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‌Journeys

An ‘absentee’ is a Palestinian citizen [who] left his place of residence before 1 September 1948 for a place… held by forces seeking to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel… Every right an absentee had in any property shall pass automatically to the Custodian Council for Absentee Property.

Israel Absentees
Property Law, 1950

No doubt Jews aren’t a loveable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.

Neville Chamberlain,
letter, 1938

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‌1948

‘Yallah, Salim! Farm-boy! The Jews are coming for you! They’re going to kick you out and break your skinny arse like a donkey.’

Two boys stood opposite each other on the dirt road between Jaffa’s orange groves and the sea.

One was older, burly and black haired. His chin, arms and belly rolled in chubby folds, like a lamb ready for the oven. Some day those folds would smooth into the coveted fat of the ay’an – one of the rich, the coffee drinkers with their white mansions and expensive wives. But today the excess weight was only good for bullying and sweating his way through the warm spring air.

The younger boy stood facing the darkening water with a football in his hand. He wore laced black school shoes and neat brown shorts. His white shirt was tucked carefully around his waist and buttoned up to the chin; his small, pale face was an open book, the Frères liked to tease, a page that anyone could write on.

‘Don’t call me a fellah,’ he said cautiously, turning the football around in his hands. It was never a good idea to argue with Mazen, who at nearly ten was brutishly heavy-handed.

‘Why not? You live on a farm. Your father makes you go and pick fruit, like the fellahin.’

An angry retort filled Salim’s mouth, but he swallowed it, suddenly uncertain. Hadn’t he begged to go to the groves last week? The harvest was ending, and his father’s labourers had picked the family farm – all fifteen full dunams of good orange land. Joining the harvest was supposed to be a birthday treat; he was seven now, and one day he would share the groves with Hassan and Rafan. Let me go, he’d asked, but his father said no, and to his shame Salim had wept.

‘My father pays fellahin to work, yours puts them in prison,’ he said, changing tack. Mazen’s father was one of Jaffa’s top judges, a qadi; Hassan said he stank of money. ‘If the Jews come and live in your house your father can help them lock us all up.’ Mazen grinned.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘If you ask nicely I’ll take care of you and your pretty mama. But that stupid Hassan will have to look after himself.’

He grabbed the football from Salim and turned down the path towards the sea. The younger boy followed him instinctively, empty arms swinging by his side in the falling sun.

‘The Jews aren’t coming, anyway, not while the British are here,’ Salim said, remembering suddenly what Frère Philippe had told him at St Joseph’s that morning. A scuffle broke out between two boys in the yard at playtime: one had called the other’s father a traitor for selling his dunams to the Jews. The other shouted that at least he hadn’t fled his home like a coward. They were dragged off by their ears, still hitting each other. Salim had stood by transfixed, while Mazen laughed and cheered them on. Afterwards, Frère Philippe had patted him gently on the face. ‘Don’t worry, habibi,’ he’d said over the wet thwack of the whip as the boys took their lashes. ‘All this talk of Jews and armies… not everyone is crazy for fighting, not while the British are still here and God watches over his flock.’

‘God helps those who help themselves,’ said one of the nearby Frères, darkly. ‘God better had,’ said another, ‘because the British surely won’t.’

‘You’re such a donkey, Salim,’ sneered Mazen, bringing him back to the present. ‘The British don’t care if we live or die. They want to slice this place up like an orange and give the Jews the biggest piece. But we’ll be ready for them, by God. Let them test the Najjada. I can’t wait to shoot a Jew.’

Salim could not imagine shooting anyone. He had once seen a British policeman shoot a sick dog – a stray; the sad noise it made as the bullet went in had made Salim kneel on the ground and vomit. And then there was what happened last month – the blood that ran over the bricks onto his shoes – but he would not think about that.

‘You can’t join the Najjada,’ he said, pushing his hands into his pockets and squaring his shoulders. ‘You’re just a boy. Mama says they only take men.’ Boy scouts with guns, she’d called them at the parade last week; but Salim had stretched up on his toes behind Hassan’s back to see them standing to attention in Clock Tower Square. They had tall rifles and fine grey uniforms. He knew one; Mazen’s gang called him cat’s arse because he had a deep brown pimple in the middle of his chin. They’d teased him to crying about it, but that day his eyes were bright and proud. Hassan would have joined them too – but Mohammad Nimir al-Hawari accepted no boy under fifteen.

‘Your mama has a woman’s brains,’ Mazen scoffed. ‘Al-Hawari is a friend of my father’s. Anyway, why would I tell you if I joined? They don’t take little donkeys like you.’

‘I’m not a donkey,’ Salim whispered, as Mazen ran ahead. Sometimes, in his wildest moments of courage, Salim imagined knocking Mazen to the ground like a fat football. But with his big fists and blistering scorn, Mazen was more terrifying than even the Jews. I hope the Jews get Mazen when they come.

The Jews are coming. That’s what the Frères whispered to each other at school. The countryside was emptying as the fighting drew near, bringing refugees to Jaffa with their dirty bags and clinging children. Salim’s father had complained to the Mayor about them – but his mother had sent packages of food for the women with babies. Salim could not understand what would make people want to sleep in Jaffa’s mosques and churches instead of in their own homes.

But today, with the sun high and the air filled with salt and oranges, it was hard to feel afraid. They chased each other along the path, racing through the scrubland and yelling into the warm rush of sea air. The ball flew towards the sea and Salim streaked ahead, breathless and exultant, scooping it before the surf could claim it. Spinning around to cheer his victory, he suddenly realized he was alone. His cheeks turned red as he spotted Mazen, grinning down at him from the top of the embankment.

‘You always fall for that one,’ he laughed. Salim hung his head to hide the shaming flush. Why do you always let him trick you, stupid? the stones on the ground seemed to say.

‘Come on, fellah,’ Mazen said, pointing to Salim’s dirty knees and sweaty face. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s go to the souk.’

There were two ways to get from Al-Ajami to the souks of Jaffa’s Clock Tower Square.

The route from Salim’s house led straight through the silent inland. It passed the sun-bleached whiteness of the seaside villas, their walled gardens spilling glorious streams of red bougainvillea and the dusty tang of oranges. It turned left onto old Al-Ajami Street, where new motorcars whined past donkeys trundling loads of pomegranates and lemons. The door of Abulafia’s bakery was always open, even in the bracing winter months. Salim had waited there a hundred times, his senses scorched by the smell of pastries rising in clouds of cinnamon and allspice. His mother liked manquish, a flatbread sprinkled with thyme and sesame. He used to eat it from her hands, a little piece at a time, as they walked out into Jaffa’s old city, with its coffee shops and yellow plumes of nargile smoke.

The other way to the Square belonged to Jaffa’s boys; it was a rite of passage. As soon as a boy was old enough to walk, another would dare him to try it – crossing down over the wild beaches, braving the slippery rocks and then inching out step by step under the ancient port wall.

Today, the sun beat down on the great crescent of the Mediterranean; the water shone gold against the black land like a ring in an African ear. Salim and Mazen jumped across the tide pools, splashing the bare-armed boys fishing for crabs. They picked their way across the jagged rocks until the port of Jaffa emerged in white, sea-stained stone.

‘Jaffa’s harbour is as old as the sea,’ Frère Philippe had taught them. ‘It was here before the Arabs or the Jews. God Himself led Japhet here, Noah’s son, in the times before time. The bones of twenty-two armies rest here. The pagans of Thebes chained their maiden sacrifice just there,’ his wrinkled hand pointed and a dozen pairs of eyes followed it. ‘There, out on the rocks that we call Andromeda, waiting for the sea monster to devour them. The Crusader king, Richard the Lionheart, lay in his sickbed on the port just there, begging Salah Al-Din for peace. The godless Emperor Napoleon camped by the lighthouse, while the plague destroyed his army and his righteous prisoners rose against him. He learned a lesson that I tell you now, mes enfants: that Jaffa is God’s beloved place, and they are cursed who come to harm it.’

Salim cherished a guilty love for the English king with the lion on his chest, even though most of the boys liked Napoleon and Salah Al-Din, champion of the faith. He imagined Richard now as he edged carefully under the yellowing harbour wall. It might have been the same for him: the sour slap of shallow waters and the bloody scent of feluccas bringing in the catch. Only the great steamships on the horizon marked the passage of centuries.

By the time he pulled himself up onto the harbour floor, Mazen had already found a loose orange. He was dropping the pith on the ground, the yellow juice running down his chin. ‘There it is,’ he said, a chubby finger pointing north. ‘There they are.’ Across the bay, the gleaming high-rises of Tel Aviv curved up the coast as far as the eye could see.

Salim barely noticed Tel Aviv most of the time. Only the very old, the grandmothers and grandfathers of his friends, sometimes talked of a time when Jaffa was surrounded by circling dunes and Tel Aviv was just a few shells in the blowing sand. To Salim it had always been here. It was the same with the British. They had always been here too, the Commissioners and Commanders, those starched, pink-faced men. The boys called them schwee schwees, the noise that pigs make. But they were fond of the Jaffa garrison. A private called Jonno used to give Mazen and Hassan cigarettes. He’d promised that Salim could have one too, once he turned eight.

Only these days Salim felt he was seeing more of Tel Aviv and less of the British. British rule in mother Palestine ends next month, the Frères said. And then a new place called Israel will burst out of her belly, and split her in two forever. Salim had overheard Mazen’s father putting it more simply. ‘The next time you see the British will be from the deck of a ship, waving goodbye.’

‘It’s late,’ Mazen said, frowning as the call for the early evening prayer started to rise. ‘If you weren’t so slow, we’d be there by now.’

‘Let’s not go,’ Salim said suddenly. The fear that had crept up while he climbed under the wall now swept over him in a bitter wave. In the evening light his feet looked red again, red as the blood on the stones, as the sound of screaming. But Mazen just laughed and said, ‘Chickenshit baby boy.’ He wiped his mouth and grabbed Salim along by the arm into Jaffa’s narrow alleyways, as the words of the muezzins flooded the city, dissonant keening, rolling down from every quarter.

