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By Root 1261 0

the minefields that divided the city, and once, in the dark, straying perhaps into one of the areas of no-man's-land, I accidentally trod on an empty can, which made a noise that sounded as loud as a landslide, and immediately two shots rang out from quite nearby in the dark and I ran away. Still, I went back the next evening and the following ones to the edge of no-man's-land as though I had had enough of it all. I even went down into the secluded wadis, till I couldn't see any lights, only the outline of the hills and a sprinkling of stars, the smell of fig and olive trees and thirsty summer earth. I got home at ten, eleven, or midnight, refusing to say where I'd been, ignoring my bedtime even though Father had extended it from nine o'clock to ten, ignoring all his complaints, not responding to his hesitant efforts to bridge the silence between us with his well-worn jokes:

"And where, if we may be permitted to ask, has Your Excellency spent the evening, until almost midnight? Did you have a rendezvous? With some beautiful young lady? Was Your Highness invited to an orgy in the Queen of Sheba's palace?"

My silence scared him even more than the burrs that clung to my clothes or the fact that I had stopped studying. When he realized that his anger and his punishments were having no effect, he replaced them with petty sarcasm. He muttered with a nod of the head: "If that's the way Your Highness wants it, that's the way it will be." Or: "When I was your age I had almost finished the gymnasium. Not the light entertainment of a school like yours! The classical gymnasium! With iron military discipline! With classical Greek and Latin lessons! I read Euripides, Ovid, and Seneca in the original! And what are you doing? Lying flat on your back for twelve hours on end reading rubbish! Comics! Dirty magazines! Dwarf and Stalag! Disgusting rags intended for the dregs of humanity! To think of the great-nephew of Professor Klausner ending up as a good-for-nothing! A hooligan!"

Eventually his sarcasm gave way to sorrow. At the breakfast table he would look at me for a moment with sad, warm, doglike eyes, and at once his gaze fled before mine and buried itself behind his paper. As though he were the one who had gone astray and should be ashamed of himself.

Finally, with a heavy heart, my feather suggested a compromise. Some friends in Kibbutz Sde Nehemia would be willing to have me stay for the summer months: I could try my hand at agricultural work and find out whether life with youngsters of my age sleeping in communal dormitories suited me. If it turned out that the experience of the summer was enough for me, I had to commit myself to coming back to school and tackle my studies with the seriousness they deserved. But if I still hadn't come to my senses by the end of the summer holidays, then the two of us would sit down together again and have a truly grown-up conversation and try to come up with a solution that was agreeable to both of us.

Uncle Joseph himself, the old professor whom the Herut Party put forward at that time as its candidate for the presidency of the State against Professor Chaim Weizmann, the candidate of the Center and the Left, heard about my distressing intention to join a kibbutz and was alarmed. He considered kibbutzim to be a threat to the national ethos, if not an extension of Stalinism. So he invited me to his house for a serious private conversation, a tête-à-tête, not on one of our Sabbath pilgrimages but, for the first time in my life, on a weekday. I prepared for this meeting with a pounding heart and even jotted down three or four notes. I would remind Uncle Joseph of what he himself always proclaimed: the need to swim against the tide. The determined individual must always stand up boldly for what he conscientiously believes in, even against strong resistance from those dearest to him. But Uncle Joseph was forced to withdraw his invitation at the last minute because of some urgent matter that had attracted his outrage.

And so it was without his blessing, and without this David and Goliath confrontation,