Among the many books competing for attention as gifts this holiday season, one that stands out is "Arik Einstein: Still the Same Love" (Daniella De-Nur Publishers). The book, which calls itself "a biography in dialogue," is divided into chapters according to subject, and consists of the lyrics of Einstein's songs along with stories and anecdotes about the circumstances in which they were written.

I met with Einstein and the editor of the book, journalist and poet Eli Mohar, to discuss what is revealed and what is hidden in this "biography" of a musician who takes great care not to reveal too much about his private life. Our conversation, too, was marked by this duality.

Eli, In your introduction to the book, you describe the work process and write: "When the door opens and the tall figure stands there (incidentally, always a bit taller than you remembered), it is impossible not to be a little excited: After all, it's Arik Einstein!" Since I, too, share these feelings, I thought it would be good to begin with this agreement: "After all, it's Arik Einstein!" But what are we in fact agreeing on here?

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Mohar: "When I write that for me, the proposal to work with Arik was an offer I couldn't refuse, it's because of Arik's place in the life of this country, and certainly in my own life. As a child I listened to 'Autumn Wind,' humming to myself, 'It is autumn with the cloud and the whining wind,' which is a poem of my father's in Arik's voice. So here was one of my father's poems, and it is brought alive by that voice, and since then I have been living with that voice, from the age of 10.

"And after that I remember 'Your Brow is Adorned." I really remember the very day I heard it, how I walked the streets singing it to myself and couldn't stop. I heard it for the first time at the Gordon swimming pool [in Tel Aviv]. That was a short time after I got divorced, and I had no daily routine, and this song threw me for a loop. When I received the offer to 'do Arik's book,' I couldn't refuse, because I knew that if anyone else did it, then I would say; 'I don't like it this way, I would have done it totally differently' and so on."

Einstein: "I can't see anyone else with whom I could have done it, if not you."

Mohar: "There's no knowing, in life, you know."

Einstein: "I think in retrospect, with whom? With whom? It's a deadly combination, you and I. We know each other, and have worked together, and these are also our times. I sang one of your father's poems, that's where we began."

Mohar: "We had meetings over the years, and it takes Arik time to accept a person. He gives you a suspicious look ...

Einstein: "Come on, I'm the most easygoing person ..."

Mohar: "I'm also the most easygoing, everyone knows that. Daniella [De-Nur - A.R.] is absolutely the most easygoing ..."

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Over the years you chose to speak both through the songs you wrote as well as through the songs you chose to perform. Is there any difference for you?

Einstein: "What you're asking me for is an analysis of things I really don't know how to explain in words, and I also think it isn't necessary to explain them because then they lose something. I don't want to say the word 'magic' because that's a big word, but something gets lost when you talk about processes or what you felt. I don't know what to tell you about the difference between one sort of text and another."

Mohar: "Surely you know what's the difference between a text of Avraham Halfi's and a text of yours?"

Einstein: "The basic difference is that the one comes from me and the other comes from someone else, but what does that mean? For example, 'Your Brow is Adorned with Purest Gold" - can't I enter the mind of the person who wrote that love song?"

Mohar: "But in the book you say of the line: 'Sadness is like a glass filled with bitter wine from the grapes of the soul,' that even if you lived for 500 years you wouldn't be able to write a line like that. You say this. So this is another difference between the lines that you can write and Halfi's line, about which you say, 'I can't come up with one like that, but I can sing it.'"

Einstein: "Still, basically I don't feel comfortable with analyzing a work, in the style of 'How did you get to that.' It's like a rainbow: It is magical and beautiful, but when you read the explanations of the phenomenon, you see that it's hydrogen and oxygen and gases and reflections, and then to my mind it loses the magic. And also when you see films about artists, and they talk about the process of creating the song, it bothers me. I don't want to know how you did it. It becomes too practical."

Is there a connection between your need to preserve the unspoken magic of the work and the nostalgic view that emerges from your songs?

Einstein: "What do we have in life except for our past? I don't think that nostalgia is some sort of disease or pathology, it's something terribly natural. I wrote a line in a song for which Yehuda Poliker composed the music, a sentence that says: 'The Eden Cinema, Eddie Cantor, something distressing with Roman soldiers, Menachem Mendel, pistachio nuts, skies sown with a million stars.' And all of this is a very personal song."

