A Long War Is Degenerating - It

The Revival Of Hebrew, As A Spoken Language, Is A Fascinating Story, Which I'm Afraid I Cannot Squeeze Into A Few Sentences. But, Let Me Give You A Clue. Think About Elizabethan English, Where The Entire English Language Behaved Pretty Much Like Molten Lava, Like A Volcano In Mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew Has Some Things In Common With Elizabethan English. It Is Being Reshaped And It's Expanding Very Rapidly In Various Directions. This Is Not To Say That Every One Of Us Israeli Writers Is A William Shakespeare, But There Is A Certain Similarity To Elizabethan English.

I'm A Great Believer In Compromise. I Know It's Not Popular Among Young Idealists. Compromise Is Not Popular. It's Not At All Popular Among Young People Who These Days Call Themselves "activists." They Think Compromises Are Dishonest, Opportunistic, Humiliating. Not In My Vocabulary. In My Vocabulary, The Word "compromise" Is Synonymous To The Word "life".

"the State Of The Jews" Was Not A Title Of A Country. It Was A Title Of A Futuristic Novel.

When I Was Little, My Ambition Was To Grow Up To Be A Book. Not A Writer. People Can Be Killed Like Ants. Writers Are Not Hard To Kill Either. But Not Books: However Systematically You Try To Destroy Them, There Is Always A Chance That A Copy Will Survive And Continue To Enjoy A Shelf-life In Some Corner On An Out-of-the-way Library Somehwere In Reykjavik, Valladolid Or Vancouver.

Hebrew Has A System Of Tenses, Which Is, In A Big Way, Different From The English System Of Tenses, Probably Different Than Any European System Of Tenses, Which Means A Different Sense Of Reality, Which Means A Different Concept Of Time.