Great Works of Literature II, Fall 2019 (hybrid) JTA

You could talk about whether you think he’s provocative, and if so, how, and/or how he using his poetry to bear witness (in other words, to give a very honest and possibly cathartic accounting of tragedies).

I think Yehuda Amichai is provocative because when he starts writing poetry, he never stop paying attention to and thinking about the war. His war-themed poetry often shows a strong anti-war tendency. He constantly analyzes the ruthlessness of the war and shows the harm of war to people, he writes in the poem “The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard.”(The Diameter of the Bomb). Also, in the poem “Try to Remember Some Details,” he writes “unlike wild beasts they live each in his lonely hiding place and they die together on battlefields and in hospitals. And the earth will swallow all of them, good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,” He repeatedly demonstrated the destruction of people by war and caused people to think and react strongly to the war.