Amos was two and a half years my junior. He left Jerusalem at the age of 14 and moved to a kibbutz. Yet every Friday he would visit his father’s house in Jerusalem where he was in the Scouts movement and participated in group activities. I was their leader, but I didn’t really notice him. From time to time, he would remind me that he used to be my student. “How could I have missed you?” I would ask, to which he would reply, in his own way, “I was shrunken to lower the grass.”

Shrunken because his mother had died, because he moved to a strange kibbutz as a child. But Amos was strong, very strong even. Strong in his solitude.

After his father passed away at a young age, I felt like Amos was my little brother. I don’t have a brother so I told him that he was one to me. That was the basis of our relationship — fraternal, beyond literature, beyond our shared political and ideological views.

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