Published: 29 October 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
WHENEVER I LEAVE MY HOME in Israel to visit London, I make a pilgrimage to the four-story bookstore on Gower Street, next to University College London. A visit to the store satisfies my book hunger, but also accords with the practice of returning to the scene where one experienced a miraculous transcendence of the natural order of the world.
You see, in the early 1980s, one of the most perplexing and unimaginable things that ever happened to me occurred in the cluttered and claustrophobic basement of this bookstore.
The truth is our story begins more than 15 years earlier, sometime in 1964. I was then doing my army service, assigned to the office of the chief rabbi of the IDF as a journalist for the army’s magazine, Machanayim, which surveyed Jewish affairs in Israel and worldwide.
Officially the editorial offices were on the base of the Military Rabbinate in Jaffa, but in reality, we sat in the building of the Davar newspaper, at 45 Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv. That is, I sat there—the editorial assistant, copy editor, proofreader, printer’s assistant, packager, and delivery boy all wrapped up in one!
Davar had won the tender to serve as the outsourced printer for the Department of Defence and made a third-floor walk-through office available to the “visiting editors.” Our story begins in this room.
Toiling away, I sat editing an article by professors Dov Sadan, David Flusser, or Hugo Bergmann, when in walked a bespectacled, civilian-clad man of around 30. He had a pleasant demeanour, wore his Anglo-Saxon appearance lightly, and introduced himself as Efraim Halevy, part-time editor of a monthly magazine for army officers put out by the Chief Education Office.
FULL STORY Spies in the basement (Tablet)
Illustration: Tablet magazine
