Herschel loitered in a quiet alley just long enough to strip. He kicked off the crocodile shoes and hurled them deep into the dark recesses of the alley. Off came the suit pants, jacket and tie. He wore his usual khaki shorts underneath, and a pair of sandals tucked into his belt. He threw away the wide-brimmed hat. As he discarded each garment he felt a little safer. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and unfastened his collar. Finally he smudged dirt on the gleaming silk. When Herschel emerged he looked like what he was, a student at Hebrew University.
He headed for the university now. He was pumped far too full of adrenaline to return to the apartment he shared with his mother. She would be waiting for him, and he didn’t trust himself to face her while he was so on edge. She knew he’d joined the lrgun, and quite soon word of the organization’s country-wide reprisals would reach her.
No, he could not yet return home, not until he had sorted out his thoughts and tumultuous emotions as the ramifications of his actions took hold. At one time he could have discussed such things with his mother, but they’d grown apart.
So, you helped kill women and children? Herschel could imagine the accusation in his mother’s eyes. The question hovered in his own mind. His had been a so-called ‘clean’ target, but what of his complicity in the organization’s actions as a whole? What of his moral responsibility?
Herschel boarded a motor bus and settled into a seat in the back as it began the slow journey north, up the winding road to the campus on Mount Scopus. As Herschel gazed through the bus’s grimy window, covered with wire mesh to deflect hurled stones, or worse, grenades, his thoughts drifted back.
Early in his education Herschel showed a strong talent for mathematics. His teachers took him as far along as they could, and after that they compiled book lists for him. The volumes were ordered from Tel Aviv.
His mother was pleased that Herschel wished to pursue his education. She explained to him that there were two decisions he would have to make.
Was he willing to leave Palestine in order to go to school? Was he willing to resign from Degania if the membership, which had the authority to veto the kibbutz children’s career plans, failed to agree?
Herschel thought hard. He knew that their money had been wisely managed over the years; paying for an education abroad was not a concern. But if he left Palestine there was no promise that the British would allow him to return. Besides, how could he resign from Degania? He told his mother that he would remain in Palestine and abide by the kibbutz’s decision.
Permission was granted. Herschel would attend Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The kibbutz decreed that Herschel should stay on until there were youths old enough to take his place in the defense of the settlement. The delay chafed at him, but it also worked to his advantage, for Hebrew University at that time focused on graduate-level research. The older Herschel was, the better he would do there.
In 1934 Rosie accompanied her son to Jerusalem. Degania granted them both leave, insisting that she go along to look after Herschel, so she said. Herschel suspected that his mother encouraged him to choose Jerusalem over Haifa as much for her own benefit as his. She seemed as excited as he. She would paint, she told her son, take classes, talk with other artists and stretch her mind and talent. New surroundings would inspire her. Degania was her home, but she needed a change.
Herschel welcomed his mother’s company. The harsh demands of settlement life matured him beyond his years, but in another sense he led quite a sheltered existence within the rural family atmosphere of Degania. He knew how to track his way across Galilee and how to kill, but the thought of an urban maze of cobblestoned streets dismayed him. How could he haggle with a shopkeeper? No money changed hands at Degania. Farm life had afforded him an eyewitness understanding of the facts of life, but the girls on the kibbutz possessed the passion-numbing familiarity of sisters, and Herschel had never had a girl friend, never been in love.
But it was not merely a matter of finding Jerusalem intimidating; he wanted his mother with him for her sake as well as his. Since the death of his grandparents and the sale of the family home in Jaffa, his mother was feeling very much alone. Some of her brothers and sisters had left Palestine and some had stayed, but all were occupied with their own lives and families, and all had grown apart from Rosie since she moved to Degania.
Herschel was, quite simply, the only family his mother had left. He relished the role and the responsibility that went along with it. In that expectant, happy time, Herschel assumed that he and his mother would forever be happy in one another’s company, watched over by his father’s ghost.
The bus to Mount Scopus groaned to a halt before the ponderous castlelike buildings that made up the university. News of the terrorist attack in the Arab quarter preceded Herschel. Several students collared him as he stepped off the bus, demanding to hear the latest.
