Modern Turkish culture and modern Hebrew culture resemble one another far more than what might appear at first glance. The movement of these two cultures is in the same direction of shaking the religiosity out of the language and transforming it into a means of secular expression. The Turkish poets of the 20th century were in the vanguard of the struggle to secularize the language and strip it of its religious associations. Their effort resembles that made by modern Hebrew poets to stop seeing Hebrew as a sacred tongue and to start relating to it as an everyday language. The advantage of Turkish was the transition from Arabic writing to the Latin alphabet. Hebrew has not succeeded in taking this daring step, and remains with one foot in the sacred and one foot in the everyday.

One of my first contacts with Turkish literature was in 1963. I was 10 years old. One afternoon I was taken to visit a Jewish family called Serero, who my grandmother and my mother said were "communists." They said they wouldn't have taken me there were it not for the fact that the Sareros' daughter had been a childhood friend of my mother's and my mother wanted her to meet me. The daughter was called Thilda Serero, and she was then the wife of the greatest living Turkish writer, Yasar Kamal.

It must be noted that at this meeting an argument broke out between my opinionated aunt and Thilda Serero about Israel and the diversion of the sources of the Jordan River by the Syrians, which at the time was the hot topic in the news. Thilda was pro-Syrian and argued that the sources of the Jordan did not belong only to Israel, and my aunt argued the opposite. Things would have ended in a more serious quarrel had my grandmother not suggested that we go for a walk in Yalova Park.

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I still have a number of pictures of the Sarero family and my family in the park. Who took those pictures? Perhaps it was Yasar Kamal - who was with us, although I didn't know who and what he was.

In just such an indirect way, during my youth, I encountered for the first time a selection of poems by Nazim Hikmet that were translated into Hebrew, apparently by way of English, by the Israeli poet T. Carmi. Hikmet himself wrote the introduction to the Hebrew edition, which expressed how moved he was by the fact that the book would appear in Israel, the land of the Jews. The collection of poems was printed in a series of books bound in red by the Sifriat Hapoalim publishing house, along with poems by Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda. There I read the poem "Angina Pectoris," in which the poet talks with his doctor about the troubles of the world that are weighing on his heart. There was no poem like that in Hebrew. I was envious, because to my regret, no Israeli poet had arisen who was sufficiently subversive to have sat in prison and to have been exiled from his country, like Hikmet was in Turkey.

To this day, I think that Hebrew literature is unbelievably conformist in political matters, even though ostensibly there have been no restrictions on it and it could have been more subversive. Many Turkish writers, however, living in a world of regimes that restrict the freedom of the individual, have not hesitated to choose prison and exile, only so that they could have their political say, like Hikmet, like Yasar Kamal - and most recently Orhan Pamuk.

I met Pamuk in Israel, in front of the Abulafia bakery in Jaffa, where he was brought by the editor and public relations representative of the Keter Publishing House when he visited here on the occasion of the publication of "The Black Book" in Hebrew translation. I had volunteered to tour Jaffa with him; he found it neglected and ugly and he was a bit insulted that the publishers had chosen the Arab part of Tel Aviv for our meeting.

This small detail is indicative of the basic misunderstanding about Turkey that exists in Israel. A writer like Pamuk does not see himself as "Eastern" in any respect, just as an Israeli writer does not see himself in that way. And if the degree to which a culture is "Western" is measured by the extent of its secularity, in this respect Israeli culture is far more problematic than Turkish culture in its inability to free itself from the religious-sanctified element within it. Is it necessary to explain why? Every single word that has been written in this article expresses this powerlessness.