"Aduma" ("The Red Anthology"), edited by Yaara Shehori, Roy Arad, Joshua Simon, Asma Agbariya, Nir Nader, Marwan Makhol, Turki Amer and Matti Schmauluf, Etgar, Ma'ayan and Hakivun Mizrah, 226 pages, NIS 20

I can recall a brief bad period when I was working at a huge computer components warehouse in Holland. My job was to put the orders together: I would receive a long bar-code list, with which I collected, from dozens of rows of shelves, the wrapped parts with the matching numbers. Each shift was eight hours long, eight hours of endless columns of numbers, brown cardboard cartons and frequent glances at my watch to see how much time remained before I could clock out and board the shuttle home. But from the first week on the job I discovered that clocking out did not release me from the job. It took over my free time. Numbers and black lines ran in front of my eyes all the time. At night my dreams were uniform, monotonous and cyclical: I arranged cartons in piles, more and more of them. In the morning I would wake up exhausted, as though at the end of a hard day's work, and head off to the shuttle stop.

Some of the strong poems in "Aduma," a new anthology of class-conscious poetry by Jewish and Arab poets (plus one sweeping anthem by Pete Seeger), do a fine job of demonstrating this experience exactly, the way the capitalist system robs workers not only of their labor but also of their free time, those moments and hours when they are ostensibly on their own.

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Dorit Weisman's "Sestina lekupa'it" ("Sestina for a Cashier") follows a supermarket cashier's stream of consciousness, in which the bar-code numbers and item quantities mingle with scattered thoughts and worries that do