Herschel told them he knew nothing, even as he itched to correct the rumor that the lrgun had blown up a coffeehouse filled with “innocents.” Nearby a student anxiously wondered when the police would make an appearance on campus. The university had only recently returned to normal since the last sweep. In that one the police, many of whom were fascist veterans of the repressive Black-and-Tans sent to quell the Irish Rebellion in the twenties, arrested Abraham Stern and David Raziel, former students and lrgun founders. An overzealous police inspector named Cairns ordered both men tortured when they refused to be interrogated. The lrgun issued Cairns a warning and then put forth his death warrant. Soon after that Cairns and another police official were killed by an lrgun bomb.
“The British will be coming up here again,” the student said worriedly. “They’ll arrest someone—anyone—just to have a culprit.”
Herschel wandered away, heading for the shaded limestone courtyard behind the science building. “They’ll arrest someone—anyone . . .” The ramifications of his actions were beginning to dawn on him. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving him tired, anxious, remorseful and angry at himself for suffering the weakness of uncertainty.
He entered the courtyard and sat down on a bench before pulling a book from his pocket. Pretending to read so as to avoid being disturbed, he tried to sort out the jumble of conflicting thoughts and emotions washing over him.
Raziel and Stern were rotting in jail under torture, he reminded himself. Any action was permissible to protest such injustice, the atrocities committed against Jews and the British government’s white paper, which capitulated to Arab demands that Jewish immigration be curtailed and that the Jews be forever condemned to minority status in Palestine. He ought to be proud of himself, not mired in this confounded funk.
Then he remembered the look of fear in the eyes of that Arab in suit, and fez, and his resolve to be a “good soldier” once again began to waver. To kill in a fair fight was one thing, but his spirit could not endure the thought of any more bombing attacks. It was true that Herschel wished to avenge his father’s death, but bowling bombs into the midst of unarmed, unsuspecting victims hardly honored his father’s memory.
If only Frieda were here, Herschel thought wistfully. I could do with some of her strength, her certainty.
They met during the spring of 1936, during Herschel’s second year of school. He was lazing on the grass, his back against a tree and his nose in his calculus text, when he heard his name called. He looked up from his numbers and equations to see a pretty girl grinning down at him. She had a scattering of freckles across her apple cheeks and a bushy mane of coppery, wiry curls beneath a bright blue kerchief.
“You are Kolesnikoff, the English Jew?”
“I am descended from the English on my mother’s side,” Herschel coolly allowed. He tried hard not to be mesmerized by the points of her nipples showing through the gauzy cotton of her blouse, but her grey-green eyes followed his fidgety stare, and she smiled, obviously reading his thoughts.
“B-but I was born here in Palestine,” Herschel continued, flustered and sounding it. “As was my mother.”
“A sabra!”
“What?”
“You never heard the term?” she asked, incredulous. Then she plopped down beside him, sitting crosslegged, carelessly hiking her calico skirt high above her knees.
Freckled also, Herschel thought, his pulse pounding, her thighs are freckled too.
“I’m Frieda Litvinoff.” They ended up talking for an hour discussing politics, school and their pasts. Frieda had come to Palestine in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power, when the Nazis were just beginning to blame European Jewry for the world depression. Frieda emigrated without her parents as part of the Youth Aliyah program financed by Hadassah. Now she was studying to be a nurse at the university hospital, also funded by Hadassah.
Herschel told her of growing up at Degania. They talked of his renowned grandfather and his paintings on exhibit at the university. It was during a lull in the conversation that Herschel remembered. “Frieda? Before, you were calling me by name. You were looking for me.” He smiled. “I’m glad you found me, but why—?”
“Many students here know English, but not so well as you, I’ve been told.” She tugged a packet of papers from between the pages of her nursing tomes and passed them over to Herschel. “Read them later, at home, in private,” she commanded.
“What are they?”
