World Cup Wishes

22nd June 2002

To Whom it May Concern

On 1 June 2002, I was asked by the family of Mr Yuval Freed to collect his belongings from the police station on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. Among the things that were given to me by Ms Esther Loel, who is in charge of the property room, was a plastic bag containing a large bundle of papers. Since Mr Freed never informed me or his other friends that he was trying his hand at writing, my first assumption regarding the abovementioned bundle of papers was that it must be one of the translations he did for liberal arts students at the university to earn some money. However, there was no name or telephone number written on the plastic bag, and the title of the article in English did not appear at the top of the page, as is customary. I mention all of this to explain why I thought it justified to spend several hours skimming the bundle of papers. I did so not out of voyeurism, but out of a genuine desire to determine the identity of its intended recipient and what I should do with it.

The brief reading I allowed myself made it clear that, in fact, this was not a translated article but a text written by Mr Freed himself. A more thorough reading revealed that it was the manuscript for a book entitled World Cup Wishes, which Mr Freed had been working on over the last year, and that its protagonists are Mr Freed himself and three of his friends. A telephone conversation with Mr Freed’s father confirmed that his son had indeed intended to publish the manuscript as a book, and that he had already reached an agreement on the matter with the Efroni Publishing House in Haifa, owned by their family. According to the father, the only thing left to be done before publication was copy-editing and, to the best of his knowledge, his son had intended to assign that job to me, the undersigned.

To avoid any doubt, I should say that I am not at all sure that the father was correct in thinking that Mr Freed wanted me to edit the book. The more I read of the manuscript, the more puzzled I grew: why did Mr Freed decide to ask one of the protagonists in his book, a character portrayed in the most negative light, to do the editing for him? Nevertheless, since Mr Freed himself was naturally unable to confirm or deny any of this, and since, as a friend, I considered it extremely important to complete the book by his deadline I reluctantly took it upon myself to do the job.

The temptation to make changes in the manuscript was very great. The undersigned, as previously mentioned, is ridiculed in the text. Embarrassing and harsh things that I never said are attributed to me and, worst of all, the book is filled with factual inaccuracies which, in any other situation, would, based on my legal experience, be sufficient grounds for a libel suit. Nevertheless, in the end, I decided to act with a modicum of restraint and minimise my corrections and changes as much as possible, for two reasons. First, despite the many inaccuracies, and despite the generous ‘poetic licence’ Mr Freed granted himself, there is a sense of truth about the entire text, and I was afraid that any change I might make was liable to damage that sense. Second, ‘fixing’ the text without Mr Freed being able to respond or agree to the changes seemed to me to be a betrayal of him and his trust, and since I had already committed one such betrayal during our friendship, I did not wish to add insult to injury.

Despite all the abovementioned, I could not avoid making some changes in my capacity as copy-editor, a role that has been imposed on me. Most of them were cosmetic changes: replacing a comma with a full stop, replacing a full stop with a colon, changing awkward sentence structure, and so on. In only one place in the text did I allow myself to make a factual correction: on see here of the original manuscript it is stated that in the 1994 football World Cup final, Germany played against Brazil, while in fact, it was Italy against Brazil. Based on the many years of my friendship with Mr Freed, I have no doubt that it was a slip of the pen that he would not have wanted to remain in the text.

With the exception of that correction, three minor comments and a short epilogue I thought it necessary to add, everything in this book was written by Mr Yuval Freed, my beloved friend, and he bears sole responsibility for it.

Yoav Alimi (Churchill), Attorney-at-Law