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NOT OF THIS TIME, NOT OF THIS PLACE
One of Yehuda Amichai's rare novels.Maybe his best.Haunting, scary, real.Joel, a child refugee from Germany pre-WW2, and long settled in thinly veiled autobiog in some ways.A crossroads in one's life, and how one's duty to self, loved ones, and one's nation all exact their demands. Sometimes, all at once.
- GenresNovels
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1963
35 people want to read
About the author
Yehuda Amichai
114 books147 followersYehuda Amichai (Hebrew: יהודה עמיחי; 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.
Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s.
(The Times, London, Oct. 2000)
He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.
After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It was about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the war of Independence in Israel, he visits his hometown in Germany, recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.
Amichai was invited in 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read from his poems at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
"God has pity on kindergarten children" was one of the poems he read. This poem is inscribed on a wall in the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv. There are Streets on his name in cities in Israel, and also one in Wurzburg.
Amichai was married twice. First to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.
He died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.
Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s.
(The Times, London, Oct. 2000)
He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.
After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It was about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the war of Independence in Israel, he visits his hometown in Germany, recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.
Amichai was invited in 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read from his poems at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
"God has pity on kindergarten children" was one of the poems he read. This poem is inscribed on a wall in the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv. There are Streets on his name in cities in Israel, and also one in Wurzburg.
Amichai was married twice. First to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.
He died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 14, 2025
Amichai, a celebrated Israeli poet, was born in Würzburg, Germany, emigrating with his family to Palestine in 1934 when he was 11 years old. Although he had memories of being bullied as a boy in the aftermath of Hitler’s ascension to power, he did not experience the deportations and genocidal policies of the Third Reich personally. But he it still left a mark on his psyche, especially because he knew many who were victims of the terror. He returned to Würzburg for the first time in 1959 and was inspired to write this novel (Not of This Time, Not of This Place in English translation) a few years later.
The structure of the novel is interesting. In the opening chapters his alter ego, an archeologist named Joel, is overwhelmed with a sense of ennui and purposelessness. It is the late 1950s and he is in Jerusalem. He visits with friends, some of whom are originally from Weinberg (Würzburg). One is Rabbi Mannheim, the father of his childhood friend Ruth, who perished in the death camps. He becomes haunted by thoughts of Ruth—which is also the name of his wife. His friends suggest he spice up his life with an affair—which is weird. Then the novel becomes two stories; of alternating chapters, one a first person account of his return to Weinberg to come to terms with his guilt of have escaped Nazism while others were left behind, the other a third person view of his evolving affair with an American woman. We are left to follow two fates, each with a differing outcome.
This sounds interesting, but I’m not really sure what this book was about nor what the author intended. The parts that interested me for a while were mostly due to the personal connection I have with Würzburg, my birthplace, his Weinberg. My earliest memories of the city, twenty-plus years after the end of WWII, are filled with visions of areas that were still bombed out. I used to play in them. Joel returns to the city when it is still mostly rubble. His descriptions of the city, with accurate street names and descriptions of landmarks awakened my memories. I could literally visualize every thing and place he described.
He meets with a woman who babysat him as she lays dying in a group home for displaced Jews run by nuns. She has lost everyone in her family and has adopted others in the home as her family. And there are odd situations that defy credulity. Near the train station he stumbles on an American film crew making a movie about Jewish deportations with extras from the city in SS uniforms and portraying those being rounded up. He gets caught up in it and gets his hands on an actual manifest of a deportation complete with the train conductor’s request for expenses. He later meets that conductor, who has become the top bureaucrat at the train station. He walks by the rubble of the synagogue and finds a box filled with Rabbi Mannheim’s sermons only to have most of papers blown away in a gust of wind. For the rest of the story he finds pieces of those sermons in odd places: as wrapping for food he buys, in the water of the Main river as he paddles on it with people he has met. And everywhere he is haunted by memories of his young “girlfriend” Ruth, of how she lost a leg by amputation due to some medical issue, of how he helped her walk with her new wooden leg, and of visions of her deportation and, as he characterizes it repeatedly, her burning. In one of the odder scenes, he actually buys a wooden leg, convinces himself it was hers, and then carries it around only to lose it when he forgot about it while at a restaurant. He imagines taking revenge on the Nazi tormentors who have settled back into daily life, but nothing comes of it. All in all, without my parochial connection to Würzburg, I’m not sure I would have been interested in his story and have a hard time figuring out why anyone else would.
The parallel story of his affair was tedious and uninteresting. Both characters were so superficial and self-absorbed that I was left asking why Amichai included this at all. He could easily have excised all these chapters. Although there is a conclusion of finality, it had nothing to do with the affair.
