When I was a little boy, my mother, Naomi Shemer of blessed memory, received a phone call.
It was evident from her reaction that the brief conversation had greatly stirred her. To my question, "What happened?" she replied desperately: "They are building the first large shopping center in Israel, and these bastards want to call it Dizengoff Center. I suggested that they call it Lev Dizengoff, and now I've been informed that my proposal has not been accepted." To my question "Why do you care so much?", she answered simply: "Because if it were in English, everything here would be in English".
I remembered that conversation when I saw the sign "Hebrew Book Week" at the entrance to the fair at the station compound in Jerusalem. The word "Hebrew" surprised me, and this surprise proved to me that my mother was right: the cosmopolitan troops, of which Dizengoff Center was the bridgehead of their landing in Israel, won.
Rotman arrived at the Book Week event in Tel Aviv // Archive photo: Avi Cohen
They have turned Hebrew into an endangered species that needs to be created as a nature reserve with defined boundaries in time, so this is not just "Book Week" but Hebrew Book Week.
This year I came there for the first time as a writer, so I was in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I quickly realized that standing in a stall and making souls work for my book wasn't for me, and I went down a back slope – to the small square that had formed between the stalls of my publishing house, where those authors who also didn't feel like testifying to their pulp gathered.
Jerusalem Book Week, Photo: Oren Ben Hakon
This provided me with a side view of the Hebrew Nature Reserve, and here there is actually a very good reason for optimism: people, from all sectors and ages, were crowded into the fairgrounds, and somehow the crowding did not adversely affect the atmosphere: everyone who came to the gates of Book Week as if he had suddenly shed the veil of nervous and sweaty Israeliness and devoted himself to the holiday atmosphere - and the holiday, with all due respect, feel in their hearts, Certainly not in the chin.
Does Hebrew deserve its own holiday? Absolutely! Language is every culture's way of experiencing the world, and Hebrew is full of treasures that no stranger but us will understand:
I recently heard Dr. Jordan Peterson's lecture series on the book of Genesis, and although he is a man of sharp intellect and interesting insights, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him: Anyone who reads "In the beginning god made..." doesn't really read the Torah." Genesis" is not "in the beginning" and "created" is not "made". Hidden within the word "creation" is, for example, the connection to the word "healthy" - to teach you, already in the second word of the Torah, that everything created is healthy, that is, complete as it is. Go explain it to Jordan Peterson.
The shared love for the Hebrew language and the way it experiences the world is, in my opinion, the profound reason for the festivity and camaraderie between people that characterize the special atmosphere of Book Week.
Because of this, I can't help but wonder: If we had kept Hebrew more, insisted on the "heart" and rejected the foreign implant of the "chin", and not just for one week a year, perhaps Hebrew would also protect us better: perhaps a people that feels that it has a common treasure all year round would not have descended into the abyss of brotherly hatred of recent years.
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