They burst into Clock Tower Square as the songs faded. Salim was panting and his arm was sore. Mazen let go, and he stood for a moment to catch his breath and calm his pounding heart. His eyes ran automatically up the Tower’s severe angles. A plaque on the wall read Sultan Abd Al-Hamdi II. They had learned about him, the great Ottoman emperor who was short of money – or perhaps of patience – and asked Jaffa’s leaders to pay for the Tower themselves. Today, there was hardly a rich man in Jaffa – Muslim, Christian or Jew – who didn’t claim to have bankrolled it.

But all that was over now. At the other end of the Square, like an ugly tumour, the ruins of the New Seray Government House lay in a shattered pile. The building itself had been blown completely open, gaping over the Square like a toothless mouth.

He crept over to the rubble. Mazen was watching a man wrapped in a keffiyeh pulling stones out of the pile.

‘I bet there are still bodies under there.’ Mazen pointed to dark red stains. ‘Or maybe arms, or legs or something. If my father had been voted Mayor instead of that idiot Heikal, he would have cleaned all this up by now. Smell that stink! Or maybe you can’t, because Hassan smells like this all the time.’

Salim felt his stomach heave. The bomb had been hiding in a truck of oranges, they’d said. The man who drove it must have looked like an Arab, but he was really one of the Irgun, the most dreaded Jews of all.

They’d heard the boom on their way to the schoolroom, and afterwards the screaming. Hassan had turned to run back, his schoolbag bouncing across his shoulders. Salim had run too, terrified to be left behind. He’d clutched at Hassan’s bag until it vanished ahead of him into a thick yellow cloud. And then the cloud was on him too, choking him with dirt, while under his feet shards of glass and stone crunched and broke, sending him sprawling to the floor. Through the ringing of his ears he’d heard sirens. Someone was screaming over and over again. Omar! Omar! He was lost in a dark well – he was drowning, he tried to call Hassan’s name but dust filled his mouth. Something large and soft was lying near his legs, leaking in slow pulses, turning his canvas shoes red under the faint returning sun. The colour had blossomed around him as he lay transfixed. Until Hassan suddenly appeared overhead, grey dust spattered over his face, his eyes white as a beaten horse. He’d hauled Salim up by his filthy shirt and dragged him home.

The next day Jaffa’s mothers howled while the British soldiers crawled over the ruins. He’d watched paralysed as Mazen pulled a strip of someone’s shirt from under a piece of masonry. It was white cloth, wet and stained black with blood and caked brown dirt. The smell on it was foul, and it stayed with him even when the police came to chase them away.

Salim pulled at Mazen’s shirt. ‘Please can we go? I don’t like it here.’ Mazen shook Salim’s hand off, but he turned away all the same. They’ll become ghosts, Mazen had told him as they carried the bodies away. The dead can’t rest without vengeance.

They made their way to Souk El Attarin, to buy sweets. The mounds of pistachio, lemon, rose and gold smelt as delicious as ever, but Salim’s mouth was dry. The boys were used to fighting through the crowds to get their share. Not today, though. The souk was almost empty. The old shopkeeper looked at them with hungry eyes as they handed over pocket money.

‘Hey, Salim!’

Salim looked around in alarm; they were not supposed to be out so close to curfew.

‘Shit,’ said Mazen loudly, ‘it’s the Yehuda boy.’

‘Hi, Elia,’ said Salim. ‘How’s life?’ He shifted, grateful the Square was empty. It was not so good to be seen with a Jew, even a local one.

Elia was older than Mazen, fair skinned like Salim with thin arms. He shrugged his narrow shoulders and said ‘Yani,’ the universal Arabic expression for that grey place between good and bad. ‘I was going to see my father,’ he said, pointing in the direction of Souk Balasbeh, the clothes market. ‘We close early now. He doesn’t like me to walk alone, with all the troubles.’

‘Who’s causing the troubles?’ said Mazen. ‘Your father and his friends, that’s who.’

‘He’s not one of those people, Mazen,’ Salim protested. He dimly remembered a time when they had been allowed to be friends. Elia’s father, Isak Yashuv, was nearly an Arab. You could never tell him apart from any other Palestinian, with his dark Iraqi skin and hawk eyes above the coals of his nargile, bubbling away all day long. But Elia’s mother came from outside Palestine, with the white Jews.

This had been endlessly and furiously debated in Salim’s house when a final halt was called to Elia and Salim’s friendship.

‘A Jew is not a Palestinian and a Jew is not an Arab,’ Abu Hassan had yelled at him, his hand hitting the table. ‘They are all bastards who came here for nothing but to rob us. You want to shame me?’

‘For God’s sake, calm down,’ said his mother coldly, her high forehead smooth as glass. ‘Isak’s family was fitting buttons in Souk Balasbeh before you were born. And as for his foreign wife – what about me, eh? Didn’t you drag me to this forsaken country, like a cow in a cart?’

Salim knew that his mother and the pale Lili Yashuv had a strange kind of friendship too; when they went to collect her finest clothes from Isak’s shop, Lili would talk to her in halting Arabic with a heavy accent. And his mother would smile in a way she rarely did even with the wives of the other ay’an.

Today, Elia looked even more miserable than usual. His family was among the tiny handful that still kept a foothold in Jaffa; the rest had moved to Tel Aviv. Their shop in the textile souk had become an open target, but Isak refused to move. ‘I won’t give in to this madness,’ he’d said, doggedly coming into work every day while his small stock of business dwindled.

‘My family don’t want any trouble,’ said Elia to Mazen. ‘We just want to work. But it’s not just the Irgun causing the problems.’ He jerked his head over to the south, where the Najjada and the Arab Liberation Army headquartered.

‘Look, Elia, I’ll take you to your father now,’ said Salim quickly. Mazen had a look Salim knew well, his beating face. ‘We have to get back before the curfew.’

‘Okay, Yehuda boys,’ said Mazen, the words smeared with contempt. ‘Enjoy your walk. I’ll see you when the Arab armies come.’ He moved across to Elia, and bent his head towards the other boy’s ear. ‘There are thousands of us, Jew. You’ll see.’ And he turned his back on them and ran across the Square.

‘You don’t have to walk with me, Salim,’ Elia said. The sky was turning dark now, slate grey clouds rolling in with the night.

‘I won’t walk all the way. Maybe just a little bit. Is your mama okay?’

‘Yes, she’s okay. She’s afraid now. She and Papa fight a lot.’

‘Mine too.’ Salim kicked the ground in front of him. ‘Is she frightened that the Arab armies are coming to save us?’ These days, the radio and Friday sermons were full of nothing else.

Elia didn’t reply, and they walked along in silence. Salim started to feel sorry for him. If he were Elia, wouldn’t he fear the great Arab armies? He imagined them, rows and rows of men with their flags streaming and guns waving, just like the bedouin from the old stories.

‘You can come to our house,’ he said in a rush of feeling. ‘Mama will hide you. We won’t tell anyone you’re Jewish. You’ll be safe with us.’

Elia raised his head sharply and Salim was suddenly frightened by his expression. ‘Ya Salim, I don’t think we can live like we used to,’ he said, slowly. ‘Mama says your people hate the Jews and will never let there be peace. So we’ll fight each other, no matter what.’ He shrugged his shoulders again. ‘Only God knows who will win.’

‘The Arabs will win,’ said Salim firmly. He had little affection for his father, or Abu Mazen, or for any of the other heavy men who came and went from his house. But his world was built around the smell of their cigarettes and the low hum of their conversation. It was impossible to believe that their authority might ever cease to be there, quietly ordering the universe.

‘You’re just like Mazen, if you think that,’ said Elia, stopping dead beside him. ‘Why didn’t you go with him? He’ll teach you how to shoot at my family and trash our shop, like his terrorist friends.’

Salim laughed before he could stop it; the thought of fat Mazen screaming with a pistol in his hand was too funny. But the sound seemed to hurt Elia somehow; his thin shoulders recoiled into his body like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring. Yelling, ‘Yallah, go on then! Go!’ his arm shot out in a half-punch, half-shove, hitting Salim in the chest and pushing him against the stone wall.

It felt like the time he was stung by a bee – numbness, followed by a sharp, rising pain that made Salim want to howl. Hot tears sprang to his eyes.

‘You should go!’ he shouted back, bunching his hands into fists. ‘Go away. This is Palestine, where the Arabs live. Go back to your own place.’

‘Jaffa is my place!’ Elia sounded tearful. ‘But that bastard Mazen wants to throw a bomb through my window. What are we supposed to do?’

Salim thought of the terror of Clock Tower Square, the bloody pile of broken stone and the raw screams filling the air like smoke. Mayor Heikal had spoken on the radio that night and called the Jews murderers of children, as savage as bears. Mazen and his gang had sworn revenge. On that day, across the whole of Jaffa, it was heresy to think that Jews were not devils.

But despite this, Salim still believed the world of Jews must surely be divided into the bad and the good. The bad ones lived in Tel Aviv and those vast farmlands where Arabs did not go. People said they had driven families out of their homes, invaded Haifa, Jerusalem and other Arab villages and killed in their hundreds while the British just stood by. Salim had never seen one of these nightmare Jews. But at night, they stood dark and faceless on the borders of his sleep.

But Elia’s family looked much the same as everyone else in Jaffa. They worked and lived just as his family did. So how could they be enemies?

He wanted to explain some of this to Elia, but confusion tied his tongue. Instead he just stood there, eyes cast down, twisting his foot on the gravel. They were still some distance from the gates of El-Balasbeh, and it was already closing time. Elia sighed, a sound that seemed to say: Well? But if it was an invitation, Salim did not understand it.

‘I have to go home now,’ Salim said finally. Tomorrow, perhaps, they could put it all right. Elia nodded.

‘Okay, Salim,’ he said. ‘Ma salameh’ – go in peace.

As Elia walked away, Salim’s stomach felt heavy – like small stones of worry knocking together. And then there was nothing left to do but run, past the ruin of the Square and through the shuttered streets, back towards the safety of home.

