Khamsin: Memoirs and Poetry by a Native Israeli

Exile, flight and return, war and the yearning for peace comprise the themes of this compilation by a veteran Israeli author and journalist. The autobiographical part describes with lyrical precision Dor's struggle to become an artist during Israel's fight for independence, recapturing his childhood in the ``little white town'' of Tel Aviv in the 1930s, his sexual maturation, his youthful activities in the Hagana in the 1940s, the publication of his first poems and his evolution into a student-intellectual and modernist Israeli writer. Dor tells of learning to ``cling to the tiny particulars of the tangible past.'' Of an experience digging trenches for the Hagana, he writes: ``Why do I remember so vividly the smell of dry earth at the Dov airstrip?... Why do I still recall the brilliant green of the summer sea and the smoke pinching my nostrils?'' In his poetry, Dor underscores these same themes. In ``Before Sleep,'' for instance, he writes, ``Baba is flying, above walnut trees, above/ wandering souls..../ When she returns,/ her hair will be heavy/ with the dust of stars.'' (Dec.)