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By Root 1056 0

from his breast pocket like a snowflake in a heat wave. When we entered the auditorium, half an hour before the meeting was due to start, he raised his hat in all directions in greeting and even bowed to his friends. I marched beside my grandfather, solemn and well combed, in a white shirt and polished shoes, straight to the second or third row, where seats of honor were reserved for people like Grandpa Alexander, members of the Jerusalem committee of the "Herut Movement—founded by the Irgun, the National Military Organization." We would sit between Professor Yosef Yoel Rivlin and Mr. Eliahu Meridor, or between Dr. Israel Sheib-Eldad and Mr. Hanoch Kalai, or next to Mr. Isak Remba, the editor of the newspaper Herut.

The hall was always packed with supporters of the Irgun and admirers of the legendary Menachem Begin, almost all of them men, among them the fathers of many of my classmates at Tachkemoni. But there was a fine invisible dividing line between the front three or four rows, which were reserved for prominent members of the intelligentsia, veterans of the National Front campaigns, activists in the Revisionist movement, former commanders of the Irgun, who mostly came from Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, and Ukraine, and the throngs of Sephardim, Bukharians, Yemenites, Kurds, and Aleppo Jews who filled the rest of the hall. This excitable throng packed the galleries and aisles, pressed against the walls, and spilled out into the foyer and the square in front of the auditorium. In the front rows they talked nationalist, revolutionary talk with a taste for glorious victories and quoted Nietzsche and Mazzini, but there was a dominant petit-bourgeois air of good manners: hats, suits, and ties, etiquette and a certain flowery salon formality that even then, in the early 1950s, had a whiff of mold and mothballs.

Behind this inner circle extended an ocean of fervent true believers, a loyal, devoted throng of tradesmen, shopkeepers, workmen, many of them sporting skullcaps, having come straight from synagogue to hear their hero, their leader Mr. Begin, shabbily dressed, hard-working Jews trembling with idealism, warmhearted, hot-tempered, excitable, and vocal.

At the beginning of the meeting they sang Beitar songs and at the end they sang the anthem of the Movement and the National Anthem, Hatikva. The dais was decorated with masses of Israeli flags, a gigantic photograph of Vladimir Jabotinsky, two razor-sharp rows of Beitar Youth resplendent in their uniforms and black ties—how I longed to join them when I was older—and stirring slogans such as "Jotapata, Masada, Beitar!," "If I forget thee O Jerusalem may my right hand lose its cunning!," and "In blood and fire Judaea fell, in blood and fire Judaea will rise again!"

After a couple of warm-up speeches by committee members of the Jerusalem branch, everyone suddenly left the stage. Even the Beitar Youth marched off. A deep, religious silence fell upon the Edison Auditorium like a quiet whirring of wings. All eyes were fixed on the empty stage, and all hearts were primed. This expectant silence lasted for a long moment, then something stirred at the back of the stage, the velvet curtains parted a crack, and a solitary small, thin man stepped daintily to the microphone and stood before the audience with his head humbly bowed, as though he was overwhelmed by his own shyness. Only after a few seconds of awestruck silence did a few hesitant claps rise from the audience, as if the crowd could hardly believe its eyes, as if they were stunned, every time, to discover that Begin was not a fire-breathing giant but a slightly built, almost frail-looking man. But at once they burst into applause, and at the back the applause quickly turned to roars of affection that accompanied Begin's speech almost from beginning to end.

For a couple of seconds the man stood motionless, with head bowed, shoulders drooping, as if to say: "I do not deserve this accolade," or "My soul is bowed down to the dust under the burden of your love" Then he stretched out his arms as if to bless the crowds,