Yehuda Amichai's “The Times My Father Died” (1959)

By reimagining Aeneas’ pietas as a universal ethical value, she claims for herself, a Jewish Italian Holocaust survivor, the cultural imagination of Rome that Fascism had appropriated, the very regime that, in alliance with Nazi Germany, persecuted and enslaved her and destroyed the lives of many of her loved ones. This chapter discusses ‘Jewish Aeneas,’ that of Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai. After an outline of Amichai’s “The Times My Father Died,” it explains the importance of Vergil’s Aeneid to the work, with a particular focus on the significance of its last paragraph. “The Times My Father Died” tells the many different ‘deaths’ of the narrator’s father. The short story was published in an Israeli literary journal in 1959 and became part of Amichai’s only short story collection, In This Terrible Wind, which came out in early 1961. All these stories revolve around a single narrator and his episodic experiences, mostly set in a puzzling, riddle-like context.