The Al-Ishmaeli house was known as Beit Al-Shamouti, the Orange House. A thick wall of shamouti orange trees flickered darkly behind the bars of its iron gate, spring blossoms swelling on their boughs. Over summer, they would turn from small lemon buds into globes of Jaffa’s gold. Then the air would fill with a bruised sweetness as they were crushed into juices or sliced and sprinkled with sugar and rosewater. Across Jaffa, others would be wrapped in paper and packed into steamships, destined for lands Salim had only dreamed of.

The neighbours whispered, too, that without his fifteen dunams of orange land south of the city the thick-lipped Saeed Al-Ishmaeli – Abu Hassan to his friends – would be lucky to afford a shed in his own back garden. That was the other reason for the house’s nickname.

As he walked back home through the darkening streets, Salim brooded over Elia and Mazen. They’d all been friends once. But last year everything changed.

Frère Philippe had tried to explain it at school. Palestine was to be divided up between the Jews and the Arabs. The Jews would get the northern coast, the Galilee and the southern desert. The Palestinians got the fertile west bank of the Jordan and the green hills before Lebanon, as well as the southern port of Gaza. Jerusalem was given to the whole world. Because Jaffa was in the Palestinian part, by law, the Jews could not take it. Salim had looked at his teacher in amazement. Who were the people doing all this giving and taking of homes?

The thought of anyone taking his own trees made his skin prickle. Fellah! How dare Mazen call him a peasant? Peasants were dirty and poor, with rough hands and bad teeth. They worked the land, but never owned it. I am a landowner’s son. It’s my right to pick the harvest.

When he visited the fields last week, he’d not been allowed to take any fruit. Salim was too young, Abu Hassan said – by which he meant too disobedient. Harvest is a job for a man, not a child, he’d proclaimed.

Instead it was always Hassan who went. It suited Abu Hassan to parade his eldest boy up and down the lanes of trees like a real effendi – ‘As if he was heir to something important and not just a few acres of dirt,’ his mother had said. Salim was too complicated a case for a man who loved income, idleness and coffee in that order, who bought Jaffa’s newspaper Filastin just to keep folded by the living room table.

This is why Mazen’s jibe hurt so. It was his way of saying ‘My father is a clever and important man who understands things. Your father may have a bit of money, but he has the brains of a fellah. So when the fighting comes your family will be out in the cold.’

Turning the handle of the back gate, Salim slipped inside the garden. The trees looked sleepy in the dusk, the air between them still flushed with the sun’s warmth.

He liked to count them as he walked the path towards the porch. Each had a story: this lopsided one lost its branches in a famous winter storm and now stood like a beggar at the gate, reaching out to guests with one plaintive arm. This one was a bully, pushing its branches into all the others while its roots bubbled up out of the earth like a sea monster.

Then there were the three smallest trees planted for the three sons: Hassan’s first, then Salim’s and then Rafan’s just last year.

Hassan’s tree was a good height for its age, tall enough to shelter under, with thick roots. It had matured early and Hassan was only five when he started taking its fruit. Salim could not recall a year without the ritual of holding his elder brother’s woven basket and breathing in the bitterness of freshly plucked oranges.

Salim’s tree had been fruiting for a year now. But his father had not let him take the fruit during this harvest, to teach him a lesson in obedience. Orange farmers plant trees when their sons are born, the fellahin said. But they only grow sweet when the boys are ready to become men.

Perhaps that was why you’re so little, he thought sadly, stroking its bark. It was only three years younger than Hassan’s but less than half the height. The tree leaned westwards into the sunset, its branches like hands clambering up the wall to escape.

The stunting of Salim’s tree was a kitchen joke in the Al-Ishmaeli household. Hassan found it particularly funny. ‘I hope your balls grow bigger than your oranges, Salim,’ he used to say. ‘Or you might turn into a woman after all.’ His mother blamed it on the wrong ground. It was stony by the gate and lacked the morning sunshine. But she never mocked him for loving it. He touched the fresh cut on the trunk made that week, the memory of tiptoeing into the garden by candlelight together, to mark his seventh-year height on the tree and eat sweets under the stars.

She was sitting on the porch as he reached it, Rafan at her breast. Behind her the sky was emptying, and the blue shadows made her red hair look black. Her head was bent to the baby and the hushed sound of her song was swallowed by the sea breezes.

Noor Al-Ishmaeli was a breathtaking woman. Even Salim knew it, from the whispers of the boys, and the deference of the Frères when she took him and Hassan to school. It was her remoteness – as still and melancholy as a sculpture, as scornful as Andromeda tied to her rock. Her white forehead and olive-green eyes were the legacy of a noble Lebanese family, fallen on hard times, who bargained away their fifteen-year-old daughter’s virginity to Saeed Al-Ishmaeli for the equivalent of two new cars and her father’s retirement fund.

Now, despite fifteen years in Palestine, with three children born and raised there, she still lived like a stranger. But to Salim she was the source of all wonder and love. He had always been her favourite – until the new baby came.

He put his chin over her shoulder, suddenly desperately tired. She tipped her head to rest her forehead on his, and he closed his eyes for a moment in peace.

‘Where have you been, ya’eini?’ she asked. Salim was the only child who ever won that endearment from her, the mother’s blessing that says ‘you are more precious to me than my eyes’. She chose to say it the old way, in the formal Arabic of imams and singers – words that distanced, that said foreigner. But to Salim it sounded noble; it stirred his daydreams of knights and queens.

‘Out with Mazen, Mama.’

She laughed, as Rafan snorted on her lap. ‘I don’t know what you see in that son of a pig.’ Salim felt guilt itch up his back.

‘I don’t like him either, but there’s no one else still here,’ he said defensively. It was true – many people had left Jaffa, saying they would be back when the ‘troubles’ were over. Salim hesitated and then said, ‘He called Baba a peasant.’

‘Aya, maybe he’s cleverer than I thought.’ She lifted her head into the dying light and turned those vivid, searching eyes on him. ‘Did it bother you, habibi?’ Salim hung his head, afraid to answer.

‘My beautiful boy,’ she said, and he heard amusement in her voice. ‘So sad, a mosquito stung him. There are so many here, buzzing all over the place. But when morning comes, ya’eini, what happens to mosquitoes?’ She opened her empty hand, and Salim imagined tiny puffs of shadow disappearing into the air. ‘One day, all these Mazens will mean less to you than that. You’re going to be a bigger man than them.’

Then, just as quickly, she dropped her hand and turned back towards the horizon, where the pale darkness had settled over the sea.

‘If you want to see what kind of big man Mazen is going to become, go inside,’ she said, carelessly. ‘Abu Mazen is there, talking shop with your father.’

The kitchen was dark, with the evening meal prepared and covered on the table; warm smells of rice, lamb, hummus and little parcels of steamed cabbage leaves. The kitchen door opened directly into Abu Hassan’s domain with its plush leather seats surrounding a coffee table of tortoiseshell lacquer.

From behind the door, Salim could hear his father’s low, complaining rumble and Abu Mazen’s smooth replies. Hearing the word Jews, he pushed the door open just enough to listen.

‘You can think what you like, my friend,’ Abu Mazen was saying, ‘but these guys leaving now have their heads screwed on. Look at Heikal and Al-Hawari! Heikal is Jaffa’s first politician and Al-Hawari is its first soldier. But are they here? No. They’re waiting it out in Beirut and Cairo. They know the British have already dropped us like a rag. The Jews took Haifa and Jerusalem without the Angleezi firing a single shot. They’re coming here next. And when they do, it will be like Deir Yassin all over again.’

Deir Yassin. The words made Salim go cold. He’d seen the pictures of the bodies in that village, after the Irgun came. They said Jews had put whole families in front of the walls and filled them with bullets.

‘The Jews are cowards.’ Abu Hassan’s voice, a wheezy bass. ‘Haifa and Deir Yassin had no defences. We have the Arab Liberation Army here, more than two thousand men.’

‘They don’t care about that rabble. They have the Americani at their right hand, and the United Nations. They have guns and artillery coming from Europe. In three weeks Palestine is facing a death sentence. When the British leave, the Jews will raise their flag and defend it. You think Ben-Gurion is going to wait while we hit his convoys and kibbutzim? For the Egyptians and Jordanians to invade his new Israel, to bed down in our cities then cross to Jerusalem and destroy him? No, the Jews won’t risk it, I promise you. They’re attacking first, and they’ll take all they can get. Haifa’s gone. We’re next. Remember Clock Tower Square? They don’t care what they have to do to us. Maybe we should all clear out, until our friends come across the border to help us.’

Clear out? thought Salim, just as his father said, ‘Why should I leave my own house because of the Yehud? Let the Arab armies fight around me.’

And then suddenly Salim yelled in shock; a hand had clapped over his eyes and another over his mouth.

A giggle from behind him told him it was Hassan. He felt a hard pinch on his cheek as Hassan said, ‘What’s this, ya Salimo? Listening at the door again? Shall I tell Baba or can you pay me not to?’

Salim wrenched himself around in panic, trying to break from Hassan’s grip. One flailing arm caught Hassan on the cheek. The older boy stopped laughing and started yelping ‘Baba, Baba!’

The conversation halted; footsteps approached and then the kitchen door swung open. Stuck in Hassan’s furious arm-lock, Salim could just see his father’s round cheeks and sunken eyes glaring at him over his white shirt and neck-cloth.

‘He hit me, Baba,’ panted Hassan. ‘He was listening at the door and when I tried to stop him, he hit me.’

The injustice made Salim choke; the words surged up before he could stop them. ‘You liar!’ he screamed. ‘You’re a lying son of a pig!’

Hassan’s eyes widened in shock and Salim realized what he’d said. Then Abu Hassan’s ringed hand came sweeping out of the air, slapping him hard enough to drive his teeth into his lips. Saliva and the tang of blood mingled with tears running down his face.

Looking up at his father’s face he saw the lip thrust out, the same immovable lip that last week said no to the harvest, no to his orange tree, no to his mother’s idea for a birthday party like the ones the British children had. He heard himself saying: ‘I hope the Jews do come to kick you out.’ Then he ran past them, sobbing as he hurtled up the stairs into his bedroom and slammed the door shut.

