Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

I’ve been trying to revive the defunct PEN organization in Israel, and although I’ve been working on it for months, and there were hundreds of members less than a decade ago, the sense of unity seems to have vanished. Or perhaps it never existed but people gathered around money. When I first became interested in writers organizations in Israel there was government support of all of them – a sense that writers enriched the language and therefore the culture. Many of the writers didn’t really respect the other writers and had fearful arguments with each other, often on ideological grounds, but there was a home, the writers’ house, for almost all of them. That’s gone. There were two women sitting in the hallway of the shabby neglected building in the heart of tel aviv when i came by today, and nothing going on. The archives was unmanned and open, the offices were empty. This has to change.