Nashibirskis, who are marked out for death - ­ we're both of us artists; I am the one who will always rise up from the past and be with you like a member of your household."

I dreamt this dream early in 2007, in Oxford, when I was starting to write the novel Tender Hand, and it is the opening of the book that is now being published in Tel Aviv.

The name Hitler is no longer igniting fires in the land of the survivors who in the past would take to the streets because of a Wagner concert. The text exists in the city alongside the one-man show Adolf, in which a young actor plays Hitler at the Tmuna fringe theatre in Tel Aviv. "How a sensitive boy who dreams of becoming an artist turns into Hitler," says the programme. For the first time in the Israeli theatre, director Yagil Eliraz depicts how Hitler's personality is shaped from early childhood to adulthood.

And as for Mein Kampf, that immature work by the young Hitler, its publication was supported here this month by Ariana Melamed, the culture editor at the very

popular internet magazine Ynet.

She described how, at the beginning of 1933, her grandfather, Isidor Albrecht, a decorated officer in German intelligence during World War I, received a gift book, bound in navy blue, adorned with gilded edges and entitled Mein Kampf. Chapter 11 particularly aroused his ire, so much so that he saw fit to send a sharp letter to his bosses, in which he wrote: "As a humanist and as a Jew, I am shocked to the depths of my soul by this hatred-laden nonsense."

"I, his granddaughter, support its re-publication," wrote Melamed, arousing a polemic in which many supported her and many opposed her. Selected chapters of Mein Kampf were translated into Hebrew in 2001 and published under the title 'Chapters from Adolf Hitler's My Struggle,' but copies are to be found only in the university libraries.

This year the Tel Aviv Cinematheque screened the fascinating film by Ari Libsker, Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel, about the phenomenon that I remember from my childhood in the 1960s, of a wave of