names into Hebrew names ... 'Amichai' was a right name, because it was Socialist, Zionist and optimistic." Gold also believes that a childhood trauma in Germany affected Amichai's later poetry. She claims in her book that Amichai had an argument with a childhood friend, Ruth Hanover, which led to her cycling home angrily. Ruth was caught in a traffic accident, as a result of which she had to have a leg amputated, and Gold claims that Amichai felt guilt and responsibility. Ruth later was murdered in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth". In an interview Amichai said: "Little Ruth is my Anne Frank". "I found out that she (Little Ruth) was in the last transport in 1944. This knowledge goes with me all the time, not because of guilt." "If there is any guilty feeling it's like the guilt that soldiers feel when they survive the battle while their friends were killed." Robert Alter wrote about Gold's contention: "Again and again Gold asks why Amichai did not represent his German childhood in his poetry, except fragmentarily and obliquely. The inconvenient fact that his major novel, Not of This time, Not of This Place, devotes elaborate attention to Würzburg (which is given the fictional name Weinburg) is not allowed to trouble Gold's thesis of suppression, because the book is fiction, not poetry, and hence is thought somehow to belong to a different category in regard to the writer's relation to his early years. But Gold's notion of Amichai's 'poetics of camouflage' rests on an entirely unexamined assumptionthat it is the task of the poet to represent his life directly and in full ..." However, Gold argued that Amichai only wrote extensively about Würzburg in his novel because it was not his primary genre and therefore would be read by fewer people. Moreover, Not of This Time, Not of This Place does not hide the fact that it is based on Amichai's autobiography, including both his trip to his former hometown (and, explicitly, his search for closure about Little Ruth) and his affair with an American woman. Contrary to Gold's argument, Amichai wrote many plays and radio plays, a book of short stories, and a second novel, and he never said or wrote in any interview that he hoped that fewer people would read his prose. Boaz Arpaly wrote: "Amichai did not hide in his