In her study of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, Chana Kronfeld sets out “to reclaim … the poet for whom simplicity and accessibility are serious ethical principles, guidelines for a poetic effect and a verbal art that can be part of the fabric of everyday life” (5). Although Kronfeld acknowledges Amichai's autobiographical poetics, she contests a still-pervasive tendency to read him in a narrowly confessional or personal vein and challenges the ways in which Amichai's appropriation as a popular and national poet has occluded his commitment to a radical and revolutionary poetics. To this end, Kronfeld is invested throughout the book in elaborating Amichai's “coherent yet open-ended aesthetic and ethical system,” and in so doing, bringing Amichai's poetry to bear on the urgent concerns and issues of contemporary poetry and culture (23).

Kronfeld's study begins with the story of her first meeting with Amichai in late 1970. That year she had invited him to sit for an interview broadcast on Israeli Educational Television. By her own admission, Amichai's poetry already constituted part of her daily reading practice. Amichai's respect for his student audience, his insistence on treating them as peers, epitomizes for Kronfeld the ethical position that Amichai consistently applied to his own poetry. Throughout his career he “resisted playing the role of the Great Poet” (1), and continued to teach students in Israel and abroad while garnering numerous accolades and honorary degrees for his poetry. And he had a sense of humor for popular appropriations of his poems—for example, a hair salon ad that had reworked a line from “The Ballad of the Long and Short Hair,” a poem that draws its language and references from Israel's military culture. These are hardly idle anecdotes; rather, Kronfeld uses these episodes as opportunities to tease out vital intertextual relations, and to further explore how Amichai's language circulates in the spaces and texts of ordinary, everyday Israeli life without losing its “radical and radicalizing effect” (27).

The field of modern Hebrew literature is an intimate space where scholars and authors are never more than a few degrees of separation from one another. Although Kronfeld enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Amichai, which included translating his poems into English with the American poet Chana Bloch, this proximity rarely feels uncritical. In this respect, Kronfeld's study recalls Leah Goldberg's 1952 Pegishah ‘im meshorer (Encounter with a poet), which offers a moving account of Goldberg's friendship with the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, as well as an incisive assessment of his place in modern Hebrew poetry. Kronfeld, likewise, does not disregard the appeal or relevance of personal and biographical information, but she cautions against the kind of biographical (mis)reading that typically shapes the reception of women poets. (That one reviewer in Haaretz insisted on characterizing Kronfeld's study as a biography also shows us how women scholars contend with this bias as well.) Kronfeld is far more invested in examining how Amichai's autobiographical poetics shapes what Kuisma Korhonen has described as a “textual encounter,” a multirelational, transformative network of readers and texts. Amichai's life-long exploration of “the fragmentation of the poetic subject by the forces of history” (50) further enriches this encounter but also complicates and unsettles it. The word “fragmentation” is key here because it calls attention to Amichai's practices of composition: his collage aesthetic, radical intertextuality, extreme wordplay and metaphor, and palimpsestic layering of autobiography and history. Through close readings of select poems, Kronfeld's attention to these practices further complicates the figure of an easily appropriated, popular, and translatable Amichai.

In chapter 4, Kronfeld addresses Amichai's reception via translation (“the many Amichais”) and how translation continues to mediate, but also complicate, a dialogue between Amichai's Hebrew and English readers. In the United States, for example, a Jewish translation of Amichai has prevailed, for various reasons that Kronfeld probes in this chapter, among them the distinct “ideological needs” of his Israeli and American (Jewish) audiences. However, instead of privileging one Amichai over the other, Kronfeld is more interested in what these translations of Amichai tell us about the readerships, communities, and literary cultures through which his poems circulate, and which in turn determine how he gets translated. In this chapter, Kronfeld also draws relations between the translated Amichai and the figure of the poet translator that forms part of his poetic system. While Amichai's poetics of in-betweenness—benayim—may be understood in the context of the German-born poet's cultural, historic, and linguistic circumstances, it also encompasses a system of intertextual strategies, translation among them, that “[leaves] behind any vestiges of romantic ideals of authenticity and authority” (175). Translation thereby constitutes a political and aesthetic site of resistance in its rejection of originality and monologic authority. In her reading of the poem “And Let Us Not Get Excited,” which concerns translation, Kronfeld even discerns a powerful feminist critique in Amichai's rejection of Hebrew literature's androcentric model of (literary) tradition and legacy.

Kronfeld's final chapter addresses Amichai's relation to the 1948, or statehood, generation of poets and his “hyphen of distance” vis-à-vis these poets and Hebrew modernism, and later movements and trends that shaped Hebrew poetry in the twentieth century. Kronfeld turns here to the poem “O God Full of Mercy,” and particularly its lines “I, who use only a small part / Of the words in the dictionary” (trans. Bloch and Kronfeld), which Kronfeld reads as a protest against “elitism and obfuscation” and modernism's privileging of difficulty. For Amichai, acknowledging that poetic language drew from the same language of ordinary life shaped his ethical commitment to writing poetry that “[could] be part of the fabric of everyday life” (5). So it is only appropriate that Kronfeld's study does not offer any conventional closure. There is no afterword, no parting anecdote, no tidy summation of the book's argument. Instead, she leaves us midencounter, with an in-between Amichai “hovering on the borders of poetic affiliation” (291), a space from which it is possible to continue to reread and retranslate the poet, “now and in other days.”