Jews in the Land of Israel
Jews in the Land of Israel - meaning Summary
Return Bearing Ancestral Pain
Amichai’s poem explores the tension of Jewish return to Israel: people bear remnants of exile—names, memories, and ancestral pain—alongside new life in the land. The speaker questions why they have come back with inherited suffering, noting beauty, children, and reclaimed landscape but also persistent wounds. The final image suggests that violence and bloodshed, while not true roots, have become the closest substitute for belonging.
Read Complete AnalysesWe forget where we came from. Our Jewish names from the Exile give us away, bring back the memory of flower and fruit, medieval cities, metals, knights who turned to stone, roses, spices whose scent drifted away, precious stones, lots of red, handicrafts long gone from the world (the hands are gone too). Circumcision does it to us, as in the Bible story of Shechem and the sons of Jacob, so that we go on hurting all our lives. What are we doing, coming back here with this pain? Our longings were drained together with the swamps, the desert blooms for us, and our children are beautiful. Even the wrecks of ships that sank on the way reached this shore, even winds did. Not all the sails. What are we doing in this dark land with its yellow shadows that pierce the eyes? (Every now and then someone says, even after forty or fifty years: "The sun is killing me.") What are we doing with these souls of mist, with these names, with our eyes of forests, with our beautiful children, with our quick blood? Spilled blood is not the roots of trees but it's the closest thing to roots we have.
TRANSLATED BY CHANA BLOCH
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