Gradually his tears gave way to stillness. Sounds beyond the door became audible once again; the evening meal went ahead without him, his mother’s and father’s voices raised in their nightly argument. Today it was about the pearls Rafan had broken, that Baba said were too expensive to replace. ‘Do you think you married a rich man?’ he was yelling, in his fractured bass. ‘Wasn’t it enough those Lebanese thieves beggared me when I took you, now you want to finish the job?’ Then, ‘You want to dress like a Beiruti whore, go back there, I won’t stop you,’ before her cold reply, ‘In Beirut even the whores live better than I do.’ Salim pulled the pillow over his head.

After dinner, the door creaked open and he heard soft footsteps. A voice whispered, ‘Hey Salim, Baba said you were to stay here without any food – but I brought you a plate.’ It was Hassan, contrite. Salim turned on his side to look at him, but did not speak.

‘By God, it was just a joke, Salim. You take everything so seriously, you ninny. But why did you have to go and upset the old man? You know what he’s like.’ He reached out and ruffled Salim’s hair, a shamefaced touch.

After Hassan left, Salim tried to ignore the food. But his tummy rumbled so badly that he ended up pulling it towards him and cramming it into his mouth, gulping each furious bite.

Thoughts twisted through his mind like snakes. The burning unfairness of it, of Hassan’s proud day at the harvest, of Rafan arriving to occupy their mother’s arms and time. And him, Salim – not a man to be respected nor a baby to be loved. Then came Abu Mazen’s words, slipping down his hot throat with the taste of ice and fear. Why were the Jews coming here next? Why would they need to leave their home? It will be like Deir Yassin all over again. The story of that massacre had blown through Palestine like a red wind – fifty dead, one hundred, two hundred. The rice in his mouth was gritty as dust and he heard the woman screaming – Omar! Omar!

He pushed the plate away and lay down again, pulling the blanket over his head. Another hour went by before he heard another click of the doorknob. This time, Salim felt a cool hand come to rest on his forehead, and breathed in the reassuring smell of his mother’s perfume. He lay still as he could, afraid that if he spoke a word, he would make her want to leave again.

A long silence passed. Finally he could hold back no longer. ‘It’s not my fault, Mama,’ he whispered. ‘Baba hates me.’

‘Hate?’ Her face was a white wall in the darkness. ‘You don’t know about hate yet, ya’eini.’

‘Why should Hassan go again to the fields and not me? It’s so unfair.’

‘What’s fair in this life?’ she said, her voice low. ‘Not even God is fair. Only fools say different – but you’ll learn, Salim. If a man wants something, he must find his own way.’

‘I want to take the harvest,’ he said, pulling himself upright. ‘It’s my right. My turn.’

She laughed softly. ‘So you want to be a fellah too, my clever boy?’ The words pricked him into shame, just like Mazen’s.

‘I’m not a fellah,’ he said hotly. ‘But they’re my trees as much as Hassan’s. And now I’m seven, it’s my turn. You and Baba promised.’

She took his chin in her hand, fingers smooth as marble. ‘Well, effendi. There’s one thing we can thank God for. He gave you a clever mother – w’Allahi, just as clever as her son. Too clever for your Baba, anyway. We spoke tonight, after the shisha calmed him down a bit. Go downstairs tomorrow morning and kiss his hand – and you’ll have your harvest. There – that’s your birthday present, ya’eini.’

He clutched the edge of the pillow. The surge of joy was so unexpected, seizing his breath like the slap of cold surf on the beach. His arms were around her neck, and the words Mama, Mama came into his throat but he swallowed them in case they brought tears too, like a baby.

She held him against her. ‘Never worry, ya’eini,’ she said softly, her breath warm against his hair. But then something shifted – she disengaged his arms, pushing him back to the bed. ‘Bookra, Insha’Allah,’ she said to him, her face turning towards the door. Tomorrow, if God wills it. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said in reply, feeling the old tug in his chest.

She leaned over to kiss his cheek, and he remembered at the last minute, in a rush of anxiety.

‘Mama,’ he said urgently. ‘What about the Jews coming?’

She stopped in the doorway, framed softly against the light in the hall. ‘What about them?’

‘Abu Mazen was talking about it. And Mazen, and the Frères. Will it be like Deir Yassin? Why did they do that?’

At first she did not answer, and he feared he’d angered her. When she spoke at last, the words were slow, as if she drew each one from a well.

‘They are all dreamers here, Salim,’ she said. ‘The Jews dream of a homeland, the Arabs of the way things were. Your father dreams of being rich. Even me.’ She sighed and looked away. ‘When dreams become more important than life, you don’t care what you have to do to grasp them.’

He lay motionless, the pillow still tight in his hand, his chest still light with happiness. When she spoke of dreams, all he could think of was the trees in the garden.

She turned to go, but he saw her hesitate – and her hand reached down to touch his face.

‘Salim, if someone calls you a farmer, don’t deny it,’ she said. ‘The fellahin are the only honest men in Palestine. They truly own this land – not the Jews and not the ay’an. They built it with their hands and sweat. They would have saved it if they could. But they were betrayed. Do you understand?’

Salim nodded, determined not to disappoint her. In truth, her words were as bewildering as a song. They left him confused, tired and entranced.

Her hand left his cheek and she said, ‘Sleep now.’ But Salim lay awake long after she left. Then, the day slipped from him into the well of exhaustion and his eyes fell shut.

‘Every Jew has a foundation story,’ Rebecca used to tell her. ‘Where they were when Israel was born. And you, Judit, are your mother’s.’

‘But I don’t want to be a war story.’

‘You are your own story, mommellah. To yourself. You can’t help what you are to other people.’

‘It took me days to get her out,’ Dora would say whenever the Ryhope Road Shul would start worrying over the war for the Homeland, like dogs over a bone. Her finger would shake in the air, conducting a personal symphony of woe. ‘She was late, because I was so worried sick with her uncle in the army, you know, in Jaffa and Haifa. Glued to the BBC day and night we were, with all those meshuganas, those bloody Arabs threatening to push us into the sea.’

This was how it went on: they’d just closed up Gold’s Fashions and were driving home when Dora felt the first wave of true pain kick her like a horse. She’d grabbed Jack’s steering arm and shouted, ‘Stop you idiot, it’s coming!’

Thirty minutes later they were staggering into the Sunderland Royal, where Dora was annotated on the obstetrician’s chart: D. Gold, elderly primigravida – NB DIFFICULT. The midwife made sure the doctor on call was sober, changed her apron and readied herself to be soothing.

But it was all for nothing. Dora’s pains lingered, the doctor poked and prodded, but her waters did not break. Two days passed under the unflinching hospital lights before they finally decided to pull the baby out for better or worse.

Jack called Judith’s arrival ‘the Miracle of Steady Driving’. Dora, on the other hand, blamed it on an act of God – a sign that her daughter’s birth was, in some way, a catastrophe narrowly avoided. It was the price of her middle-class entry into the great theatre of Jewish suffering – a forty-eight-hour labour that reduced her to yelling ‘For God’s sake, get it out of me!’ There was enough blood and ripped flesh for a battlefield and at the end a tiny, limp girl born struggling for oxygen just as the new State of Israel was drawing its first breath.

Judith was installed in a bedroom already occupied by Gertie, a shadowy presence of sixteen. ‘Not your blood sister,’ Grandma Rebecca explained once, ‘but one of God’s people all the same.’ Her first memories were of Gertie, lying beside her at night and weeping. The music of that crying spread over her childhood like a pale blue stream, creeping into her dreams and filling them with sorrow. Then one day she found a picture under Gertie’s pillow: a different family – two stiff girls with the same solemn look, holding a baby boy in their arms. A note on the back read: Gertrude, Esther und Daniel Kraus, Wien 1939.

Judith’s birth certificate, filled out in Jack’s shaky hand, read: Judit Rebecca Gold. Dora had insisted on the Judit. This was her own mother’s name, an early war death in Budapest still violently mourned. Dora’s youth had been filled with Judits; it never occurred to her how the name might wear outside the clannish walls of Sunderland Judaism, in a sturdy English classroom filled with Charlottes and Victorias. And she would have been horrified to learn of the treacherous h her daughter stealthily added to the end soon after her fifth birthday.

‘It sounds funny, Bubby,’ Judith said to Rebecca during the walk back from kindergarten, hanging her pale blonde head. ‘They laugh at me. Why can’t I have another one? Will you ask Mummy for me?’

‘Oh mommellah,’ Rebecca said, her freckled hand stroking the white, chubby one. ‘One day when you’re older, you can choose your own name, just like Papa did, and I did too. But when we’re little we have to have the names our parents give us. They’re our baby names, they show that our mamas and papas love us so much and hold us close to their hearts.’

‘But why did she choose such a funny name? Your name isn’t funny. Tony doesn’t have a funny name either.’ Anthony, her wealthy teenage cousin, was much envied and talked about in the Gold household.

‘Your mama called you after her mama, because she loves you as much as her mama loved her. That’s how we remember the people we love, by keeping them alive in our children. That’s why your papa gave you my name too, so that when I’m gone you can remember me and keep a little piece of me alive.’

Judith shivered and drew her grandmother’s warm hand next to her cheek. A pet budgie had died in their class the week before. She had watched in tears while the teacher scooped up the tiny bright body, its red legs curled into withered little stalks on the soiled cage floor.

‘Don’t die, Bubby,’ she said very seriously. ‘I want you here.’ How would life be without her grandmother’s easy voice, her warm red hair and soft lap to sit on?

Rebecca was as much a part of her as her name. Rebecca was the shriek of the gulls above Ryhope Road, the air scrubbed and raw as a kitchen sink, the distant moan of the shipyards. She was the grimy churn of the sea at Roker beach, the roar and grind of the docks – the sounds she called the heartbeat of the north. Sometimes, when the great tankers sailed up the Wear and stirred the waters into foamy life, Rebecca would take her down to the banks. And Judith would be lifted, safe in her arms, to hear the cheers of the crowds and wave her pocket handkerchief at the shining vastness of steel.

