“Asthma” appeared on the back jacket of my first short-story collection, Pipes, which was published in Hebrew almost thirty years ago. When the book came out, it sold less than a thousand copies. In retrospect, I now understand that almost all of those copies were purchased as gifts by mothers and aunts of asthmatics. So when it comes to the early adopters of my literary world, the readers who’ve been with me from the very first story, I can only assume that the vast majority of them are my inhaler-toting brothers and sisters.
