"Until I smelled the fragrance of the cut grass, I didn't believe I was home again." said the young soldier back, stricken from the battle on the Canal. And I, who was stricken after him, fifteen years after him, did not believe I had risen from my bed: drunk as then, climbing to the clay hilltop, flattening myself on its grass. And reviving in its good warmth: like a child coming back wrapped in the sweet fragrance of Mignonette. * translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden, 1999.

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Winner of the 1996 Israel's Prime Minister's Prize for Literature, Elisha Porat has published 17 volumes of fiction and poetry in Hebrew since 1973. His works have appeared in translation in Israel, the United States, Canada and England. The English translation of his short story collection The Messiah of LaGuardia, was released in 1997. His latest work, a book of Hebrew poetry, The Dinosaurs of the Language, was recently published in Israel.

Elisha Porat was born in 1938 to a "pioneer" family in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael (pre Israel); his parents were among the founders of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, a Kibbutz on the Sharon plates near the city of Hadera. Today Porat, devoted to the community ideal, still makes his home near the original tent erected by his parents back in the early '30s. In 1956 Porat was drafted into the IDF (the Israeli army) and fought in three wars: the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the War of South Lebanon in 1982.

In 1998, Porat journeyed out onto the internet. His growing volume of work can be readily found in many literary Ezines. His translated stories and poems have for years found their way into print, most recently in The Boston Review.