We Lived Through A Relatively Golden Age

The Reconciliation Is Not Based On The Fact That One Of The Characters Opens His Eyes And Says, "o Brother! O Sister! How Terrible I Was! How Right And Wonderful You Were! Please Forgive Me! Let's Hug And Love Each Other From Now Until The Rest Of Eternity!" This Is Not The Kind Of Reconciliation I Write About; I Write About Sad, Sober, Sometimes Heart-breaking Compromises.

Actually, Who Hasn't Been Through The Ghastly Experience Of Sitting In Front Of A Blank Page, With Its Toothless Mouth Grinning At You: Go Ahead, Let's See You Lay A Finger On Me? A Blank Page Is Actually A Whitewashed Wall With No Door And No Window. Beginning To Tell A Story Is Like Making A Pass At A Total Stranger In A Restaurant.

Israel Is Imperfect, Of Course It Is - A Far Cry From The Monumental Dreams Of The Founding Fathers. One Of The Reasons Is That Their Dreams Were Unrealistic. They Were Bigger Than Life. These Were Messianic Dreams, Dreams About Total Redemption For The Jews, For The World. Such Dreams Do Not Come True, Not In Their Entirety.

The Gift Of Literature Is That, In Some Lucky Cases, Reading A Novel Or A Story Makes The Reader More Curious, More Open-minded.

It Is Wrong To Take An 18-year-old Boy Or Girl And Arm Them With Machine Guns And Make Them The Almighty King Of Some Little Arab Village. No Young Man, And No Old Man Either, Should Have So Much Power Over The Life And Death Of So Many Helpless Individuals. It Is Corrupting. It Sometimes Provokes Desperate, Savage And Indiscriminate Violence Among The Occupied.