Moked created the world of modern hebrew poetry, but made a world of enemies by blasting a lot of the other poets and writers.  he also mishandled money – his own as well as that of others.  But how would you expect a man who spent his boyhood in the Warsaw Ghetto and in a closet to understand buying and selling?  

So today when we went to the funeral we were not terribly surprised to find less than 30 people there.  The press was not there.  The crowds who followed him around for years in the hope of gaining some of the glamour that he gathered were not there, and we who had planned to shake hands with mourners, express our grief, and politely leave, joined the mourners and followed the speedingy  cart to the grave. 

Yarkon Cemetery is one of the most pathetic places in this country.  Bodies are shoved into slots in walls and walled up, but the odor of decaying bodies fills the air.  Surely Moked deserved to be laid in a spacious grave surrounded by the literatti he promoted with a marble monument, and not in a corner in a wall.  

But so it went.  

A nephew of Paula Ben Gurion, his sad end typifies the loss of values and respect for culture and ethics that characterizes this country.  As I wrote my friend, read chapter 12 of Judges.