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By Root 1178 0

on, and when the water was almost boiling he carefully lowered the two glasses of juice into the pan and stirred them well with a spoon so that the juice close to the edge was not warmer than the juice in the middle of the glass. Then, shaved and dressed, with my mother's checked kitchen apron tied around his waist over his cheap suit, he would wake my mother (in the book room) and me (in the little room at the end of the corridor) and hand each of us a glass of warmed orange juice. I used to drink this lukewarm juice as though it were poison, while Father stood next to me in his checked apron and his quiet tie and his threadbare suit, waiting for me to give him back the empty glass. While I drank the juice, he would look for something to say: he always felt guilty about silence. He would rhyme in his unfunny way:

"Drink the juice my boy, I don't wish to annoy."

Or:

"If you drink your juice each day, you'll end up feeling merry and gay."

Or even:

"Every sip, so I've been tol', builds the body and the soul."

Or sometimes, on mornings when he was feeling more discursive than lyrical:

"Citrus fruit is the pride of our land! Jaffa oranges are appreciated all over the world. By the way, the name Jaffa, like the biblical name Japheth, apparently derives from the word for beauty, yofi, a very ancient word that may come from the Akkadian faya, and in Arabic has the form wafi, while in Amharic, I believe, it is tawafa. And now, my young beauty"—by now he would be smiling modestly, taking quiet satisfaction in his play on words—"finish your boo-tiful Jaffa juice and permit me to take the glass back to the kitchen as my booty."

Such puns and witticisms, that he called calembours or paronomasia, always aroused in my father a kind of well-intentioned good-humor. He felt that they had the power to dispel gloom or anxiety and spread a pleasant mood. If my mother said, for instance, that our neighbor Mr. Lemberg had come back from the hospital looking more emaciated than when he went in and they said he was in dire straits, Father would launch into a little lecture on the origin and meaning of the words "dire" and "straits," replete with biblical quotations. Mother expressed amazement that everything, even Mr. Lemberg's serious illness, sparked off his childish pleasantries. Did he really imagine that life was just some kind of school picnic or stag party, with jokes and clever remarks? Father would weigh her reproach, apologize, but he had meant well, and what good would it do Mr. Lemberg if we started mourning for him while he was still alive? Mother said, Even when you mean well, you somehow manage to do it with poor taste: either you're condescending or you're obsequious, and either way you always have to crack jokes. At which they would switch to Russian and talk in subdued tones.

When I came home from Mrs. Pnina's kindergarten at midday, my mother fought with me, using bribery, entreaties, and stories about princesses and ghosts, to distract my attention until I had swallowed some runny-nose squash and mucous squash (which we called by its Arabic name, kusa), and rissoles made from bread mixed with a little mince (they tried to disguise their breadiness with bits of garlic).

Sometimes I was forced to eat, with tears, disgust, and fury, all sorts of spinach rissoles, leaf spinach, beetroot, beetroot soup, sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, or carrots, raw or cooked. At other times I was condemned to cross wastelands of grits and bran, to chew my way through tasteless mountains of boiled cauliflower and all kinds of depressing pulses such as dried beans and peas and lentils. In summer Father chopped a fine salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, spring onions, and parsley, gleaming with olive oil.

Every now and then a piece of chicken made a guest appearance, sunk in rice or run aground on a sandbank of potato purée, its mast and sails adorned with parsley and with a tight guard of boiled carrots with rickets-smitten squash standing around its deck. A pair of pickled cucumbers served as the flanks of this destroyer, and