A Jewish Cemetery In Germany - Analysis

A place that should speak, and doesn’t

Amichai’s central claim is that this cemetery’s most disturbing feature is not death but silence: a Jewish burial ground in Germany that has been left to the weather and to forgetting. The poem opens on a deceptively pastoral scene, a little hill amid fertile fields, but the fertility only sharpens what’s missing: care, community, ritual. The rusty gate and the shrubs that hide it don’t just describe neglect; they make the cemetery feel like something the landscape itself has tried to cover over. When the speaker says neither prayer nor lamentation is heard, the line for the dead praise not lands like a bitter theology: this is a place where the living should be doing the praising, and no one is.

The turn: children replace the mourners

The poem’s emotional hinge arrives with Only the voices of the children. The word only matters: the cemetery is not truly empty, but it is inhabited by the wrong kind of sound. Instead of kaddish or weeping, there is a bright, almost comic energy: the children seeking graves and cheering when they find one. Amichai doesn’t scold them; he lets their game become a painful substitute for a lost communal practice. The similes push this ambiguity further: graves are like mushrooms and wild strawberries, things you hunt for in pleasure, things that belong to a walk in the woods. The comparison is tender and alarming at once, because it naturalizes the graves—turns them into a kind of foraging—suggesting how easily death can be folded into the ordinary when history has stripped away the proper language for it.

Names as the only surviving kinship

The children’s calls—Here’s another grave!—become a roll call of fragments, and the speaker’s attention tightens around names. He doesn’t give us epitaphs or stories; he gives us genealogy: my mother’s mothers, a name from the last century. This is one of the poem’s key tensions: the place is abandoned and forgotten, yet it still contains recognizability, a thin thread of lineage that can be grasped by reading. Even so, the names appear almost like relics under growth, requiring recovery work. The speaker’s impulse to brush the moss is both caretaking and desperation: if the name can be seen, perhaps the person can be re-entered into memory. But the poem also suggests how small that victory is—how quickly the living are reduced to what can still be deciphered on stone.

The open hand: holiness caught mid-spasm

At the moment the speaker is about to clean the name, he finds an open hand on a tombstone, marking the grave of a kohen. The engraved hand, with fingers splayed, carries the tradition of priestly blessing—but Amichai describes it as a spasm of holiness, a phrase that makes sanctity look involuntary, almost bodily, as if holiness here is no longer a calm inheritance but a cramp preserved in stone. The blessing gesture persists, yet it blesses no one; it sits inside a cemetery where prayer has gone quiet. That contradiction—sacred sign in a forsaken place—becomes the poem’s understated accusation. Something meant to transmit life and protection remains, but the community it served has vanished from the landscape.

Brushing aside berries like a beloved’s hair

The last image is the most intimate and unsettling. A grave is concealed by a thicket of berries, and the speaker must push it away like a shock of hair from the face of a beautiful beloved woman. The comparison does two things at once: it restores tenderness to the act of uncovering—this is not excavation but caress—and it risks eroticizing the cemetery, turning the hidden stone into a face that wants to be seen. The poem ends on that touch, as if remembrance is not primarily an argument or a ritual but a physical gesture against erasure. Yet even this tenderness depends on the fact of overgrowth: the beloved has been left unattended long enough for berries to become her veil.

A sharp question the poem leaves behind

If the only sound in the cemetery is children cheering at discoveries, what does that say about the adults’ relationship to this place? The poem seems to suggest that the next generation can approach the graves only as a game of finding, because the older forms of approach—prayer, lamentation—have been made impossible by absence, distance, and shame. The children’s joy is real, but it is also what remains when grief has no living community to carry it.