Yehuda Amichai’s “Hayi Shalom” and Other Partings

This essay broadens Yehuda Amichai’s corpus in order to understand the multiple sources—textual, intertextual, and autobiographical—that came together into the poem “Hayi shalom” (“Farewell”). This analysis of the poem incorporates, for the first time, the hundred love letters Amichai wrote to his girlfriend Ruth Hermann in 1947–48; interviews and conversations with Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, the woman who is the subject of the poem; and remnants of Clarice’s correspondence with Amichai in 1958–61. Through an idiosyncratic kind of interpretation, an essentially personal one, using sources often overlooked in scholarship, the analysis deciphers the secret language of the poem, tracing linguistic footprints from letters as well as the poet’s notes and drafts. Through the story of Amichai’s 1958 separation from Clarice Kestenbaum, the article reveals how their Jerusalem love affair is encoded in the language of “Hayi shalom.” Moreover, it demonstrates how, through the linguistic and experiential texture of the poem, the separation from Clarice joins with other partings in Amichai’s life—especially the unknown story of his heartbreak over Ruth Hermann. Finally, the grief for Amichai’s childhood friend “Little” Ruth Hanover, who perished in the Holocaust, forms the base of the fundamental, formative loss in the poem—and, in fact, in Amichai’s oeuvre. While “Hayi shalom” is dedicated to the day of separation from Clarice, in its hidden corners lie the partings and abandonments that preceded it. In its indirect way, the poem confronts two deaths.