According to Eshed, Carmi translated at a rate of 12 books a year, about 500 books in all. He was best known for his genial rendition of Damon Runyon, for which he actually invented an “equivalent” Hebrew slang .For his special style, Mizrahi coined the term "Carminization" of translated texts. He translated O. Henry, Edgar Wallace, H. G. Wells, R.L.Stevenson, Jack London and many more. He was especially prolific in translations of erotic literature, fiction and guidebooks. According to Arieh Hashavia, not only did Carmi disdain censorship of erotica, he exaggerated it when he felt the original was not risqué enough. He added abundantly to Stiletto by Harold Robbins, for instance.4 In his zealous efforts to translate erotic books, Carmi had to look for less “normative” publishers in the periphery. Carmi was less of a political person. However, his weekly column in the Likud magazineYoman Ha’shavua, published in the 1980s, leaves no doubt about his right-wing political affiliation. He died in 1991.

Arieh Hashavia is an example of a translator, writer and journalist who did not identify with the right wing and who found his way to more central publishing. Hashavia started in the Gadna magazine and went on to write the IDF weekly Ba’machaneh (literally: In the [Military] Camp). In 1948, as a high school pupil, he was already working as jack-of-all-trades in the Yediot Aharonot evening paper. When Aharon Shamir became editor of the paper's Weekend Supplement and of La’isha [For Woman], young Hashavia became his close assistant, and remained on the job for ten years (Zvi and Paz 1999:13).

There were many immigrants who could not read Hebrew, it was the "Utility" period, people hardly had money for food, and the conservative paper for women, founded and run by men, provided advice for the working-woman-housewife-mother in matters of fashion, housekeeping and social gossip. The British magazine Woman supplied a model. La’isha started a letterbox and, seeing that response was meager, initially had to resort to fabricating readers’ letters. Should I allow him to kiss me on the first date? Arieh Hashavia, as the woman-consultant "Ariella Lev", provided the answers. The editors conducted polls to find out what women wanted to read. What was the “recipe for success”? Hashavia explained it to me: they did not annoy or challenge anybody, they did not write about controversial subjects, they did not write about sex. 

Early in his career, Hashavia managed M. Mizrahi’s publishing firm for ten years, and throughout that time translated a large number of books. He used the pseudonym Haim Lev (his full name at birth was Haim Leib) when he translated erotica such as Frank Harris's My Life and Loves (and was surprised that I guessed as much, see BenAri 2006:269–270, 288–281). He also used the pseudonym H.Adini (his wife's name is Adina) and T.Lavie.

A colorful figure, a pseudotranslator–publisher, who made a point of staying behind the scenes all these years, is Eli Kedar.6 Born 1938 in Givatayim, Kedar was a central figure in the marginal popular literature scene of the 1960s. He used so many pseudonyms for his writing and his ad hoc invented printing firms that he finds it hard to remember them all. Among them: Nam Sun, Mike Baden, A. Zilber, A. Keren, A. Kadar and even a female name — Tali Frank. The publishing firm Great Art & I, for whom G. Kasim translated Fanny Hill, was his venture, as were a film company named Sirtey Yoel [Yoel’s Films] and a woman’s magazine called Hu ve’Hi [He and She]. Kedar was an entrepreneur, initiating projects and abandoning them as soon as they came into the public domain. He often lost money by quitting when the project became a hit.

In 1958, after his military service, Kedar wanted to become a journalist. When the major journals rejected him, he decided to try his hand at writing pulp fiction. It was then that he went to look for the publisher who was putting out Westerns. After the success of his first book Kohenet Ha’yareach Ha’tzahov [Priestess of the Yellow Moon], Nissim asked for more material, and together they created the Buck Jones series. As mentioned above, Nissim could not keep up with Kedar's tempo. Ezra Narqis met Kedar in the Central Bus Station compound and offered him more money for all the books

he could write. According to Kedar, he and Narqis published the first pocket-book to be sold in kiosks — Nam Sun’s Rutz ad Ha’sof [Run Till the End] — which appeared two weeks before M. Mizrahi published the first chapbook in his Agatha Christie series. Leafing through a foreign magazine in Narqis's office, with pictures of voluptuous SS female officers, Kedar conjured up his greatest hit — Stalag 13 (see Ben-Ari 2006: 163–173). In the tradition of Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, the series depicted British and American prisoners being tortured in Nazi prison camps, with a "twist": the camps were run by sadistic sex-craving female Nazi officers. Kedar did not pursue the success of the Stalags in Israel. He translated his book into English and went to Germany to look for a publisher. He came back to find, to his amazement, that the books had been sold by the thousands, which did not deter him from abandoning the sure success of the Stalags and looking for new ventures.

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