Sometimes Judith wondered why their family seemed so thin and small compared to the other Jewish clans at Shul every Saturday. They never felt like a clan even together – even on the family days out at Roker beach. There, Dora would sit motionless on the deckchair behind her sunglasses, while Jack fanned himself with the Sunderland Echo and Shipping Gazette. Gertie stayed under the umbrella, fully clothed, and Judith would sit alone with her bucket and spade – desperate to paddle but afraid of the waves.

Rebecca explained it like this.

‘You come from a family of mensches,’ she said, using the Yiddish word that means a worthy and righteous man. Her fingers traced the gold Star of David always hanging around her neck – a wedding gift. ‘That’s not true for everyone round here, mommellah. Your grandpa and I, God rest him, had three wonderful boys. Each of them did something good with his life. Your Uncle Max is fighting to build our homeland in Israel. Uncle Alex is giving some of all the money he makes to help poor and sick people. And Jacob, your papa, well – he and your mama thought they could not have children, so they took Gertrude in when she was a little girl just like you, saving her from the Camps. And they are keeping me in my old age, too.

‘So you see, God sent them you as a reward. And He sent work for each of my other sons – more important than raising big families. Don’t be sad about it. It’s a mitzvah, a blessing for us.’

Her cousin Tony had a different perspective.

‘Dad says that Max is crazy,’ he said, through a mouthful of rum and raisin ice-cream, during a visit up from London. ‘Mad as a fruitbat, living in the desert, growing melons and shooting at the natives. St Max of Zion, we call him. As for my Dad, maybe old Grandma has to tell herself that he’s some Jewish Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the schmucks.’ He grinned and ruffled Judith’s yellow hair. ‘Frankly I think your Pop is the only normal one in the family. So cheer up, bubbellah. You’ll probably be normal as normal too.’

War children shouldn’t grow up to be normal, Judith remembered thinking. They’re supposed to be heroes. Mensches. That was how the story ended for Dora, the Sunderland version of the great Foundation of Israel and Judit Gold. St Max came back from the fighting after the Yishuv was safe, when the five foreign Arab armies had been routed and half the local Arabs had vanished with them. ‘He told me that at the minute, the very minute she was born, Ben-Gurion was raising the flag.’ Max had presented Dora with a dirty blue patch of fabric embroidered with a six-pointed star, as a birth gift. ‘He wore it when he signed up, and it went with him from Jaffa to Yerushalayem,’ she’d say. ‘Something to remind Judit of all the sacrifices our generation made.’ But Judith had only seen Max’s star once in her lifetime. She’d spied it, a ragged square hidden away in Dora’s make-up case like an old schmatter. ‘Your brother might be dining with the righteous,’ she heard her mother say to Jack in an unguarded moment, ‘but he’s not exactly money in the bank.’

Judith had touched it lightly, as if it might hurt. It was torn around the edges and it smelt strange, a hot, red smell like dust. It was nothing like the sky-blue flag she’d seen on television; this blue was wounded, grey as the Wear at high tide, and the stains on it were dark as blood.

Salim awoke to the sound of an explosion.

It was a deep, piercing boom that dragged him up from the depths of sleep like a loud knock on the door. He sat up, confused; his room was dark and he could still smell his mother’s perfume.

Outside the inky sky was fading into dawn. Hassan’s bed was unmade and empty. In the silence he could hear his own breath.

Then it came again, a giant crash that rocked the walls and sent dust spiralling from the ceiling.

He leapt up in terror. What’s happening? Where is everyone? Have they left me? He clutched the blanket to himself, as the tears started to come.

The open bedroom door suddenly looked threatening, a black hole leading out into the unknown. Then another explosion hit. This time instinct drove him to his feet.

As he raced down the stairs he felt a third boom nearly knock him off his feet. The front door was open and a grey light streamed into the house.

Then he saw them – his mother, father and Hassan standing outside in the orange garden. They were still in their nightclothes, and Hassan was barefoot. Rafan cried in his mother’s arms, his face red as a bruise over her shoulder.

Above them the pre-dawn sky was split with white shocks, like lightning strikes. Each blast sent bright needles of light through the leaves of the orange trees. Thick flags of smoke drifted out to sea.

‘What’s happening?’ he pleaded, ashes in his mouth. Even Hassan looked terrified, clutching his father’s hand like a baby.

‘Mortars,’ Abu Hassan replied, without looking down. A high whistling followed his words, before an explosion made the ground tremble. ‘They want to drive us out with bombs and then kill what’s left.’

Salim looked at his mother. She stood still as stone, eyes fixed on the sea. Behind their heads, a hint of milky light warned of an imminent sunrise.

The thuds of the mortars were still a little way distant. They were east and north, up towards Clock Tower Square and the town centre – its hospitals, the Al-Hambra cinema with its red seats, the Mahmoudiya Mosque and the churches of St Peter and St George. But between the crashes, Salim heard other sounds closer to home: shouts and sirens, the excited barking of dogs and the squeal of tyres.

Suddenly someone was banging on the gate; the whole Al-Ishmaeli family jumped. In her shock, his mother even did the unthinkable – grabbed Abu Hassan’s arm and clung to it. She hissed ‘Get inside’ to Hassan and Salim. Neither could move, rooted to the spot like cats watching a hound.

‘Abu Hassan!’ An urgent voice, a man’s voice, spoke through the metal grill. ‘Open up, for God’s sake.’

Salim recognized the voice at once; his mother did too. ‘It’s Isak Yashuv,’ she told Abu Hassan. ‘Quick, let him in.’

Gates were rarely locked in Jaffa, even in those days of fear. But that night Abu Hassan had decided to close the rusty bolt for the first time in years; it creaked and juddered as he fumbled to pull it open. His family stayed behind, huddled into an anxious knot.

Isak Yashuv’s black eyes were wide with haste; his beaten old Austin was behind him, its engine running. Lili stood in the embrace of its open door, her light brown hair covered by a yellow cloth patterned with flowers. In the back seat, Elia sat bundled up beside piles of bags and clothes. His eyes caught Salim’s, and he looked away again in confusion.

Isak was talking quickly to his parents. ‘This is the Irgun, Abu Hassan. They’re going to take Jaffa today or tomorrow. I’m worried they’ll come through our neighbourhood, so I’m taking the family out.’ Isak lived in Manshiyya, on the flimsy border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. ‘You should lock the door and don’t let any fighters use your house. Stay out of the fighting and the Irgun will stay away from you.’

‘So where are you going?’ asked his mother, coming up to stand by her husband.

Isak gave her a strangely apologetic look. ‘To Tel Aviv,’ he said. ‘Whatever dream we have been living is over now. Either the Irgun will get us in their attack or the Arabs will, in revenge.’

Abu Hassan turned his head from side to side, as if the answer might materialize suddenly out of the orange trees. While he hesitated, Salim’s mother said coldly, ‘We will not run. This is our house. There are soldiers here too, let them protect us.’

Isak raised his hands. ‘Don’t put your faith in soldiers, Umm Hassan. Thousands are already making for the port and onto ships. Arab fighters are among them. I thought Jaffa must be empty and you would be alone here. But if no one stays, who will be left to claim Jaffa after this madness is over?’ He shook his head, unable to say more. Salim was astonished to see wetness on his cheek.

Lili came up now, touching Isak lightly on the arm. In her weak Arabic she said, ‘Don’t frighten them so, Isak.’ Turning to Salim’s mother, she said, ‘Stay, if you want to keep your home. Go into the cellar and stay. I know what you think, but these people are not monsters. They just want…’ She made a gesture with her hands, before falling silent and dropping her eyes. Salim stared at her. What was she saying? What did these Jews want? There was nothing for them here. Everything here belonged to him.

Then Lili was tugging on Isak’s sleeve and speaking to him quickly in Hebrew. He turned his head back towards the car and Elia.

‘We have to go now,’ he said. ‘God bless you and your family, Abu Hassan. I hope…’ but whatever he hoped was lost in another crash and rumble.

With a last look at Salim, he urged his wife back into the car. Elia’s eyes held his as the engine roared into action and the Austin sped off towards the coast road.

His mother turned to Abu Hassan. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ she said to him. ‘Lili is right. If we go, who knows what could happen to this house? The British are still in charge here, aren’t they? Call Michael Issa!’ The Christian was hailed as one of the heroes leading the Arab Liberation Army. ‘Go to see the British. Make them do something!’ She clenched her fists in rage, Rafan wedged hiccupping under her arm, as the sky flickered and shook behind them.

Back in their house, the long, slow Sunday morning dawned – and gradually the noise of the shelling stopped. A dull silence fell. No mosque called the morning or the noon prayers. As the heat of the day rose, so did the sound of car horns, the rumble of engines and the babble of frightened voices. Salim thought they were coming from the port. Isak Yashuv was right. The whole of Jaffa was in flight.

Salim sat with his mother and brothers in the kitchen listening to the radio. Michael Issa was talking; he said that the shelling had killed hundreds of Arabs near the town centre and port. The Jews were advancing from the north, spilling from Tel Aviv’s steel bowels. People were fleeing ahead of them. Northern Jaffa was almost empty. He begged people to stay calm and stay in their homes. He would defend Jaffa to his last drop of blood.

The heat of the afternoon became too much for Salim, and he went to pace around the garden. A yellow haze filled the sky. It seemed to him that the trees themselves were trembling, their leaves shuddering in the still air. Did trees feel frightened? He rubbed his hand on the bark of his tree, feeling the notches marking his growth. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered into the wood. ‘It will be over soon. Just keep growing, until the next harvest.’ He stood there into the uncertain afternoon, saying it again and again under his breath. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.

After a restless night, his father put on his best suit of brown wool from Jerusalem to go to beg the British Police Commissioner for help. His stomach strained against the belt loops and sweat coloured his armpits dark. Salim stood by the door as he walked past, out of the kitchen and through the back gate. Outside, Abu Mazen’s new car was waiting, its engine whining gently like a dragonfly over a pond. Mazen was in the back, dressed in his boy scout uniform. His face was pale against the tight buttons, and when he turned Salim saw his eyes were red and swollen. But as soon as he saw Salim staring, he raised his hand into the shape of a gun, aiming at Salim through the window; Salim saw his hand jerk back as the car roared to life and made off through the silent streets.