“Later, at home. Be sure no one sees them, understand, Kolesnikoff?” she repeated, her green eyes suddenly hard. “Those writings need to be translated into Hebrew, but not just any Hebrew—The language must be passionate, as fervent in expression as the English is now. It will take someone fluent in both languages, and perhaps somebody with some understanding of how those English words of exhortation came to be written.”
Dumfounded, Herschel nodded.
“You can meet me here tomorrow at this same time to let me know if you’ll do it.” Frieda patted his hand and stood up.
“Wait,” he called as she strode away. “Where do you live? How can I get in contact with you?”
“You’ll see me tomorrow when you let me know,” she called over her shoulder. “Then we’ll see, yes, Kolesnikoff?”
That night in the privacy of his bedroom while his mother cooked supper, Herschel read the documents. They were propaganda fliers from the Irish Republican Army demanding that the British leave Ireland and that it be declared a free state. The most recent was dated 1920, but Herschel was astounded at how up-to-date and relevant the words sounded when “Palestine” was substituted for “Ireland.”
By the time Rosie knocked on his door to tell him the food was on the table, Herschel was halfway through a Hebrew version of the first leaflet. After the meal he finished the work and then slid it between the scribbled pages of his lecture notebook. He hid the originals deep in his closet—safe, he hoped, from his mother’s eyes. Then he went to bed, but he found himself wide awake. The passionate words he’d translated swirled endlessly in his brain, gradually melding with another sort of passion. When he finally dozed, it was to dream of Frieda. The night passed in a giddy half-sleep in which he and Frieda danced and laughed, in which they tumbled endlessly as his trembling fingers traveled her length, learning all the secrets of her body.
A virgin, he had yet to be romantically kissed. He hungered for that of which he had only a hazy knowledge.
By the next morning Frieda was his universe. Rosie complained that he was acting thick-headed and demanded to know why, but Herschel did not tell his mother that he was in love.
That day he gave Frieda the translation and was thrilled at the pleasure she took in it. He began to spend part of every school day with her, and once or twice a week he saw her during the evening.
He quarreled with his mother about Frieda. Rosie at first attempted to reason with her son, warning him that a girl friend would distract him from his studies. When that failed to deter him, Rosie flatly forbade him to see Frieda. Herschel just as flatly refused to obey. Mother and son did not talk to one another for three days. It was the first time they’d ever seriously quarreled.
For all the turmoil Herschel’s relationship with Frieda caused his mother, it was for a long while a chaste love. Herschel felt very unsure of Frieda. He was careful how he acted, even what he said. It was months before he even let on that he knew she was an operative for the Irgun.
“I couldn’t tell you,” she confessed to him. “Your grandfather was a key figure in Zionism. You yourself were raised a socialist on a kibbutz. How could I expect you to be sympathetic to a revisionist platform that goes against everything—”
“Quiet a minute,” Herschel began, then paused. He’d been on the verge of saying that the differences between Zionist philosophies meant little to him, but he thought better of it. He knew Frieda well enough to realize that disagreement would make her far less angry than apathy.
“You’re a nice boy, Kolesnikoff,” Frieda murmured, patting his cheek.
“Boy!” Herschel was stung. “I’m older than you.”
“Chronologically, yes, but that’s all. You grew up a sabra. I grew up in Poland. I’ve been the butt of anti-Semitism, and not isolated hatred for Jews, but organized, government-condoned violent hatred. Believe me, what Ben-Gurion preaches is wrong. There is no time to negotiate a political solution, not while millions of Jews in Europe wait to escape Hitler’s net. Ben-Gurion and his supporters are prepared to accept whatever whittled-down scrap of territory the British see fit to hand us, but there are Jews who believe that the British must abide by their word. They promised us all of Palestine, including the Transjordan, and that is what we need to absorb the millions who must flee Europe. We need it and we shall have it, and now, not later, by force if necessary.”
Herschel was staggered by the intensity of her convictions. He knew of the rift between the mainstream Zionist movement and the fervently nationalistic revisionists led by the renowned Vladimir Jabotinsky. The autonomous Irgun Z’vai Leumi had loosely aligned itself with the rebels, but he’d never known their motivations. Yol and the other elders at Degania only ridiculed the revisionists as fascists. When he explained this to Frieda she laughed.
