Basket Case Yehuda Amichai’s "Tourists"
By Joseph Lowin

Another reason for Amichai’s popularity is that he sees the little things that make up human existence. He is a humanist par excellence. The critic Robert Alter, in "A Portrait of Yehuda Amichai," writes that "meeting Amichai, one quickly senses that, in his daily life, he is a person with an unflagging zest for the tangible particulars of the ordinary world" and that most of his readers "are likely to sense in the poetry an appealing quality of unaffected humanity."

Such is the case in a suite of three of his poems devoted to the subject of tourists in the land of Israel. Tourists are by their very nature outsiders and Amichai’s goal is to bring them inside. He often does this by entering their circle. There is, for example, the female tourist sunning herself near Jaffa Gate who arouses the lust of the locals, including the poet himself. Then there are the tourists who seem to come to the land of Israel for the purpose of paying impersonal condolence calls. They visit memorials to Jewish destruction like the Western Wall and Yad Vashem and the graves of both ancient and the modern Jewish heroes.

The prose poem reproduced here takes another tack, the tack of Jewish redemption.

(1) One day, I was resting on some steps near a gate at David’s Citadel, having set down nearby my two heavy baskets.

Robert Alter writes that in his family, Amichai "is the one who usually buys produce for the family, crossing Jerusalem by bus to the open-air market of Mahaneh Yehuda, armed with plastic net baskets that he will carry back loaded with fruit and vegetables, each variety carefully selected from its own special stall."

In this poem, Amichai transfers his activity from the bustling market where locals shop to a place in Jerusalem likely to attract tourists. And indeed,

(2) Standing there surrounding their guide was a group of tourists. I served as their signpost.

Now it is the shopper who is being drawn into the framework of the tourists.

What bothers the poet is that for tourists–and their guides–human beings in the land being visited lose their intrinsic value and become something whose value lies in the way they might be useful.

(3) "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there is an arch from the Roman Period, a little to the right of his head."

It is the Roman Arch that has importance for the guide and his group, and not the human being.

Why does the poet cry out at this point

(4) But he moves! He moves!

when we know that he is sitting calmly on the steps? Two answers suggest themselves: he is either referring to the gentleman’s ability to move or to his inner self, which moves because it is capable of being moved.

Finally, the poet will write a sort of Rabbinic commentary on the text of the guide and, in so doing, add a Jewish value to the scene.

(5) I said in my innermost being: Redemption will come only if they are told: You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but at its side, a little to the left and in front, is resting a man who has bought fruits and vegetables for his family.

Although this is very much a Zionist poem, for Amichai, redemption does not derive from big historical events, like a Zionist Revolution, but from small gestures, gestures that are readily at hand. That is the meaning of the repetition three times in the poem of the Hebrew word le-yad, literally, "at hand." Reducing Zionism to its human scale, making it something that is available to all, is, in the final analysis, what draws Amichai to his readers.