“
I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent
did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her
membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here,
what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived
straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound
like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned
linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes,
the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology
field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the
headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis,
the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the
jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the
cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the
language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets,
strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned
pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much
was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments,
ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of
party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and
their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the
dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant
gunfire?
”
”