Tourists
Tourists - meaning Summary
Tourists' Uneasy Voyeurism
Amichai’s poem criticizes foreign visitors who encounter Israeli tragedy and sanctity as a checklist of experiences. Public displays of solemnity at memorials and holy sites coexist with private amusement, sexual interest, and domestic banality in hotels. The poem compresses these contrasts into sharp images—photographs at tombs, staged grief, voyeuristic desire, and drying underwear—to suggest a moral gap between performed empathy and ordinary indifference.
Read Complete AnalysesVisits of condolence is all we get from them. They squat at the Holocaust Memorial, They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall And they laugh behind heavy curtains In their hotels. They have their pictures taken Together with our famous dead At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb And on Ammunition Hill. They weep over our sweet boys And lust after our tough girls And hang up their underwear To dry quickly In cool, blue bathrooms.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.