Indeed, it occurs to me that even the next 50 minutes may contain the seed of developments in the Israeli literature of the future that those of us gathered here can only guess at. Suppose, for example, that right now, in some Asian country, the Philippines perhaps, or Thailand, a young man or woman is about to board an airplane that will take him or her to Tel Aviv in pursuit of work. Suppose that it is a woman, and that she will be embarking in Manila, and that she will start working tomorrow as a housekeeper, as many Filipino women in Israel are now doing; and suppose that she will meet there a construction worker from Rumania, and that the two of them will fall in love and marry while (in all likelihood, illegally) remaining in Israel; and suppose they have a daughter who grows up there, in the slums of south Tel Aviv, and whose mother tongue (since it will be the language spoken brokenly between them by her parents) will be Hebrew. And suppose (for the ways of talent are mysterious) that this child is born with the soul of a writer. And suppose that she writes in a Hebrew like none that has ever been written before, a tough demotic street talk enriched by a love of the literary classics such as only a child of immigrants who must woo and win the language of her country entirely on her own--little help from the adults around her--can have. And suppose that the result is an extraordinary new voice in the Hebrew literary world, the first major non-Jewish Hebrew writer of our--perhaps of any--time.
As I say, the next 50 minutes could prove crucial.
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