Abu Hassan returned that night with good news. ‘The British have given the Jews an ultimatum,’ he told them. ‘If they don’t pull back, the Angleezi will blow those rats out of their holes.’

Salim took a deep breath and Hassan, beside him, clapped his hands and said, ‘Al-hamdullilah’ – thank God!

‘Don’t be so sure,’ their mother replied darkly. ‘The British have made plenty of promises before. They leave in three weeks. Why would they want any more of their soldiers to die? Better to let us kill each other.’

But this time, not even his mother’s words could quell Salim’s relief. They had been rescued from the brink. It was like when that little girl slipped into the sea from the pier last summer, while her mother screamed. Everyone had leapt to the dark water’s edge, but then a wave from nowhere had washed her right back onto solid ground.

That night they all slept. But the next morning, fear crept back. It was nearly three days since the mortars started falling. Three days, with no water or power. The house reeked of sweat and fumes from the toilet, and the air was oily with smoke.

Where were the British? The streets remained empty. Sporadic radio broadcasts said the fighting was still going on to the east and outside of Manshiyya. Villages close to Jaffa, and the outermost suburbs, had been taken. Where was the Arab Liberation Army? They felt utterly alone.

In the afternoon, Salim’s mother asked Hassan to start bringing in their stocks of food from the garden shed. ‘We have to hide them,’ she said. ‘Who knows how long it will be like this?’

He helped his brother heave the hessian sacks of flour inside. They looked like the bags the refugees carried, the ones the fellahin used to take fruit to the market; now they were all that stood between him and an aching belly. You’re just another stupid fellah now, you donkey.

As evening fell, the hairs on the back of Salim’s neck rose. The sound of mortar fire returned to the north. In the gathering darkness he rushed into his parents’ room. His mother was there, filling a suitcase with trembling hands.

‘What are you doing, Mama?’ he said, dry fear swelling in his throat.

‘I won’t let them take our things, if they come here,’ she said, not looking up. ‘You need to get ready too. Put some clothes in a bag and bring it to me. Tell Hassan.’ Her voice was calm but her hands fluttered over her dresses and jewels.

Salim ran from her, stumbling down the stairs in panic. His heart was pulling him like a desperate animal. Out, out, it urged. Run! Hide! He tried to calm himself. His mother needed him to be a man.

He walked slowly over to the family mantelpiece. It was packed with carefully arranged pictures – grandparents he had never met, and one sad, yellowed image of a young girl at her wedding. His eyes searched desperately for the one he wanted.

There it was: a small, rectangular photograph of a wide-eyed baby propped up against a tree. The baby was looking up in placid bewilderment at some distraction behind the camera. In the background, the white Al-Ishmaeli villa rose like a ghost, flowers curling around its façade.

It had been taken at Rafan’s tree planting ceremony, one year ago in the garden. The baby, his tree and the little shovel pushed into the earth, to mark the start of two new lives. Only Rafan’s tree had been too small to lean against. So they’d propped him up against Salim’s.

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ Hassan had said, when Salim complained it wasn’t fair. ‘It’s just a picture. What does it matter to you?’ But he’d always pretended it really was him in the picture, there in his rightful place.

He touched the trunk of his tree in the image, and courage came back to him. Pulling it down from the shelf he ran into his bedroom. He packed his schoolbag with his pyjamas, two pairs of underpants and a change of shirt, laying the picture in the middle. Then he went outside, to wait for what would come.

On that final night, Salim kept vigil in the garden under his tree, a penknife in his pocket. His mother twice tried to bring him inside, but he refused. Finally she brought him a blanket.

He lay huddled with his backpack against the bark. Jaffa’s lights were out, and it was the deepest night he’d ever seen. Through the dark, flickering leaves, the sky was seeded with fiery pricks of starlight. As he closed his eyes, they blurred into a brilliant river.

In the milky air of dawn, he got to his feet. The world was wrapped in stillness, empty but for the birds and dogs. For a moment he wondered if he was still asleep – if he might yet wake up in his own bed, with the light streaming in through the window.

Then he saw them – the dark clouds rising into the air over the port. A burning stench crept over the sleeping houses. Nearer than before he could hear gunshots and shouting – a wild mix of whoops and shrieks. His stomach clenched. The back gate clanged; he turned in a heartbeat and saw his father scurrying back into the house. A second later his mother rushed out, her face drawn and blank. She grabbed him by the arm and began pulling him inside.

‘The Jews are here,’ she said, her voice thick. ‘Manshiyya has gone and they’ve reached the sea; they’ll come here next. The British have failed us. Come now, it’s time. Your father says we must go.’

Salim looked up to see his father hefting two large suitcases down the stairs. Hassan followed with a duffel bag from their bedroom. Tears were running down his brother’s cheeks, and the sight of them sent more surging into Salim’s eyes.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he wept, feeling as helpless as a leaf in a storm. ‘We live here. I want to stay here.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said his father, his round face pocked with beads of sweat, his clothes stinking of terror. ‘Jaffa is gone, the Jews are coming. Don’t you remember Deir Yassin? We’ll all be dead if we stay.’ At that moment Salim did not care.

‘We’re going to your sister’s,’ Abu Hassan continued, as he lugged the heavy bags out to their car. Abu Hassan meant his grown-up daughter by his first, long-dead wife. They’d once visited Nadia and her husband, Tareq, sipping sweet tea and eating dates in the hill country of Nazareth.

In the background, Salim could hear his mother’s gramophone – a woman, singing sadly about love. They can’t make me go. The words hammered in him, louder than the lament, louder than the boom boom boom coming from the port. He ran out to the patio, ignoring Hassan’s shout of ‘Hey, Salim!’ and Rafan’s wailing.

He couldn’t go. They didn’t understand. The air was thick, and the branches of the trees drooped wearily as he raced towards them.

The penknife bumped heavy in his pocket, sneaked from Hassan’s wardrobe weeks ago. He pulled it out and dug it into the yielding bark, carving the word out one letter at a time. If anyone comes here, they’ll know you’re mine. His hand was shaking and the marks were weak, and before he could finish he felt his mother’s hand close on his arm.

‘Come on, Salim, don’t make it worse,’ she gasped, pulling him back inside. ‘Your father has made up his mind, and please God it won’t be for long.’

Over the years to come, Salim would try to replay those last minutes in the Orange House, scraps of memory dancing away like embers from the flames. The fluttering of the yellow curtain in his bedroom as he pulled his socks on and the dim reflections of his mother’s mirror as she gathered the last of her jewellery. The sudden spring wind that set the orange trees whispering as they bundled him into the back seat. The squeal of the gate as the bolt slid shut. And the final slam of the car door. That last sound seemed to ricochet inside his heart, as they tore from the gates of the house, speeding him away.

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‌1956

‘Stretch, pet, stretch. Stretch those arms out! For God’s sake, Judith. Give it some heft, girl! How do you expect to get anywhere if you don’t bloody fight for it?’

Every Thursday afternoon of her eighth year, Judith would put her head under the water at Wearside Swimming Club to escape preparations for the Tercentenary Celebration of Jews in Britain. Mr Hicks at the Wearside Pool didn’t care that the Prime Minister himself – and the Duke of Edinburgh too! – would attend a dinner with ‘every Jew that matters’. Dora’s temper was righteously inflamed: Alex Gold was one of the event’s organizers – and his family didn’t get an invitation!

Judith knew that they were not rich, because Dora mentioned it at least once a day. She referred to Uncle Alex as ‘that rich pishaker in London’, and seemed determined to punish Jack and Judith for conning her out of her rightful place in society.

Jack blamed the war. Gold’s Fashions had been a hit in the thirties. But when the bombs fell on Sunderland’s shipyards, blowing them to smithereens, half of its customers left. ‘Between your mother’s clothes and those bastards at the bank, even Moses couldn’t find a pot to piss in,’ Judith would hear him grumble as he went through the accounts.

‘He’s ashamed of you,’ Dora raged at Jack, the day before Judith’s eighth birthday. ‘We’re just the poor relations from the north while your brother’s machering around in Regent’s Park.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Jack said, edging towards the back door. ‘There are four hundred thousand Jews in Britain, we can’t all have dinner with the Prime Minister. Calm down and organize a dinner here with the Shul if you want to. Now I have to pop out to the shop, Gertie’s having some trouble with the books. Bye, pet.’ He kissed Judith on the top of her head, and slipped away.

Dora swept past Judith into the kitchen in a blur of blue heels, and started setting the table with a furious clattering of china on wood. Judith tiptoed in.

‘See what your father’s family are like?’ Her mother’s chin gave a bitter jerk. ‘They don’t even know they’re Jewish. Gold by name but coal by nature, that’s all they’re bloody worth. After all we’ve been through, Jews should stick together. But not these fine fellows, oh no. It’s self self self all the time, and the rest of us can go shtup ourselves. Don’t you take after them, young lady.’ She shook a warning finger at Judith’s reflection in the kitchen tap. ‘It’s no naches to raise an ungrateful child, you know.’

Judith nodded solemnly. It made her queasy, the idea of people sticking together – the Jewish people as a great stuck-together mass like so many pieces of the grey papier mâché they used at school.

As she lay in bed that night she imagined that they were all standing outside Uncle Alex’s famous party in London in their finest clothes. But for some reason, as she slipped into sleep, it had become a wedding, and hundreds of feet were swirling round in the hora – a din so furious that Judith covered her ears. Then Dora snatched her hand yelling, ‘Come on, we’re all waiting for you, madam!’ But something was wrong – she couldn’t move, and when she looked down she saw her feet sinking into wet pieces of paper, clinging to her, gluing her to the spot.

The Jewish girls at Hillview Junior School might not have minded being stuck together; neither Judith nor any of the others knew what it was to have a non-Jewish friend. But in their second year the girls found themselves arranged in the classroom not by tribe but by pure alphabetical populism. Judith was seated next to a new girl called Kathleen, a mass of black curls, gappy teeth and pink leggings under her school skirt.

