For the time since 1962, the annual nationwide book fair was canceled this year. This week I was reminded of how my love affair with this fair began.
When I was four years old and my parents took me and my sister to the open-air market because there was a rumor that watermelons had arrived.
When I saw a large commotion I let go of my parents and hid under one of the stands. I felt so secure, with the first book in my hand that sucked me into a new world, that I could not hear the PA announcer calling my name over and over.
I was raised in a home that did not have books, just perhaps an encyclopedia, prayer books and the Bible. You cannot blame my family.
They were cash-strapped, and that is why the local library was the most sacred place you would make a pilgrimage to, where you brought an offering to the high priest – the librarian.
If she was kind a gracious, she would let it slide that we borrowed seven books at once. If we happen to have bad luck and fall on a less friendly librarian, we would have to sacrifice our love of books to the gods of the library and have to uphold the sacred commandment of "though shall borrow only one book per day."
The books marked us, the readers. A head inside a book, a finger eager to turn pages while bumping into little objects in the public sphere: utility poles, dumpsters, traffic lights, bus stops, benches and annoyed people.
As readers, we were the darlings of the drivers: As far as we were concerned, they don't have to let us cross the street so long as we can continue reading to find out what happened to David Copperfield or Mr. Smiley.
During my early childhood, the annual book fair was our way of clearing our mind by enjoying the new books whose covers were still fresh, without the stains of fingerprints, without having to see what previous readers ate, as some library books showed.
I would go to the fair with my sister and we would look at this great celebration, taking that smell of books all in and trying to keep this alive for weeks.
Thanks to this smell we managed to get through many challenges and obstacles posed by the various librarians. This tradition continued even during the height of the Second Intifada and the many bombings. At the time, because of the heightened security, the fair was held in the Israel Museum.
In 2010, I finally met this fair from the other side of the stand, as a vendor, following the publication of my new novel.
I have published other books since, and have continued to visit the fair each year, despite it being in a terrible state as if it was some warehouse that had suffered a major catastrophe, and even though some of the publishing houses don't even take part in it.
Year after year, I go there, and always meet people who read, who are also quite the characters. Jerusalem is full of such people.
This year I am overwhelmed with a yearning to go back there. I miss the man who keeps asking questions on the plot, on the characters and the process of writing and then disappears after opening the book.
I miss my childhood friends who meet me and swear that they had always known that I would become a writer, even when I kept skipping Hebrew Literature class.
I miss the child who begs his mother to buy him a fantasy book I had written and she promises him that she would do that "tomorrow" and instead buys him Anne of Green Gables.
I miss the secret agreement between writers in the book fair that I can sign in their name, and I miss my annual tradition of adding the Latin phrase to my autograph:habent sua fata libelli – "Books have their own destiny".
I have no choice but believe in this phrase and believe that the coronavirus did not kill the only week of celebration I have had since being 4.