“Is it fascist to be more concerned with rescuing and protecting Jews than managing rural collectives or maintaining solidarity with the Russian Communists? I say that they are the fascists, not we. I left my parents behind in Poland; you know why? Because the Jewish Agency refused them papers on account of their revisionist beliefs. Only Jews with the appropriate ideological viewpoints were encouraged to emigrate.”
She began to tremble. Herschel, lost in her grey-green gaze, wondered if this was how she might look in his arms. “I love you,” he choked, and felt rising from his loins the glassy, thrilling sensation of his declaration soaring away.
Frieda patted his cheek. “Kolesnikoff, we have something very special. With you I am comfortable as with no one else. You must not spoil it.”
Herschel closed his eyes to hide his pain and then said the same thing all over again, but in different words. “I want to join the Irgun.”
Frieda cocked her head in appraisal. “Why?” She must have realized, for she tried to be kind. “It doesn’t matter. We can use you.”
Herschel’s reveries shattered when a chattering group of students invaded the cobblestoned courtyard. They were loudly debating the grenade attack on the coffeehouse. Herschel had no stomach to listen to their views and dreaded being snared into the argument. He shut his book and left.
After a moment’s indecision he decided to head for the gallery where his grandfather’s paintings were on view. The brilliant optimistic landscapes of the Holy Land never failed to cheer him. Besides, Herschel spent a good deal of time in the gallery with Frieda, who greatly admired Glaser’s work.
It was several weeks after his initiation into the Irgun that Frieda at last took him to her bed. They had been at a hushed candlelit cell meeting in the musty basement of a university building. There was a debate about something. Herschel could not remember what, all he remembered was the way he’d fathomed Frieda’s point of view and championed it. She tried to argue for herself, but she’d never been good at that sort of thing. With one other person she could be persuasive, but addressing an assemblage her heady sexuality betrayed her. The women disagreed with her to punish her and the men ignored what she had to say to bask in her aura.
So Herschel rose to the challenge, taking the floor and speaking for his beloved. He debated, cajoled and harangued for over ninety minutes, alternating jokes and shouts to put her point across to them. All that while he knew Frieda’s eyes were on him. He noticed another Irgun member leaning toward Frieda and heard the man murmur in admiration, “He’s very good.”
Frieda smiled and Herschel saw her nod.
Afterward he shyly stood before her, his head lowered, waiting for her benediction. He felt small and vulnerable, but also excited and expectant; he was still elated from his triumph in bending the meeting to his will. His throat tightened as he asked her to have coffee with him. He was ready for her to say no, she was busy, she was going with one of the other boys—Herschel had known from the start that she went with other boys—but she said yes, taking his hand.
They hurried, tense and silent, to Frieda’s small rented room in the Jewish quarter. They made love on her thin mattress on the floor beneath her room’s single gauze-curtained window. The moonlight washed over them as they twisted together. Frieda’s experienced, lushly sensual body enveloped him. He clutched at her, almost frightened as he discovered what delicious physical sensations his own body was capable of. She cried out when he’d moved within her. It was his first time hearing a woman’s passion, and that high, feline sound brought him more pleasure than his own climax.
He’d heard frightening tales about a man’s first time: that he would be unable to love or else it would be over too quickly. Nothing like that had happened, however. When at last they lay quietly, Herschel’s head resting on her soft hip, he nervously asked her if he’d been all right. Frieda’s throaty, purring laugh filled the gloaming.
She marked him as her own right then; he felt her etching ownership onto his heart’s pristine surface and rejoiced. “Sweet, sweet boy,” she murmured, her fingers in his hair, “sweet boy . . .” He drew himself up to lie on her; he suckled at her full bosom; he pressed his ear against her ribs to listen to her heart. He was half drowned, embracing the shore after struggling out of the turbulence of a roiling sea.
