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By Root 1247 0

girl is smiling at the photographer. She looks as though she is well aware of her charms, which she is projecting very deliberately at the lens of the camera. Her soft, long hair, which comes down over her shoulders and rests on her coat, is neatly parted on the right. Her round face is plump and happy, her eyes are elongated and slanted, almost Chinese-looking, and there is a half smile on her full lips. She has been dressed in a tiny double-breasted coat over her dress, identical to her brother's in every respect, only smaller, and wonderfully sweet. She too is wearing little socks that go up to her knees. On her feet she has shoes whose buckles sport cute little bows.

The boy in the picture is my uncle David, who was always called Ziuzya or Ziuzinka. And the girl, that enchanting, coquettish little woman, the little girl is my father.

From his infancy until the age of seven or eight—though sometimes he told us that it went on until he was nine—Grandma Shlomit used to dress him exclusively in dresses with collars, or in little pleated and starched skirts that she ran up for him herself, and girls' shoes, often in red. His magnificent long hair cascaded down onto his shoulders and was tied with a red, yellow, pale blue, or pink bow. Every evening his mother washed his hair in fragrant solutions, and sometimes she washed it again in the morning, because night grease is well known to harm hair and rob it of its freshness and sheen and serve as a hothouse for dandruff. She made him wear pretty rings on his fingers and bracelets on his pudgy arms. When they went to bathe in the sea, Ziuzinka—Uncle David—went to the men's changing rooms with Grandpa Alexander, while Grandma Shlomit and little Lionichka—my father—headed for the women's showers, where they soaped themselves thoroughly, yes, there, and there too, and especially there please, and wash twice down there.

After she gave birth to Ziuzinka, Grandma Shlomit had set her heart on having a daughter. When she gave birth to what was apparently not a daughter, she decided on the spot that it was her natural and indisputable right to bring this child, flesh of her flesh and bone of her bones, up as her heart desired, according to her own choice and taste, and no power in the world had the right to interfere and dictate her Lonia or Lionichka's education, dress, sex, or manners.

Grandpa Alexander apparently saw no cause for rebellion: behind the closed door of his little den, inside his own nutshell, he enjoyed a relative autonomy and was even permitted to pursue some of his own interests. Like some Monaco or Liechtenstein, he never would have thought to make a fool of himself and jeopardize his frail sovereignty by poking his nose into the internal affairs of a more extensive neighboring power, whose territory enclosed that of his own Lilliputian duchy on all sides.

As for my father, he never protested. He rarely shared his memories of the women's showers and his other feminine experiences, except when he took it into his head to try to joke with us.

But his jokes always seemed more like a declaration of intent: look, watch how a serious man like me can step outside himself for you and volunteer to make you laugh.

My mother and I used to smile at him, as though to thank him for his efforts, but he, excitedly, almost touchingly, interpreted our smiles as an invitation to go on amusing us, and he would offer us two or three jokes that we had already heard from him a thousand times, about the Jew and the Gentile on the train, or about Stalin meeting the Empress Catherine, and we had already laughed ourselves to tears when Father, bursting with pride at having managed to make us laugh, charged on to the story of Stalin sitting on a bus opposite Ben Gurion and Churchill, and about Bialik meeting Shlonsky in paradise, and about Shlonsky meeting a girl. Until Mother said to him gently:

"Didn't you want to do some more work this evening?"

Or:

"Don't forget you promised to stick some stamps in the album with the child before he goes to bed."

Once he said to his guests: