4.2 The Amichai Windows – Interior of Opened Enclosure by Rick Black

Within the context of Israel, its culture, its literature, and in particular, its poetry, Yehuda Amichai—who, coincidentally, died in the same year (2000) as did Albrecht Goes—is considered Israel’s most eloquent and important voice, and one of the leading poets worldwide in the second half in the twentieth century. His poetry has been translated into 40 languages. Rick Black, from Arlington, Virginia, who lived for three years as a New York Times journalist in Jerusalem, has produced a carefully contrived handmade limited-edition book (only 18 copies were produced) called “The Amichai Windows”—a window into the poet’s poetry and its diversely directed address of Israeli, Jewish, and human issues. Yet again, the people of books is re-examined as a people of both poetry and images.

The artist has embedded eighteen of Amichai’s poems—the number is not accidental; in the numerology of Hebrew letters, the consonants that comprise the word “life” (hai) add up to 18—in Hebrew together with English translations into a triptych-like structure, in which the book opens its wings from both sides of its central section. Most frequently the artist offers a poem in Hebrew on the right and in English on the left and some relevant image, or series of images, within the central panel. Each “triptych” is presented, before one opens it, in the form of a Jerusalem window. Each of the poems has embedded within its verses the idea of a window.