People of the Book

June 23, 2009 - 9:56 AM by Jessica · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business, General, History and Culture, Israeliness 

First Book Week, 1926

First Book Week, 1926

We made it to Hebrew Book Week on Saturday night on the very last night of the fair, which is a good thing because I don’t like to miss any annual countrywide events.

Hebrew Book Week, although it’s actually more like ten days, is a very quintessential Israeli event. It’s the ol’, People of the Book checking out books, mostly in Hebrew, obviously, and with book stands from all the major Israeli booksellers, from Keter, Modan and Am Ovad to the ’sifrei kodesh’ (literally, holy books), map makers and the newspaper mongers. In Jerusalem — as in other major cities where there are Book Week booths set up at some major central site — Book Week was held at Gan Hapaamon, Liberty Bell Park, where people and families pushing baby carriages brushed up against each other as they ponied up to the booths, checking out children’s books, adult fiction, the latest Mapa map books — that’s where we spent a lot of time — non-fiction, biographies, treastises on all kinds of subjects, and generally lots of printed pages.

There’s music blasting from mounted speakers, but not too loud, as to disturb one’s contemplation of a possible book purchase. And surprisingly for an Israeli event, no food, save for the beigale and cotton candy peddlers at the entrance to the park. I like that. It’s just about books.

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A new take on the news

June 11, 2009 - 10:42 AM by Jessica · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Politics 

From the op-ed page

From the op-ed page

Hebrew Book Week began this week, and the Haaretz newspaper marked the moment by replacing many of their regular journalists with writers and poets for Wednesday’s edition, reporting the news as they experienced it.

With the exception of business and sports, the country’s top writers — David Grossman, Etgar Keret, Haim Be’er, Yehudit Katzir, Nurit Gertz and others — covered the news of the day, from Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s speech and the visit of U.S. envoy George Mitchell to the ongoing dramas of former President Moshe Katzav’s trial and the motives behind entertainer Dudu Topaz’s recent criminal actions.

The writing was entertaining, and familiar, in that the writers recounted the news in their voices, not the usual objective voice of the reporters (not that Israeli reporters are always so objective)…In writing about Dudu Topaz’s fall from grace, Ram Oren, Israel’s best-selling author, talks about being painfully jealous of Topaz and how Topaz will turn this event into a book opportunity. Keret, in recounting his brief interview with Defense Minister Barak, tries to work in the fact that Barak was speaking at, and they were meeting in, his former school. Shahar Magen was charmed by the arrival of new giraffes at the Ramat Gan Safari and Sami Michael introduced the whole lot:

“What have we done to your newspaper?…Is the author’s point of view necessarily different from that of the reporter, directly touching the live flesh of exposed reality? And what, in any case, is the link between life and literature, between news and fiction?…My colleagues featured as guests in this enterprise have answered the call to serve as reporters examining the profound link between labor and poetry, between reality and imagination.”

But my favorite piece was the weather report, written by poet Ronny Someck:

Summer Sonnet

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.
With it I compose
a billet-doux
to the seamstress who snipped
from women’s clothes
collars that had hidden napes
and lopped
an inch or two of winter
from the bottom of their dress.
Perhaps this year too
it will be hot
in the low-lying spots.

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