ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one theme from Yehuda Amichai's rich and expansive novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place. The geographical shift of Jewish existence from west to East with the establishment of the State of Israel entailed a shift from an existence outside time and space to an existence within space. Amichai places Joel, the novel's protagonist who is in his late 30s, in two different geographical locations simultaneously. Joel's problems are specific to a Holocaust survivor, but at the same time they also represent some of the problems of modern human consciousness. The dialectics of home and abroad are an interesting poetic device through which Amichai chose to convey these problems. The chapter argues that the endless analogies in the story are not its weaknesses, but its strength, and that they have a similar function to that of the analogy which binds together the different units of his poems.
