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So there we sat once more at seven o'clock in the morning on the three wicker stools at the kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth, and Mother told us a story, about a rich furrier who had lived in her hometown, Rovno, an urbane Jew who was visited by buyers from as far away as Paris and Rome because of the rare silver fox furs he had that sparkled like frost on a moonlit night.

One fine day this furrier forswore meat and became a vegetarian. He put the whole business, with all its branches, into the hands of his father-in-law and partner. Some time later he built himself a little hut in the forest and went to live there, because he was sorry for all the thousands of foxes that his trappers had killed on his behalf. Eventually the man vanished and was never seen again. And, she said, when my sisters and I wanted to frighten each other, we used to lie on the floor in the dark and take turns telling how the formerly rich furrier now roamed naked through the forest, possibly ill with rabies, uttering bloodcurdling fox howls in the undergrowth, and if anyone was unfortunate enough to encounter the fox-man in the forest, his hair turned instantly white with terror.

My father, who intensely disliked this kind of story, made a face and said:

"I'm sorry, what is that supposed to be? An allegory? A superstition? Some kind of bubbe-meiseh?" But he was so pleased to see Mother looking so much better that he added with a dismissive wave of his hand:

"Never mind."

Mother hurried us along so my father would not be late for work and I would not be late for school. At the door, as my father was putting his galoshes on over his shoes and I was getting into my boots, I suddenly let out a long, bloodcurdling howl, which made him jump and shiver with fear, and when he recovered himself, he was just about to hit me when Mother interposed herself between us, pressed me to her breast, and calmed us both down, saying, "That was all because of me. I'm sorry." That was the last time she hugged me.

We left home at about half past seven, Father and I, not saying a word because he was still angry with me over the rabid fox howl. At the front gate he turned left toward Terra Sancta Building and I turned right toward Tachkemoni School.

When I got home from school, I found Mother dressed up in her light skirt with two rows of buttons and her navy jumper. She looked pretty and girlish. Her face looked well, as though all the months of illness had vanished overnight. She told me to put my school satchel down and keep my coat on, she put her coat on too, she had a surprise for me:

"We're not going to have lunch at home today. I've decided to take the two men in my life out to a restaurant for lunch. But your father doesn't know anything about it yet. Shall we surprise him? Let's go for a walk in town, and then we'll go to Terra Sancta Building and drag him out of there by force, like a blinking moth out of a heap of book dust, and then we'll all go and eat somewhere that I'm not even going to tell you, so that you'll have some suspense too."

I didn't recognize my mother. Her voice was not her usual voice, it was solemn and loud, as though she were speaking a part in a school play; it was full of light and warmth when she said, "Let's go for a walk," but it shook a little at the words "blinking moth" and "book dust"; for an instant it made me feel a vague fear, which gave way at once to happiness at the surprise, at Mother's cheerfulness, at the joy of her return to us.

My parents hardly ever ate out, although we often met up with their friends in cafés on Jaffa Road or King George Street.

Once, in 1950 or 1951, when the three of us were staying with the aunts in Tel Aviv, on the last day, literally just before we left for Jerusalem, Father uncharacteristically declared himself to be "Baron Rothschild for the day" and invited everybody, my mother's two sisters with their respective husbands and only sons, out to lunch at Hamozeg Restaurant