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And be punished, and take my punishment like a man. With no regrets.

Of course I won't do it: my desire to charm them is much stronger than my urge to shock them. I am a saintly rabbi, not a Genghis Khan.

On the way home Mother looks me straight in the eye and says with a conspiratorial smile:

"Don't think I didn't see you. I saw it all."

All innocence and purity, my sinful heart thumping in my chest like a startled rabbit, I say:

"What did you see?"

"I saw that you were terribly bored. But you managed not to show it, and that made me happy."

Father says:

"The boy really did behave well today, but after all he got his reward, he got a piece of cake and two glasses of cherryade, which we never buy him although he's always asking us to, because who knows if the glasses in the kiosk are really clean?"

Mother:

"I'm not so sure you really liked that drink, but I noticed that you drank it all, so as not to offend Auntie Mala, and I'm really proud of you for that."

"Your mother," Father says, "can see right into your heart. In other words she knows at once not only what you've said and done but also the things you think no one else knows. It's not necessarily easy to live with someone who can see right into your heart."

"And when Auntie Mala offered you a second glass," Mother continues, "I noticed that you thanked her and you drank it all up, just to make her happy. I want you to know that there are not many children of your age, in fact there aren't that many people of any age, who are capable of such consideration."

At that moment I almost admit that it was the Rudnickis' plants, not I, that deserve the compliment, since it was they who drank the syrupy mess.

But how can I tear off the medals that she has just pinned to my chest and fling them at her feet? How can I cause my parents such undeserved hurt? I have just learned from Mother that if you have to choose between telling a lie and hurting someone's feelings, you should choose sensitivity over truthfulness. Faced with a choice between making someone happy and telling the truth, between not causing pain and not lying, you should always prefer generosity over honesty. In so doing you raise yourself above the common herd and earn a bouquet from all of them: a very special child.

Father then patiently explains to us that in Hebrew the word for childlessness is not unrelated to the word for darkness, because both imply a lack, a lack of children or a lack of light. There is another related word that means to spare or to save. "'He who spares the rod hates his child,' it says in the book of Proverbs, and I fully agree with that statement." By way of digression into Arabic, he goes on to suggest that the word for darkness is related to the word for forgetting. "As for the pine-cone, its Hebrew name, itstrubal, derives from a Greek word, strobilos, which denotes anything that spins or whirls, from strobos, the act of revolving. And that word comes from the same root as words like 'strophe' and 'catastrophe.' A couple of days ago I saw a truck that had overturned on the way up to Mount Scopus: the people inside were hurt and the wheels were still going around—so there was strobos and also catastrophe. As soon as we get home, would Your Honor kindly pick up all the toys you left scattered on the floor and put them back where they belong?"

35

MY PARENTS put on my shoulders everything that they had not managed to achieve themselves. In 1950, on the evening of the day they first met by chance on the steps of Terra Sancta College, Hannah and Michael (in the novel My Michael) meet again in Café Atara in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Hannah encourages shy Michael to talk about himself, but he tells her instead about his widowed father:

His father cherished high hopes for him. He refused to recognize that his son was an ordinary young man.... His father's greatest wish was for Michael to become a professor in Jerusalem, because his paternal grandfather had taught natural sciences in