ספר האלף-בית

Instead of telling his life in order, the author arranges it under the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, a personal dictionary whose entries are episodes and people. The seemingly arbitrary order frees the details from autobiographical ambition and turns them into something closer to a self-portrait. There are heartbreaking, almost bewitched figures from his childhood and youth in the Soviet Union and in the ruins of 1940s and 1950s Poland, and Israeli figures many readers will half-recognise: painters, poets, politicians, journalists, beggars, philosophers, shoemakers, booksellers. Between them come fragments of a life, regrets, old loves and objects, a pair of worn shoes, a mustard jar, a stopwatch, a pistol.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Nonfiction

Length

178 pages in the original

Genres

Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Poland, Israel

First published

2003 by Hargol

Author's age

67 when first published

ISBN

9789657120279 (original)