This book is a lesson that a great, celebrated poet—Amichai was selected to give a reading at Yitzhak Rabin’s Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony—does not necessarily make a great, or even average, writer. There are some exceptional lines of poetic prose, of which many are in my reading notes below. For example, he notes in passing that the department store mannequins are the “angels of the German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder).” That’s a line an economic historian can envy. Yet these occasional observations do not a novel make. I plan to one day read Amichai’s poetry. What little I have read is engaging. Perhaps it will open a new door of understanding Israeli culture. Sadly, this book does not. Its plot wanders aimlessly and despite the parallel stories, I feel as though I’ve learned nothing about coming to terms with the Holocaust or of life in Israel. There is a shallowness here that does not jibe with the commentary I have read about Amichai’s poetry.
The structure of the novel is interesting. In the opening chapters his alter ego, an archeologist named Joel, is overwhelmed with a sense of ennui and purposelessness. It is the late 1950s and he is in Jerusalem. He visits with friends, some of whom are originally from Weinberg (Würzburg). One is Rabbi Mannheim, the father of his childhood friend Ruth, who perished in the death camps. He becomes haunted by thoughts of Ruth—which is also the name of his wife. His friends suggest he spice up his life with an affair—which is weird. Then the novel becomes two stories; of alternating chapters, one a first person account of his return to Weinberg to come to terms with his guilt of have escaped Nazism while others were left behind, the other a third person view of his evolving affair with an American woman. We are left to follow two fates, each with a differing outcome.
This sounds interesting, but I’m not really sure what this book was about nor what the author intended. The parts that interested me for a while were mostly due to the personal connection I have with Würzburg, my birthplace, his Weinberg. My earliest memories of the city, twenty-plus years after the end of WWII, are filled with visions of areas that were still bombed out. I used to play in them. Joel returns to the city when it is still mostly rubble. His descriptions of the city, with accurate street names and descriptions of landmarks awakened my memories. I could literally visualize every thing and place he described.
He meets with a woman who babysat him as she lays dying in a group home for displaced Jews run by nuns. She has lost everyone in her family and has adopted others in the home as her family. And there are odd situations that defy credulity. Near the train station he stumbles on an American film crew making a movie about Jewish deportations with extras from the city in SS uniforms and portraying those being rounded up. He gets caught up in it and gets his hands on an actual manifest of a deportation complete with the train conductor’s request for expenses. He later meets that conductor, who has become the top bureaucrat at the train station. He walks by the rubble of the synagogue and finds a box filled with Rabbi Mannheim’s sermons only to have most of papers blown away in a gust of wind. For the rest of the story he finds pieces of those sermons in odd places: as wrapping for food he buys, in the water of the Main river as he paddles on it with people he has met. And everywhere he is haunted by memories of his young “girlfriend” Ruth, of how she lost a leg by amputation due to some medical issue, of how he helped her walk with her new wooden leg, and of visions of her deportation and, as he characterizes it repeatedly, her burning. In one of the odder scenes, he actually buys a wooden leg, convinces himself it was hers, and then carries it around only to lose it when he forgot about it while at a restaurant. He imagines taking revenge on the Nazi tormentors who have settled back into daily life, but nothing comes of it. All in all, without my parochial connection to Würzburg, I’m not sure I would have been interested in his story and have a hard time figuring out why anyone else would.
The parallel story of his affair was tedious and uninteresting. Both characters were so superficial and self-absorbed that I was left asking why Amichai included this at all. He could easily have excised all these chapters. Although there is a conclusion of finality, it had nothing to do with the affair.
This book is a lesson that a great, celebrated poet—Amichai was selected to give a reading at Yitzhak Rabin’s Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony—does not necessarily make a great, or even average, writer. There are some exceptional lines of poetic prose, of which many are in my reading notes below. For example, he notes in passing that the department store mannequins are the “angels of the German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder).” That’s a line an economic historian can envy. Yet these occasional observations do not a novel make. I plan to one day read Amichai’s poetry. What little I have read is engaging. Perhaps it will open a new door of understanding Israeli culture. Sadly, this book does not. Its plot wanders aimlessly and despite the parallel stories, I feel as though I’ve learned nothing about coming to terms with the Holocaust or of life in Israel. There is a shallowness here that does not jibe with the commentary I have read about Amichai’s poetry.
August 13, 2024
בביקור בספריה העירונית ברעננה שלפתי את הספר הזה במקרה מקצה המדף. הרומאן היחיד של עמיחי התברר כספר נפלא שאמנם לקח לי קצת זמן לסיים אך רק מפאת ההנאה שהפקתי מהקריאה.
עלילה שזזה בקצב איטי ומורכבת מאסופה של סצינות מלאות דמויות מלאות באהבת אדם.
עלילה שזזה בקצב איטי ומורכבת מאסופה של סצינות מלאות דמויות מלאות באהבת אדם.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews