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7 The Love Story As the new veteran Yehuda Pfeuffer climbed the stairs of the Bet Hakerem Teachers Seminary1 in Jerusalem on a bright Sunday in June 1946, he did not know that at the top was the woman who would eternalize for him the connection between ships and sadness. The crash course from which they would both graduate was already well underway. It was a special class, made up of twentytwo men and four women, all recently discharged from the British army and in need of a profession. On the Friday before his first day of classes, Yehuda was invited to a party in the Kiriyat-Shmuel neighborhood. At midnight, after the party ended, twenty of the guests walked down the middle of the empty street, chatting all the way back toward Rehavia, where many of them lived. The conversation of those who had just been discharged revolved around their experiences in the military and their plans for a civilian future. Yehuda was attracted to a woman in a green silk dress, and started walking by her side. Her name was Ruth and, sixty years later, she still remembers the details of that conversation. “I overheard that you are at the teachers’ college,” he began. “I was just discharged and I registered for the course, but I am afraid that I missed important material.” To his surprise, Ruth gave him her address on Ramban Street and said, “I can lend you my notebooks.”2 “You don’t mind if I copy your notes?” he asked. “Many people don’t like to share.”3 He stopped by her home the next day, a Saturday, to borrow her notebooks, thanked her politely, and returned them on Sunday. He may have known that he would go back to the house on Ramban Street. This encounter marked the beginning of a time of tentative peace both in Amichai’s life and in the life of his country, Israel. Despite the intermittent violent clashes with the Arabs and the growing tension with the British, which peaked with the bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel by the militant Jewish underground, Israelis would later call this interval in history “the time between the wars.” The Second World War had ended and looming in the unknown future was the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the ensuing eruption of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. The poet himself , in a handful of works that evoke this lull between the wars, dubbed it the time “before the fateful days.”4 This tranquil period spent as a student in Bet Hakerem preceded almost any known literary activity on Amichai’s part,5 yet during that time he absorbed stimuli that would nurture his future literary creations and educated himself in the craft of poetry. Despite the significance of this time in his creative development , neither his published poetry nor the numerous interviews that he would eventually grant elaborated on the life he led between his discharge from the British coast guard and the second time he was called to arms.6 As part of his effort to portray his emergence as a poet as an exact parallel to the establishment of the State of Israel, Amichai tried to camouflage the importance of this period. Nevertheless, understanding the personal and emotional development of the young Yehuda Pfeuffer during this period is crucial, because it reveals the process by which he became the poet known as Yehuda Amichai. The following pages attempt to fill in the gaps in the poet’s self-description and offset the absence of detail about the days from mid-1946 to early 1948. For Amichai, this period was defined by his courtship of Ruth Z. and their ensuing relationship. They were together for seven months before Ruth went to study in America, and they corresponded for eight more months thereafter.7 Amichai’s letters record the couple’s love affair with an almost obsessive precision . Each time he wrote the date at the top of a letter, it evoked a specific memory of their time together. Many of the letters celebrate the anniversary of an individual event—a concert, a party, a hike—that took place on exactly that date in the previous year. Even after six intervening decades, Ruth’s recollections are astonishingly detailed, capturing specific conversations and anecdotes. She offered a reserved point of view, devoid of the nostalgia that sometimes surfaces...

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