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Teaching a writing class in a retirement home – well, that really marked the point of no return. Hadassah nearly burst into tears when the director of Eden’s Garden Assisted Living Home had called her. “It’ll be fun, you’ll have a blast,” the entertainment director joyfully proclaimed, swallowing Hadassah’s silence before it could turn into a No, thank you. They’re not invalids or demented. Some of the stuff they write – I’m telling you, there are a lot of late blooming S. Yizhars there, just waiting to write their own Days of Ziklag.

A bullet of goosebumps shot straight into Hadassah’s tailbone, splitting to travel up and down twenty-two locations in her body, like the worst acupuncture of all time — or the best; only the coming days would determine which. In the “cooperative,” S. Yizhar’s  Days of Ziklag served as a code name for a convoluted manuscript written in elevated language, with dozens of names, people and places, and emotions and quotes – lots and lots of quotes, most of them littered with double spaces or a variety of fonts, fat ones, slanted ones, thin ones, or wavy ones. Days of Ziklag was worse than death.

Actually, it was one Days of Ziklag too many that had finally made her quit the profession and swear she would never work as an editor again. Only a single member of the “cooperative” – that was...