“Sweet boy—”
His low, guttural moan rose from his core as Frieda’s fingers recaptured him, inexorably drawing him back into her warmth.
Much later that night, as dark velvet gradually lightened to leaden grey and the first expectant bird song greeted the morning, Herschel told her how much he loved her. Frieda said nothing in return, and during that awful silence, as the hopelessness of Herschel’s devotion became evident to him, he left her side and ran to the rusty sink in the corner to wash his face.
He left his face dripping wet so that she could not see that he was weeping.
And so at first Frieda refused further advances. She didn’t want to encourage him, she insisted. It was not fair to him. He should find another girl. She was married to the lrgun. She would never take a man until the homeland was established.
Herschel persisted. He was head over heels in love, but that did not make him foolish. He set about wooing his reluctant lady. Love had not blinded him to Frieda’s weaknesses. She was a slave to her own sensuality, and Herschel had made love to her in an exquisite inspired fashion. No other man could so love her. It was inevitable that Frieda would grow at first to desire and then to need his loving.
Before another month passed Herschel was able to lay claim to her bed. For a week at a time he’d disappear from the apartment he shared with his mother.
“Have you ever heard of the Betar?” Frieda asked him one night in bed as they shared a cigarette in the dark. “It’s a youth organization founded in Latvia by Jabotinsky back in the ’20s. Betar’s ideology combines Jabotinsky’s and Joseph Trumpeldor’s ideas on forming a Jewish defense legion—”
“I knew Trumpeldor,” Herschel remarked. “I was only nine years old when he was killed in the Arab riots. Anyway, he lived for a time at Degania. It’s said that he and my father were friends.” He glanced at her profile, inches away on the pillow they shared. “Is that where you became politicized, in Betar?”
“Yes.” The tip of her cigarette glowed red as she inhaled.
“A handsome young fellow probably seduced you into joining,” Herschel grumbled. “Another man—I can’t bear it.” He leapt upon her, tickling her ribs and rolling his tongue about her nipples. Frieda began to screech, letting the cigarette fall to the mattress. She brushed the burning embers to the floor, where they burned bright cherry for a second and then slowly cooled to ashes.
“The fellow who ‘seduced’ me, as you put it, was not handsome, but he won me all the same.” Frieda planted an affectionate kiss on his brow. “It was my mind, he won, not my body. Truthfully, we never met. I was thirteen when I attended a Betar membership meeting in my village in Poland. A Betar commander, a university student, spoke. What an orator, Herschel—better even than you, and I know how good you are,” she giggled. “The commander’s name was Menachem Begin. The entire audience rose to applaud when he was through. Imagine, a young man barely out of his teens. It was a difficult time for Betar in Europe. The Socialist-Zionists and Betar used to have terrible street fights. Names were called and heads broken.”
“Jew fighting Jew?” Herschel shook his head in disbelief.
“Begin exhorted us to be strong, to be proud, to train and to wait patiently for vindication,” Frieda continued.
“We revisionists have been patient, and behold, we have been vindicated. Since the Germans and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact, the Socialist-Zionists think twice before condemning us.”
Herschel’s voice sounded small. “Frieda, you have inspired me the way that fellow Begin inspired you. We are soldiers together for Zionism. We are lovers . . . I want to marry you, Frieda.”
There was silence for a moment. Frieda struck a match to light another cigarette. In the flare Herschel saw her furrowed brow—her frown.
“They say Begin will be Jabotinsky’s successor as leader of the movement,” she began, trying to change the subject.
“Frieda, I’ve asked you to marry me!”
“Oh, Herschel, how can we? You’ve told me you intend to return to Degania. Those kibbutz socialists would rather you bring home an Arab than my sort. They’d ask me my beliefs and I’d tell them. They’d blackball me.”
“Then to hell with Degania,” Herschel declared. “I’d renounce it for you.”
“You would, Herschel? Your home?” Frieda murmured. “You’re a sweet boy, but what of your mother? She despises me. You can’t give up your mother.”