Mohar (reciting); "'It isn't exactly longing'..."

Einstein: "'It isn't exactly longing, just pleasant to recall.' It's not sitting and jerking off over how 'once it was like this, and like that.' It's not that it used to be, back when we lived that life of the Eden Cinema and Eddie Cantor and open roofs and skies sown with stars, that we would walk around saying 'How lovely, what quiet, the Eden Cinema and pistachio nuts.' Not at all. We lived life. In retrospect, when you look back and you see what has happened to this country and to the whole world, it's a horrible mess, it's unbelievable, an entire revolution has happened here.'

Mohar: "I have a kind of identification with Arik, because the circumstances of our lives are similar. The question is what happens to a person who doesn't change very much in a changing world."

Einstein: "Yes, good. I by chance am the subject, but this happens to a lot of people."

Mohar: "As a child I lived in North Tel Aviv, with a pair of working parents, in a key money house, and I went to the beach and I went to the cinema and I thought it was wonderful, that this was happiness, that once a week one had to go to a late show, and one had a slice of bread with halva, and maybe an orange in winter, and that this was very nice, and that this was enough for me. And today too I get up in the morning and I go to the beach, and I go to the cinema, and I come back and go to sleep. I've been doing this for 30 years now and all around the world has changed entirely. And I don't think that things should have changed. I haven't bought a car and I still walk places. These are after all the same streets where we grew up. All around the world has turned upside down but you continue to follow the same route, only along the route everything has changed."

Einstein: "You're talking about daily life, but I'm saying that the change isn't only at the level of daily life, that back then you would eat halva and today people go to a Korean restaurant or who knows where. What has changed is the world, and I'm saying this along simplistic and pretty general lines. The world has become much, much more vicious, much more violent and merciless. It used to be that everything was much sparser. Fewer people and fewer of the negative things. It was less crowded, with less envy and it was less of a race.

"I'll give you an example. People phone me, and I say, 'Okay, I'll call you back tomorrow.' And then when I call and they're in shock, and they say, 'Thank you for calling.' Thanks for what? Didn't we say I'd call you back? But it's true, because everywhere I see people who don't keep their word. An elementary word. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I'm just a Tel Aviv kid who's trying to stay sane.

"And I'll give you another example. I put out records, and I always make sure the name of the artist I've worked with appears next to my own name. So then everyone says, 'Good for you,' because others don't do this. But it's his baby just as much as it's my baby. How could I write my name and not write the name of the person who worked maybe harder than I did? But this has become an exceptional behavior considering what is happening around us, because in most cases this isn't done."

But doesn't the past, that is, "the good old land of Israel" that people yearn for, already harbor the foundations of what has turned out to be so bad nowadays?

Mohar: "Yes, you say this in the book; 'Never mind the "good old Israel", the old Israel is enough.'"

Einstein: "At the start of the 1970s, Shem-Tov Levi and I were a lot less critical, a lot more relaxed, a lot more naive. Read the songs that we wrote, how naive they are. I sit today and say, 'I want to write like that,' but then I say to myself, hell, how can I? How is it possible today to write a line like: 'You can't walk away just like that, you can't leave me?'

"It's a bother to talk again about the loss of innocence, but that's it, that's it. A loss of innocence. There are still islands, there are forces that don't give in, that continue to struggle all the time, but it's amazing how everything has changed. Take the ways of expression, for example. How we express ourselves. I don't know if I'm going overboard a bit, but nowadays people say 'cunt' [to refer to a pretty woman] and I hear this and I'm shocked. Even though I'm a person who likes to cuss ..."

Mohar: 'The word cunt really does reveal unimaginable crudeness. It's not just dirty language, which can also be innocent. Anyone who can call a girl that ..."

Einstein: "The norms really have changed so much. And then, in this context, people our age, and I'm older than he is by some 10 years, are looked at as nostalgic relics longing for a better world. But it is the world that is changing ceaselessly and you just try to be sane. You are attacked. We are attacked. Why 'cunt,' fucking hell..."

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Do you feel that the quality of the writing in Israeli music today is influenced by this decline in modes of expression?

