Great Regulars: The story opens in 1997,

when [Nili Scharf] Gold, a professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Pennsylvania, accompanies [Yehuda] Amichai to a lecture in New York. "We sat in a back row at the end of a crowded hall and waited for the speaker to begin," she writes in her introduction, "when suddenly he touched my arm and said, almost in a whisper, 'Do you see, three rows in front of us, near the aisle, a woman sits? Her name is Ruth Z. Do you remember the poem about the one who 'ran away to America'? I wrote it about her."

That poem is "'History's Wings Beating, They Used to Say'" (as translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav in Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948–1994):

Those were days of great love and great destiny,

from Adam Kirsch: Nextbook: The Reader: The Book of Ruth

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