Israeli elections are just one day shy of a week away, and now might be a good opportunity to examine the use of stereotypes to shut down important conversations that we might have, as we elect the people who will represent us.

Yesterday something wonderful happened—Etgar Keret’s newest short story collection, “Fly Already,” appeared in the world. This collection contains all the charm, the absurdities, the intelligence and surreal sense of Keret’s previous collections, but this time, most of the stories are somewhat longer.

“He didn’t call himself a writer, but rather a craftsman,” Haim Be’er says about Yossel Birstein. Today Marcela reads a story containing Birstein’s two great loves: Buses and Shoes.

On this week’s episode, Marcela excerpts from a fairy tale written by Leah Goldberg. She was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, and comparative literary researcher. Her writings are considered classics of Israeli literature.

Naji Daher, a writer, poet, and playwright, was born in Nazareth and lives there. He has published more than fifty books, including six novels. Daher’s works have been translated into Hebrew, English and other languages, and he is the winner of the 2000 Prime Minister Prize.

Gali-Dana Singer is a bilingual poet, translator, an artist and photographer, born in St. Petersburg, who immigrated to Israel in 1988. “I always emphasize that I haven’t switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory.”

The literary world lost one of its bright lights with the passing of Tuvia Ruebner. He was 95 years old. Ruebner lived on Kibbutz Merhavia, where he had made a home since arriving from Nazi occupied Bratislava as a teenager in 1942. The poem “Postcard from Pressburg-Bratislava” is his goodbye to his home town and its devastation during the war.

One of the most predominant themes in Israel Bar Kohav’s work is childhood. The writing is not nostalgic or romantic, but often filled with the terror and anxiety of a child confronting uncontrollable and enigmatic forces.

Lali Tsipi Michaeli’s work attempts to capture, not just the mind at work, but also the spirit, the soul, as it becomes aware of itself as an entity both anchored in, and apart from, the body. Likewise, the body is often viewed as a physical object, one of many that occupy the world.

The poetry of Adi Assis injects us with the distress that consumes his days and nights. His laments madden us as we find ourselves rare witness to circumstances usually hidden from view, and even more profoundly, to the hidden reaches of the poet’s heart.