, “the chief of staff in the war to liberate Hebrew literature,” Yossi Sarid said. He liberated Hebrew from the oy and the goy, from the pathos and piety, the rhyme scheme and the dead letter of tradition and ritual in literature as in life. For all that, he continued to shoulder the Jewish sack of images and insights and expressions as a beloved sacred weight, just as he persisted in carrying the memory of his dead friend who fell in the battle of Ashdod in the...