Tourists - Analysis

Grief as a sightseeing routine

Amichai’s central accusation is blunt: the tourists’ sympathy is real only as a public gesture, a kind of required stop on an itinerary, while their private lives remain comfortably untouched. The poem begins with a sour reduction—Visits of condolence are all we get—as if condolence were a service performed for the locals, not an encounter with them. The word get matters: it makes compassion feel like a handout, not a human exchange. From the first lines, the speaker isn’t pleading for more sympathy; he’s exposing how easily sympathy becomes a pose.

Holy places turned into photo backdrops

The poem’s list of sites—Holocaust Memorial, Wailing Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, Herzl’s Tomb, Ammunition Hill—isn’t reverent; it’s transactional. The tourists squat at the memorial (an undignified verb, suggesting impatience or bodily discomfort) and put on grave faces at the Wall, as if sorrow were a costume. The detail that they have their pictures taken Together with our famous dead is the poem’s sharpest turn of the knife: the dead become celebrities, and the tourists pose with them the way one might pose with a monument, a mascot, a proof-of-presence. The repeated naming of tombs and battle sites piles up like stops on a tour bus, implying that history is being consumed as content.

The curtain line: public mourning vs private laughter

The poem’s key hinge arrives with the image of the hotel: they laugh behind heavy curtains. The line splits the tourists into two selves. Outside, they display practiced solemnity; inside, the trip reverts to leisure. That contrast is the poem’s main tension: the tourists’ faces are correct in public, but their emotions are unaccountable in private. The heavy curtains suggest not only luxury but concealment—an intentional barrier between the speaker’s world of exposed history and the tourists’ protected comfort. What stings is not that tourists ever laugh, but that laughter can exist so close to sites of catastrophe without being transformed by them.

Desire mixed into sympathy

Amichai complicates the tourists’ sentiment further: they weep over our sweet boys and lust after our tough girls. The pairing is deliberately unsettling. The boys are softened into a sentimental category—sweet—while the girls are hardened into an erotic fantasy—tough. In the speaker’s phrasing, the locals’ bodies and losses are both consumed: grief becomes a tearful attraction, and attraction becomes another form of taking. The possessive our is crucial here. It marks intimacy and protectiveness, but also ownership: these are not generic symbols of tragedy and resilience; they belong to a community the tourists can briefly touch and then leave.

Underwear in the blue bathroom: the obscene normal

The ending doesn’t rise into moral pronouncement; it drops into a jarringly ordinary image: tourists hang up their underwear to dry quickly in cool, blue bathrooms. The specificity is the point. After memorials and tombs, we are suddenly inside a private, tiled calm—air-conditioned, clean, insulated. The color blue reads as soothing and detached, a world away from dust, stone, and mourning. This domestic detail isn’t just a joke at their expense; it’s the poem’s bleak recognition that tourism lets people keep their most intimate routines intact even while passing through other people’s trauma. History becomes something you visit between showers.

A sharper question the poem refuses to soften

If the tourists can cry at our famous dead and then laugh in the hotel, is the poem suggesting their grief is fake—or that grief itself can be made into a compartment? The speaker’s bitterness implies performance, but the poem is more disturbing than a simple exposure of hypocrisy. It shows how easily the world trains us to treat catastrophe as a location, something we can enter briefly, feel something appropriate, and then exit back into our cool private lives.

What the speaker wants that tourists can’t give

Throughout, the tone is controlled, corrosive, and weary, as if the speaker has watched this scene repeat too many times. The poem doesn’t ask tourists to stop coming; it asks them to stop turning suffering into a consumable experience. By ending not on a monument but on underwear, Amichai insists that the real divide is not between sacred and secular, but between those who can return to ordinary comfort and those who must live where history happened—and keeps happening.