"War and the Dream" by Yair Lapid is a memoir by a politician and a journalist, where personal biography is intertwined with the history of the state. The book is assembled from scenes and episodes: family, early career, experience of public service, decisions in power, days of terror. The end—to-end motif is "two basements": Budapest in 1945, where his mother was fleeing, and a shelter on October 7, 2023, when Lapid hides his family. The parallel of these basements is not only a metaphor for trauma, but also the optics of choice: what values do you keep in the dark, and what light do you bring out later. Lapid writes simply and accurately: about the price of leadership and the responsibility of a citizen, about the memory of the Holocaust, repatriation and modern war, about how the language of news corrodes empathy — and how to return it. This is not a chronology of posts, but an honest "account of time and myself," where private stories are combined with documentary specifics and political reflection.