My writing is related both to my own childhood and to my children's.

I was born in 1941, before the birth of the State of Israel, on Kibbutz Dafna, in the mountain-ensconced Hula Valley in the Upper Galiliee in the north of Israel.

My parents and their friends, pioneers believing in an ideology, decided to build a blooming community in the deserted valley and to earn their livelihood from the land. They pitched tents, built cabins and a small fence marking the borders between the fledgling community and the sprawling wadis and the untamed surrounding woods with their thorny bushes and endless shrubbery.

My early childhood was full of excitement and an easy oneness with my environment. Every tree that was planted, every furrow plowed, every house built, every baby born was another ingredient in the making of our new community. As children, we took part in this unique, primal experience. We had few toys, no movies or television, but we knew every flower and plant by its name, we could recognize the bird calls, we wandered barefoot through the fields like wild flowers, growing and blossoming as the seasons changed.

I inherited my love for the written word from my father. A gifted storyteller, he often told my brother and me Bible stories, fables and fairy tales, and even made up his own fascinating stories. My father, a farmer, educator and socialist, believed in the equality of all men and in every child's right to respect. We learned these values first hand from the way he treated us, but they were also apparent in the figures he admired and revered, such as Yanosh Korchak, the Polish Jewish writer and educator killed, together with the children in his orphanage, by the Nazis.

My father's love for stories was perfect for me. I was a sensitive child, shy and introverted. I often found refuge from the children around me in my imaginary world. When I learned to read, books became my best friends. They were teeming with wonderment, action and adventures. Books took my beyond the fences surrounding the small kibbutz and I learned of great places - of Northern lands covered in snow and of the jungles of Africa. Books opened the door to magical kingdoms with giants, sorcerers, fairies, monsters, dwarfs and witches. Every fantastic idea could come true.

As a child, and later as a teenager, I loved writing and spent hours filling notebooks with poems and stories. As I grew older, my studies, my own criticism of my writing, and my educational work took precedence. I put aside my writing.

Years later, when my own daughters were growing up, their childhood experiences reminded me of my own. I began writing poems for them. These were to be published later in my first book, A Moment Hard to Forget. The poems in this book were like a key for me - writing them opened up some sort of lock. After the book was published, I continued writing.

When writing, I return to my early childhood love for words that create an imaginary, magical world full of adventure. My heroes' stories tell of the hardships, fears and problems children and teens face, and describe complex family and social situations. I tell of coping with being different, with death and illness and of every person's longing and need for support and love.

Young readers often ask me about the hardships and sorrows my heroes experience, talking to me as if my heroes are children the same as them. These conversations truly move me. I tell myself that once again, just as when I was a child, a book has made that wonderful thing happen, an imaginary character has touched a reader's heart, filled it with empathy and emotion.

As an editor of children's and teen books, I appreciate the power of my book, To Touch the Heart. I became an editor after I began writing, and I have been working as author and editor of other authors for several years.

Editing essentially involves reviewing all aspects of a manuscript, the language, the style and the ideas expressed. Naturally, in my capacity as editor, I am exposed to an endless number of stories and poems. When I write, I try my best to shut out the editor in me and listen to my unique writer's voice. I can only hope that I have woven that invisible thread between the writer and the reader and that I have touched someone somewhere.