she would tell her a story in installments, and the three of us would run there to listen, because Xenia knew how to tell such strange stories, they sometimes made your hair stand on end, I've never met anyone who could tell stories like her. I still remember one story she told. Once upon a time there was a village idiot, Ivanuchka, Ivanuchka Durachok, whose mother sent him every day across the bridge to take a meal to his elder brothers working in the fields. Ivanuchka himself, who was foolish and slow, was given only a single piece of bread for the whole day. One day a hole suddenly appeared in the bridge, or the dam, and the water started to come through and threatened to flood the whole valley. Ivanuchka took the single piece of bread that his mother had given him and stopped the hole in the dam with it, so the valley would not be flooded. The old king happened to be passing and was amazed, and he asked Ivanuchka why he had done such a thing. Ivanuchka replied, What do you mean, Your Majesty? I did it so there wouldn't be a flood, otherwise the people would all be drowned, heaven forbid! And was that your only piece of bread? asked the old king. So what will you eat all day? Nu, so if I don't eat today, Your Majesty, so what? Others will eat, and I shall eat tomorrow! The old king had no children, and he was so impressed by what Ivanuchka had done and by his answer that he decided there and then to make him his Crown Prince. He became King Durak (which means King Fool), and even when Ivanuchka was king, all his subjects still laughed at him, and he even laughed at himself, he sat on his throne all day making faces. But gradually it transpired that under the rule of King Ivanuchka the Fool there were never any wars, because he did not know what it was to take offense or to seek revenge. Of course eventually the generals killed him and seized power, and of course at once they took offense at the smell of the cattle pens that the wind carried across the border from the next-door kingdom, and they declared war, and they were all killed, and the dam that King Ivanuchka Durak had once stopped with his bread was blown up, and they all drowned happily in the flood, both kingdoms submerged.
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Dates. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz Mussman, was born in i889.My grandmother Itta was born in 1891. Aunt Haya was born in 1911. Fania, my mother, was born in 1913. Aunt Sonia was born in 1916. The three Mussman girls went to the Tarbuth school in Rovno. Then Haya and Fania, each in turn, were sent for a year to a private Polish school that issued matriculation certificates. These enabled Haya and Fania to attend the university in Prague, because in anti-Semitic Poland in the 1920s hardly any Jews gained admittance to the universities. Aunt Haya came to Palestine in 1933 and obtained a public position in the Zionist Workers' Party and in the Tel Aviv branch of the Working Mothers' Organization. Through this activity she met some of the leading Zionist figures. She had a number of keen suitors, including rising stars in the Workers' Council, but she married a cheerful, warm-hearted worker from Poland, Tsvi Shapiro, who later became an administrator in the Health Fund and eventually ended up as executive director of the Donnolo-Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa. One of the two rooms in Haya and Tsvi Shapiro's ground-floor apartment at 175 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv was sublet to various senior commanders of the Haganah. In 1948, during the War of Independence, Major General Yigael Yadin, who was head of operations and deputy chief of staff of the newly established Israeli army, lived there. Conferences were held there at night, with Israel Galili, Yitzhak Sadeh, Yaakov Dori, leaders of the Haganah, advisers and officers. Three years later, in the same room, my mother took her own life.
Even after little Dora fell in love with her mother's lover, Pan Krynicki, Xenia did not stop cooking the evening meal and telling her stories, but the food she made was drenched with tears and so were the stories. The two of them would sit there in the