“Frieda, I am all my mother has left,” Herschel began. “The day she admits that I am grown and ready to leave her nest is the day she must once and for all say good-bye to my father and the past. Surely you can understand what pain that will cause her”
“Yes, of course, but—”
“Nevertheless, I shall take leave of her nest. I already have,” he said firmly. “My mother has nothing against you but the notion you’ve stolen me away. When she realizes that my loving you does not amount to rejecting her, she’ll come to adore you.” He grinned. “How could she not?”
“That much I accept,” Frieda chuckled.
“So? It’s settled then?” He kept his tone light to control and conceal his anxiety. She could not abide uncertainty. “You accept, I presume? We will be married?” He held his breath.
“Herschel, in the Betar we took an oath. It went, ‘I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.’”
“So?”
“When I devote myself to something I do it totally, excluding everything else. When I marry my husband shall take precedence.”
“What does that mean?”
She embraced him. “It means that you have conquered me, Kolesnikoff.” Although he’d pared his surname down to Kol at his lrgun initiation, Frieda delighted in teasing him. “I thought I could twist you around my little finger, but I see that you have turned the tables on me. When our struggle is over, I will be your wife.”
The picture gallery connected to the university’s library was empty at this time of day. Students were either in class or studying. To be enrolled here was a great privilege. Few students would jeopardize their standing by wasting time looking at pictures at this hour.
Herschel walked the deserted marble corridors, gazing at his grandfather’s landscapes and desperately missing Frieda. It seemed that he could hear her ghostly laughter echoing in the still hallways, could remember exactly her comments about each painting.
If only you were here, he thought, you could tell me I did the right thing in the Arab quarter. You could tell me that destroying a terrorist headquarters struck a blow for our cause and brought us closer to marriage. If you were here I could feel like a hero.
But Frieda was not here. Three months ago the lrgun had ordered her to report to a cell somewhere along the Mediterranean coast; she was not allowed to tell Herschel exactly where.
Since the Nazi invasion of Poland, leaky, overloaded ships flying the Greek or Turkish flag had begun to transport desperate Jewish refugees to Palestine. The ships brought their cargo as close to shore as they dared; then lrgun boats ran the British blockades.
The Arabs were howling in disapproval and the British were increasingly determined to stop the influx. Frieda’s cell was doing all it could to keep the people from being drowned or sent back.
Herschel was at the mercy of his guilty conscience. Perhaps all the people in the coffeehouse were Arab terrorists, but what if they weren’t? What if that one fellow, the one in the suit and tie and the fez, was an innocent?
That poor man stared at me like he knew me, Herschel recollected. He saw his death in me, and in him I saw stark fear.
It was no good. He couldn’t live with the thought of more attacks like this one.
A particular painting by his grandfather caught Herschel’s eye. It was a view of Galilee. Herschel did not know if Erich Glaser had ever visited Degania, but he had captured the burnt umber of the pillowy hills and the cerulean blue of the sky. Herschel had heard the usual criticisms leveled at his grandfather’s work: that it was highly idealized, often saccharine. In some Herschel could see how such comments were justified, but with this his grandfather had succeeded. The almost fantastic pleasantness of the scene corresponded to the pride, affection and solicitude a son of Degania felt when gazing at the land he and his fellow members had tamed.
As Herschel took solace a childhood memory came to him. He could have been no more than ten. He and another boy were together in the schoolyard, which afforded a view similar to the one in the painting. This other boy was seven and was named Moshe in memory of the brave young halutz who in 1913 rode out alone to fetch medicine.
The more Herschel concentrated the more vivid his recollection became. He and the younger boy were arguing, Moshe bragging that he’d been named after a hero. Stung by Moshe’s boasting and still raw with sorrow over the loss of his father, Herschel reacted with a child’s ferocious intensity.
“That man Moshe was dumb to be ambushed. My father is the true hero. He fought in the war, facing the enemy man to man. He had a pistol—yes, he did! I remember he showed it to me.”
The younger boy was no match for Herschel’s fury. He apologized, agreeing with him. “A man who fought in the army is certainly a hero.” They shook hands and parted as friends.
