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Celebrating Hebrew books
By Haaretz Editorial
Tags: israel news

Hebrew Book Week, which opens today, is a surprising and joyous celebration.

Surprising, because despite endless prophecies of its imminent demise, year after year it turns out that the book is alive and kicking. In fact, young people are reading more than ever, even if Harry Potter and melancholy vampires have replaced the old "Hasamba" kids' series. And starting this evening, hundreds of thousands of Israelis will flock to the Book Week booths in major cities, enthusiastically performing an almost sacred Israeli ritual that has taken place continuously since 1926.

And joyous, because Hebrew literature is our most beautiful export industry, and the only one that is constantly on the rise.
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Only 100 years have passed since the holy tongue awoke from its millennia of sleep, but today it is blossoming in literature, constantly renewing and refreshing itself with the spirit of nonsense and wisdom, an ageless beauty that many see as the most outstanding achievement of the Jewish people's return to its land.

In other languages, too, Israeli literature has become a superpower: You can find David Grossman and Zeruya Shalev in bookstores in dozens of countries, along with A.B. Yehoshua, Etgar Keret, Yehudit Katzir and Amos Oz. They are providing millions of people with possible answers to the growing question of how it is possible to be an Israeli.

Book Week also gives us a chance to consider the state of our authors. This year's fashionable discussion is on what the "correct" price of a book should be, a debate that misses the really important question: What is the "correct" way for the state to treat its writers?

On this issue, we have a lot of room for improvement. Israel is one of the few nations that levies the maximum marginal tax rate on payments to writers and artists. It is also currently the only Western country, other than Bulgaria, that levies full value-added tax on books. Despite year-long fellowships and an efficient and beneficial system of paying writers when their books are loaned out by libraries, Israel still lacks a diverse, dignified support system for authors who cannot make a living from their books - in other words, the vast majority of writers and poets.

Hebrew Book Week is not a secular holiday, just as it is not a religious one. It was born as a commercial venture, but was soon filled with cultural and social content.

Today it serves as a platform for lively debates on the place of literature in society - a vibrant, fascinating discussion that this newspaper is proud to have been part of from its inception.
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