This is a travelogue by the great American writer and Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow from 1976, three years after the dust of the Yom Kippur War had settled and eight years after the publication of his magnum opus, Herzog.

Bellow meets all sorts of people in Israel — diplomats, spiritual and cultural elite, and ordinary men — stitching everything he hears together seemingly without any particular narrative.

As with any writer’s reporting, it sometimes goes a bit too far into side-thinking, irrelevant poetic pauses, name-dropping, and, well, American overthinking about the country or America itself.

At the same time, it’s an interesting read for a short break between more history-focused books — a unique kaleidoscope of portraits and opinions, some of them exceptionally interesting: from Rabin to Kissinger, from Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek to Sartre.

Reading it from Israel in 2025, it is curious to see how exactly nothing in political thinking, history reading, the descriptive language of the conflict — has changed, or rather keeps reproducing itself. In that sense it provides some comforting about today's turmoil.