Einstein: "The giants of the past are giants because they are giants. [Natan] Alterman and Halfi and all the rest. But my feeling is that today there are young men and women who are writing extraordinary things. I put Meir Ariel right next to Halfi and Alterman."

Meir Ariel isn't now.

Einstein: "Why isn't he now? Because he died?"

Nevertheless, do you read poetry that people are writing now?

Einstein: "I taste poems when I think about music. But I rummage again and again through the Halfis and the Altermans and the [Haim Nachman] Bialiks and the Leah Goldbergs. Nevertheless, textually and musically wonderful things are happening in Israel. Like in life, everything today is a thousand times more: both better and worse. Musically, do you know how much talent there is here?

"Altogether, I have a theory that says that most of the good people aren't known. Because how many good people can possibly be known? A thousand? Two thousand? But there is an endless number of good people, there's an explosion of talent here. But Halfi and Alterman are like Pele and Maradona. Like Beethoven. You can't help it. They were great and have remained great and the world can change a thousand and one times. It's not relative and not shmelative."

But you aren't giving me an example of a young person who in your opinion writes excellent texts.

Einstein: "Yes, that's right, you're right. We aren't touching on everything. I hope that this isn't suffering from superficiality."

Mohar: "My heart often aches when I hear a poem, by a young fellow, a song that is well written, and he completely mispronounces the words, and I turn off the radio."

And does this erosion of the language affect the written texts?

Einstein: "It cuts both ways. On the one hand, the language is totally tortured, and so is the music, and on the other hand there are so many beautiful things. It's an extreme world: On the one hand there is so much that is terrible and on the other there is much more that is good."

So in the midst of all this decline, how have you maintained your place and your standing as a musician?

Einstein: "You can't ask me this question. Do you think that I know exactly what kind of effect my singing has? I don't have an answer. I live my life. I meet my work partners and we work and write and create. I simply don't know."

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When reading the book there is a sense that Arik is very much in control of the materials that he is prepared to reveal; is there conscious concealment here or is this just part of Arik?

Mohar: "I don't think that there's concealment here, but I do think that the book is just chapter headings for a biography. It goes according to his own stations, it touches on things. And Arik also sometimes says, 'I know exactly what took place between this other person and me and I don't want to say.' This is absolute frankness."

Einstein: "We don't tell the truth in all its nakedness, everything that we think about the world and about people, including people with whom we work and get along. What for? These are such personal and intimate things. You're sitting with us now and you have your own thoughts, about how you are seeing me and Eli, for example, and it isn't the sort of thing that needs to be told. These are personal things that aren't talked about. They aren't talked about also because very often, over the years, things happened afterward to people with whom I worked, unpleasant things included.

"So first of all, it doesn't interest me in the least to talk about this. Let's talk about the cup that is one-third full, I call it. Half full? Forget it. The cup that is one-third full. Why go into details? Sometimes this can only cause damage."

In the book there is a feeling that you, as an individual and as a creative person, are always moving between activity and passivity, between optimism and despair.

Einstein: "Oh, is that a question? If that's what you felt then apparently that's what it is. (To Eli Mohar:) What do you have to say about me?"

Mohar: "I think that there's something to it that reflects your movement between your private space of contemplation and the inability not to react to things that come into your home via the newspaper or television."

Einstein: "Yes, but when this is noted as something that is unique to me, I feel very uncomfortable. What happens to me happens to you."

But even if these two stances are to be found in everyone, there are people for whom the identification with one of the extremes is clearer, and with you the identification is with both of them.

Einstein: "Apparently that's so, yes. If you felt that way then that's certain."

Mohar: "Arik is trying to say that everyone has his own work. He is trying to say that 'my work is not to analyze myself, and also not to tell the whole truth.' Except in the songs."

Einstein: "And sometimes it is possible both to analyze and to tell the whole truth. Life is this and that and this. I always tell the story of the two people who had a problem and went to the rabbi, and the beadle let the first one in and the rabbi asked him what the problem was, and he told of a financial problem between him and the other person. The rabbi listened and in the end said to him, 'You're right.' That one went out and the beadle let the other one in, and he related his side. The rabbi listened and said to him, 'You're right.' When the beadle was left alone with the rabbi, he said to him, 'Rabbi, how could you tell the one that he was right and also tell the other that he was right?' So then the rabbi said to him, 'You're right, too.'"