“Shalom, Herschel Kolesnikoff.”
“Shalom, Moshe Dayan.”
A short while after that the Dayans, one of the original families of Degania, moved to another settlement with their three children, of whom Moshe was the youngest.
Herschel stared at his grandfather’s painting, musing on the memory it had evoked. Seven-year-old Moshe misunderstood and assumed that Herschel’s father was in the British army. “A man who fights in the army is certainly a hero . . .”
Herschel hurried out of the gallery and cut across campus to the bus for Jerusalem. He knew what he had to do to assuage his conscience.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Herschel Kol returned to the apartment he shared with his mother near the Western Wall. He steeled himself for confrontation as he climbed the dim stairs to the third floor. He hoped his mother had painted well that morning. When her time at her easel was profitable she was in a good mood.
Their rooms faced the rear courtyard and did not receive much sunlight after midmorning. The ceiling light was off in the living room as Herschel entered the apartment. He heard a chair creaking and saw his mother, bathed in shadows, sitting in a rocker in the far corner of the room.
Rosie reached out and clicked on a table lamp beside her chair. Herschel saw that her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, her lined face drawn and pallid. How old she looked. She was just fifty, but her years in Degania’s harsh climate had turned her skin leathery and her hair prematurely grey. What had become of his beautiful mother? Who was this haggard crone in a shapeless, paint-splattered frock? When had mother and son become such strangers to each other?
“It was you, wasn’t it Herschel?” Rosie’s trembling voice, husky from disuse, shattered the dark stillness. “You blew up that coffeehouse. Oh, I know it was you.”
“I don’t want to fight about it with you, Mama,” Herschel began.
“It’s that girl—she’s turned you into a murderer. I warned you about her, didn’t I?” She stood up. “She has made you a wild man. You grew up in Galilee, learning to use weapons just as you did farm tools. I remember how you cried, your head buried in my lap, that first time you had to kill to defend our settlement.” She shook her head bitterly. “You don’t cry now, though, do you, boy? Why are you here? Why don’t you rut with your whore to celebrate—”
“Shut up!” Herschel shouted. “What I did was for our people! I didn’t enjoy it!” His anger vanished. “How can you, Mama? How can you speak to me this way?”
Rosie’s shoulders sagged. She turned away from her son. “Are you safe at least? No one is chasing you, I hope?”
“No one. Mama, let’s not argue anymore. I love you.”
Rosie nodded. “I’m sorry, Herschel, but I can’t forgive her for transforming my beautiful, clever son into a terrorist. You had a future, but now it’s only a matter of time before the British arrest you. If not for this crime, for some other one that girl—”
“Frieda. You know her name, just as you know that she is away from Jerusalem. Don’t be this way.”
“All right,” Rosie said scornfully, “Frieda.” She shook her head. “I heard ten people were killed in that blast and six more injured. Your father would not have approved.”
“That’s not fair—”
“Your father would never have joined an organization like the lrgun.”
“But he would have joined the Allied Army,” Herschel snapped. “Wouldn’t he have joined to fight the Turks if he could?”
Rosie stared at her son. Something in his eyes frightened her. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “Herschel?” Her fingers rose to her lips. “Herschel, what are you getting at?”
“On my way home I stopped at the Jewish Agency office. They are taking names for volunteers to join the British Army. Most Jews are having trouble getting inducted, but with my light features and my British ancestry, I should have no trouble, I was told. The agency people are anxious to get as many Jews into British uniforms as they can.” He smiled. “They think it will persuade the British to side with us against the Arabs later on. That’s what Papa thought. I guess history does repeat itself. Personally, I don’t care what the agency people think. I’m only joining so I can fight our enemies honorably. You see, Mama, I do care what you think and what Papa might have thought. I’m quitting the lrgun to follow in my father’s footsteps.”
Rosie said nothing. What could she tell him? He wouldn’t listen anyway. As her son retreated to his bedroom and shut the door behind him, Rosie thought that history did indeed repeat itself. The first war had taken her husband and this second would lay claim to her son.