At Home in Exile: An Interview with Shimon Ballas This interview appeared in slightly different form in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited and translated by Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996). Ammiel Alcalay: Starting with education, practically and in a wider sense, how were you formed as a writer? Shimon Ballas: One has to go very far back, to early childhood. I was always attracted to writing. I connected it to stories told at home and I used to try and write them down for myself. I was always a little reticent to show them to anyone; I was scared of criticism. I was also very drawn to reading. In comparison to my friends at school, though, I actually read less. They swallowed books; I did too, but I would think about them and contemplate things more, I would write notes. By the third or fourth grade we read a lot of translations from French. Adventure stories, Arsene Lupin, Alexander Dumas. And also things like