At break time, when the Shul club (as Tony called them) went into their usual corner, Kathleen asked blithely to see where the swings and the toilets were. As they walked around the playground in the cool morning sun, Judith felt Kathleen’s thin hand slip into hers, as she chatted away in a happy lisp.

‘You’re not like them at all,’ she said, kicking one of the boys off the swing and hitching her skirt up to sit on it. ‘They’re just like the ones at my old school – keeping themselves to themselves, you know. You’re nice, though.’

Judith blushed and shrugged. ‘They’re not so bad,’ she said, uncertain. She looked nervously over her shoulder and saw the little group she knew so well – Minnie, Blanche, Ethel and Rachel – staring back in frank astonishment.

Kathleen pushed herself off the ground and swung her legs to the marbled sky. Judith sat down next to her and did the same, a swooping feeling filling her stomach with the fall of the wind.

‘So why are you playing with me and not them?’ the stranger asked, as they flew past each other.

Judith had no idea how to answer. She didn’t dislike her other friends. But she didn’t like them much either. ‘Just because,’ she said at last, feeling a perverse rush of courage as she imagined what Dora would say. ‘I like you. Why shouldn’t I like you?’

Kathleen giggled and jumped off the swing onto the ground. ‘You’re a rebel,’ she hooted. ‘Mamma says rebels are the best kind of people.’ She started skipping around Judith, waving her arms in the air. ‘I LOVE it!’ she said. ‘It’s so romantic, like a song.’ And then she started singing ‘Tutti frutti, oh Judy’ again and again, until both girls leaned on the school wall and laughed until they cried. From that day, Judith became Judy and she and Kathleen were inseparable.

Kathleen was a swimmer. ‘Mam says it’s all I’m good for.’ Wearside was on their way home, and Judith stood rapt as she watched the girls flying through the pool, their white caps cresting against the clean blue like the sea from Uncle Max’s postcards. There were no Jews under the water. That’s what Mr Hicks said in so many words when Kath nudged Judith to ask what it took to join the swim team. ‘Just strong legs and a bit of old-fashioned brass, pet,’ he answered.

Life was different from that moment on. It was a rush of bubbles of water and air, the bursting exhilaration of the first breath at the surface, the cooling pressure in her ears that blocked out Dora’s irritation, and the feeling of weakness in her arms turning slowly to strength. After Wearside every Thursday, she’d walk with Kathleen to her house and listen to Pat Boone and Little Richard on her mother’s record player.

Kathleen’s home smelt of fried sausages and chips. Her mother wore bright, tight trousers that showed her ankles and stripy tops that made her look like a doll. She had Kathleen’s black curly hair, she smoked and laughed like a teenage girl and told Judith to call her Molly. Judith once asked where Kathleen’s father was and got nothing more than a shrug from Kath and a ‘gone and good riddance’ from Molly. But she loved the fun they had together; the endless hints from Molly around making your own rules and living your own life. Judith was too young to see that Kathleen had trouble reading, that Molly sometimes cried and drank and Kath’s clothes were dirty behind their splashes of colour.

On the last Friday afternoon of the summer holiday, Kath knocked on Judith’s door. From her bedroom she heard Gertie’s voice and Kath’s pipe, and tumbled downstairs. Mind yourself, Judit,’ Gertie grumbled, her lingering German accent soft against the northern vowels. Judith wriggled past her sister, rolling her eyes. Kath giggled, her shoulders squeezing up into her black curls.

‘Guess what, mon?’ she said, when Gertie had vanished. ‘I’m off to Wearside for a splash. Mam went out with some fella. She won’t mind. You coming?’

Judith looked instinctively back over her shoulder. Gertie and Rebecca were in the kitchen, and the sour smell of gefilte fish was filtering through the hall. ‘I can’t,’ she said, frustration filling her. ‘It’s Sabbath.’

Kath shrugged. ‘Judy-Rudy, you’re no rebel.’ But she smiled, a wicked freckled grin. ‘We’re doing Roker this Sunday. Last one of the summer! Mam says come too, why not?’

The Shabbas prayers that night made Judith itch. Over Dora’s song, all she could hear was Kath yelling ‘Don’t get wet, pet’ as she skipped down the street.

At the table she stirred her spoon morosely round the bowl, watching uneven balls of dumplings float to the surface. Earlier she’d watched Rebecca roll them up out of matzo-meal and egg, and drop them so tenderly into the pot, the sour wheat smell of them filling the kitchen. But now they floated heavily around her spoon, dreary and lumpen. Her stomach turned at the very thought of putting one into her mouth.

Stealth in her fingers, she lifted one out and rolled it under the soup bowl. Gertie was concentrating hard on her own bowl, and Dora was telling Jack about a woman at Shul who was shtupping some goy from London.

Judith lifted another one out and hid it. She was just trying for a third, when Rebecca suddenly said, ‘Mommellah, what on earth are you doing with those knedlach?’

Dora’s head snapped up and her beady eyes saw the treacherous dumplings peeking out from under the plate rim. ‘What’s this, young lady?’ she said. ‘Hiding your food again?’

‘They make my tummy ache,’ Judith said, stubbornly. Dora raised her eyebrows and Jack pointed his spoon at her.

‘After all the work your grandma did for us today, pet,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know there are hungry children in the world?’

‘I don’t know what’s come over her recently,’ said Dora, lips pressed together and the candlelight glinting off her earrings. ‘I never heard of a girl not eating what her parents gave her. Gertie was just as old as you, madam, when she came to us – and she’d been starving,’ she pointed a thin finger at Gertie’s round frame, ‘starving in the ghetto and millions of Jews along with her. Hunger took almost as many as the Camps in the Shoah. It’s an insult to their memory not to eat when there’s plenty, isn’t that right, Gertie?’

‘God commands us to eat at Shabbas,’ said Gertie earnestly to Judith, poking her in the elbow. ‘It’s a holy commandment, Judit.’ Judith jerked her arm away.

‘Stop telling me about God all the time,’ she said, miserably. ‘It’s not normal.’ Gertie wrinkled up her face in wounded astonishment, and Dora threw her hands in the air.

‘Normal?’ she said, her voice swelling with scorn. ‘Normal? What’s normal about a girl talking back to her parents? What’s normal disrespecting your traditions? Well?’ Judith stared at the table, trying to pretend she was under the water, and Dora’s voice was dim and faint like a song through the waves.

‘You’d best go to your room then, if you’re not hungry.’ Dora started scooping knedlach into her mouth and nodding in exaggerated thanks to Rebecca. ‘Go on then! You’re starting to give me indigestion.’

Judith stood up from the table, her legs wobbling as if lead weights were strung to the end of them. She walked slowly out of the kitchen, feeling as she went the soft, consoling brush of Rebecca’s finger on her arm.

As she lay on her bed upstairs, hunger was an exciting emptiness inside her. A low hum of conversation drifted upstairs from the kitchen. They’re talking about me. The idea gave her pangs of guilt and queasy delight.

She swung her legs off the bed and opened her schoolbag, pulling out a red notebook and a chewed pencil. Tearing out a page she drew a small heart at the top of the page and wrote:

Dear Kath, ive been sent to my room without dinner. Im really a rebel now! Hope you have fun at Roker this weekend. See you at school, love Judy.

She folded up the paper and wrote Kath on the front. She wondered if she could persuade Gertie to pass by Kath’s house on Sunday during the weekly trek to Hebrew class.

A week after the Knedlach Incident, as Tony called it, Max came home from his kibbutz in Israel for Yom Kippur. ‘It’s a day of atonement for all our wickedness,’ the Rebbe told Judith in Torah class. He stressed there was to be no eating or drinking from sunset to sunset, no wearing of leather shoes, no washing, no anointments with oils or perfumes and no marital relations. These last two confused Judith; she had never known Dora to miss a day of perfume. As for relations – it was several years before she understood what was supposed to happen in Jack and Dora’s separate single beds, and then felt furious for having been fooled for so long.

It was hot for September, and Jack had spent all month lamenting poor sales of autumn stock. Judith crept into Gertie’s bed one night while the sound of Dora wailing at her husband pierced the floorboards. ‘What was the point of more coats in August?’ she thundered, while Jack’s reply was lost in a shamefaced mumble. ‘Do they hate each other?’ Judith whispered to Gertie, wrapped in her pale, soft arms. ‘No,’ Gertie whispered back. ‘But they’ve come a long way up, they’re frightened to fall back down again.’ And Judith found herself wondering if Gertie ever wanted to go back where she came from – ever wished that Judith was an Esther or a Daniel from Wien rather than a pretend sister who pushed her away.

It was the tradition to keep Judith home from school on Yom Kippur, even though she was too young to observe the fast. ‘Your little belly is too small to be empty so long,’ Rebecca said to her gently when she asked why she had to mope around the house all day. ‘Our Law puts the safety of human life above all other holy obligations. That means your health comes first, mommellah, but you can still sit and think and pray like the rest of us.’

During Yom Kippur, Dora, Jack and Gertie went to synagogue. Rebecca, nursing a weak heart, stayed quietly at home with Judith to make the festival supper – baking chollah bread, chopping boiled eggs and preparing sweet kugel cakes. She didn’t try to go to Wearside, so Kath went without her again.

At sunset, Uncle Max lit candles he’d brought all the way from the kibbutz, kissed and blessed his mother and hugged Jack and Dora. He shook hands with Uncle Alex, up from Regent’s Park. Cousin Tony had come down from university, and as the sun slipped behind the horizon, he blew a loud blast through his cupped hands in a parody of the shofar, winking at Judith as he did it.

Judith enjoyed the family coming together; the two uncles felt like adventure and drama. Alex was a snappier version of her father, with tailored suits and pinkie rings and an accent filed into London smoothness. When he spoke, Judith thought of a chocolate milkshake flowing into a cold glass. Uncle Max, on the other hand, was like someone you’d see at the pictures, tanned and lean. Rebecca glowed with pride and happiness to see all her sons gathered around the table; she sat holding Max’s hand and wiping away silent tears.

‘So Max,’ said Alex, helping himself to a cake, ‘how are the melons of Zion coming along?’

‘Come and see for yourself,’ Max said with half a smile. ‘Donate your labour instead of your money.’

Alex grinned and chucked Judith in the ribs. ‘Your Uncle Max thinks I’m one of the moneylenders in the Temple,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t realize that without scoundrels like me funding pure-hearted idealists like him, Israel would have sunk into the marshes decades ago.’ Rebecca tsk-ed and waved her hand at Alex, and Jack said, ‘Come on, now.’

‘No, no, no,’ Max said, leaning forward and widening his fierce blue eyes. ‘Speak your mind, Alex.’ But then he turned to Judith and Tony saying, ‘Uncle Alex here knows that when the war finished we had nothing at the kibbutz – not even water. I don’t remember any calls offering me tools and irrigation systems. We had to build them all with our bare hands.’

‘Good for you,’ Jack said, nodding, as Alex laughed. Max went on.

‘I was younger than our Tony here, and I thought I knew about hard work. What did I know?’ He smiled ruefully at Judith and shook his head. ‘After the first week my hands were so full of blisters I couldn’t hold my spoon to eat. They had to feed me like a baby. And then there were the Arabs, sending in grenades, shooting at us in the dark. So don’t listen to your uncle, Judit. Your papa here, he knows. Money can’t buy everything. And it didn’t buy the Jews a homeland.’

Alex cut in. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘Why does every Jewish dinner party have to end up mired in Israel or the Shoah? Don’t we have anything else to talk about?’

Max pointed his fork at Judith. ‘Look at these kids here. They should know that Israel didn’t just appear like one of the miracles. Jews were slaughtered there too, to make a safe place for all of us.’

Rebecca stroked Max’s face and said, ‘I know, my love.’

Alex sipped his wine. ‘You take it so seriously, Max.’

‘Because it’s a serious thing. Every day I have to look after three hundred people, dozens of acres, more than a hundred cows and sheep and several tons of farm machinery, plus a well that needs reinforcement and drainage every year.’

‘No wonder you’re looking so old.’

‘Alex, ten years I’ve been asking you for money, Papa’s money, by the way, which he meant for all of us. What, aren’t I important enough for you to give your pennies to? You can’t believe a man might not be wealthy and still be a mensch.’ Alex rolled his eyes.

‘Jack, you remember? Gold’s Fashions was supposed to be our investment together after Papa died, some security for the family. But our little brother had a different idea – no sacrifices for him, right? No, it all went on that big-shot university, those nice suits we couldn’t afford and a Golders Green accent. Should I have to beg my own family for a little money? Should Israel ever have to beg a Jew, I ask you?’

Alex’s face darkened, and Judith saw his hand clench beside her, under the table.

‘You want me to thank you for your sacrifice? Max Gold’s personal sacrifice, leaving his mother and family to indulge in socialist collective agriculture and shoot at Arabs? Jews like me have already paid enough for Israel. Who do you think bought your machinery and your precious cows? It wasn’t the Soviets, that I can promise you.’

‘It wasn’t the bankers either.’

‘Oh really? Who was it – Moses? Papa lost everything running from one war, Max – he never wanted his money to be spent on another. Safe!’ he snorted, as Jack tried to interrupt. ‘High walls and barbed wire don’t mean safe, they mean siege.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ Max threw back, paler now under his tan. ‘We tried it your way. We tried living together with the Arabs, but they’re savages. No education, no civilization – and they all hate us. For fifty years they shot and bombed us and tried to drive us off our land. They called us monsters! And the partition – it would have meant peace – well, they refused to even discuss it. They’d rather wipe us out!’ He pushed himself away from the table, the screech of the chair making Judith jump.

‘The Arabs weren’t the only ones with the guns and the bombs,’ said Alex calmly. ‘What about the Irgun? What about that UN man they blew up – Bernadotte? And – more to the point – what about the rest of us who don’t live behind your barbed wire fence? Sorry to tell you, Max, but Israel hasn’t made a single Jew safer. Too many people hate us for it, right or wrong. They’ve been putting anti-Semitic mail through Tony’s door at university!’ Max shot a glance at Tony, who returned his gaze evenly. ‘What’s the solution? We all pack up and move “next year to Jerusalem”?’ He raised his glass like the sacred Passover prayer. ‘No. Thank you for the favour you’re doing us, but I think I’ll stay here in London and keep paying my taxes, while you dig your wells in the desert to make life safer for me.’

Something made Judith turn her head to look at Rebecca, sitting quietly on the other side of Max – Rebecca, the gentle stream that carried them all along.

Her grandmother’s face was turned slightly to one side, towards the mantelpiece where pictures of their lives lay in dusty frames. Judith knew them by heart, although she could never remember, if pressed, what it was each one showed. Rebecca’s eyes were unfocused, ‘a thousand miles away’, as she might say. In the half-light of the candles, she looked like she was swimming in some private sorrow. The shadows seemed to be clambering up her body to grasp her. Something leapt in Judith’s throat, and she put her hand out saying, ‘Bubby.’ Alex looked sharply up and said, ‘Mama, are you okay?’ Jack leaned over to take her shoulder, and she suddenly came back from wherever her mind had been walking, putting her hand to her eyes in confusion.

‘Mama, sorry for the racket,’ Jack said. ‘You want to lie down?’ Max breathed out slowly, Alex sat back in his chair, and Dora reached past Jack to take hold of Rebecca’s hand.

‘It’s all right, darling,’ Rebecca said, although it wasn’t clear whom she was talking to. ‘Don’t worry about me, your mama’s just getting old.’ She looked around the table, her eyes still wet and somehow hazy. ‘Eat, eat, children,’ she said, a little breathless. ‘It’s a blessing to be together. Our home is with each other, wherever we are. So many families have been lost.’

She shook her head and began to eat again. Alex and Max picked up their knives and forks and began to talk about something called the Suez Canal, which Judith vaguely understood was a waterway like the Wear that had recently been stolen by an Arab man called Nasser, which all three brothers agreed was a very bad piece of work and would lead to trouble.

In the darkness of her room after dinner, Judith fell asleep thinking of melons in the desert that grew and burst. Hundreds of little people came streaming out of them, scattering this way and that as heavy boots stamped down on them, while Judith screamed ‘Over here! Over here!’ and wept bitter tears.

At the end of September Mr Hicks gave Judith permission to try for the Junior Team. ‘You’re less than completely hopeless,’ he told her. Later in the changing rooms, she wondered why she didn’t feel more excited.

‘Kath?’ she asked, as they dried themselves, goggles dripping on the bench.

‘Yes, Judy-Rudy?’

‘What do you think about us?’

‘You and me?’

‘No.’ Judith felt her cheeks flush. ‘You know. Us. Jews.’

Kath stood up and gave this question the consideration it deserved.

‘Don’t know. Why, what do you think about them?’

‘I don’t know either.’ There was no similarity between Max, Dora, Alex and Rebecca. They were more likely to be invaders from Mars than members of the same family.

Kath rubbed her hair until it stuck out from her head like wire.

‘My mum says that people don’t like Jews much,’ she offered, pulling on her damp leggings. ‘They’re too rich and they control everything.’

‘We’re not rich,’ said Judith. ‘I don’t really know anyone rich, except my Uncle Alex.’

Kath shrugged and grinned. ‘Well, you’re okay then.’ Judith nodded uncertainly. How could Kathleen tell? She herself did not know.

Over the next few weeks, Judith made a point of coming home and watching the six o’clock news on their brand new television. She lost interest in Crackerjack and was half-hearted about spinning records in Kathleen’s mother’s living room.

On the twenty-ninth of October, bombs started falling in the Sinai. Judith listened to the BBC presenter explaining that Britain and France were helping little Israel to punish Egypt for closing the Suez Canal. The Israeli soldiers waved cheerfully to the camera before climbing into fighter jets. And then they cut to the blast of the bombs, and howling hordes in London with anti-Israeli banners chanting anti-Jewish slogans.

The year rushed towards its end; everyone else was preparing for Christmas and Kathleen headed to Ireland. In the Gold household, Judith and Gertie lit the Hanukkah candles for the Jewish Festival of Lights.

Looking into the menorah’s flames in the early darkness of winter, Judith heard them again – the explosions and screams. The match light wavered at the tip of the candlewick as the last candle burst into glorious bloom. She thought of Uncle Max’s star, lying lightless in Dora’s cupboard. And she wondered what life would be like if everyone was doing the same thing at this exact moment – and if no person had to feel different from another.

The day of his betrayal came out of the cheerful blue sky, at the height of Nazareth’s midsummer.

It was a school day; the bells rang at noon, ending the first shift. Dozens of books snapped shut, bags were hoisted onto shoulders and shoes pounded the dusty concrete floor. An excited hum of teenage chatter headed out into the stifling air of downtown Nazareth – away from lessons in mathematics, English and Hebrew, ready for the gruelling trudge uphill.

He was one of the few boys walking alone. A recent growth spurt had added sharp cheekbones, pale skin and bony arms to the other indignities of being nearly fifteen.

In the fierce heat, Nazareth turned from sandy yellow to blazing white. Salim’s eyes ached as he walked up the winding main road. He passed rows of street stalls, children selling soap, car parts and badly made clothes.

The truth was, the Al-Ishmaelis were lucky. They’d come to Nazareth like everyone else, running ahead of the Nakba – the great Catastrophe. Thousands had arrived with them, the fellahin and the ay’an flocking together in a shared disaster.

Eight years later, Salim had a bed in his half-sister’s flat, a school and an Israeli passport. They lived on Tareq’s wages and his mother’s jewels. Most of all, they still had the deeds to Jaffa’s orange groves. But these children had nothing. Their fathers had worked the land, and now the land was gone. Today, work meant scraping a hollow living in the car repair shops or handing out tomatoes at the market.

In the block of flats where his family now measured out the days, Salim climbed slowly, counting the floors. The stairwell was wide, but dirty and rancid with the smells of daily life – washing, cooking, sweat and the sewers somewhere beneath.

His half-sister Nadia was in the kitchen leaning out of the window to hang their washing on the narrow balcony. ‘Hi,’ she called out. ‘Did you have a good day at school?’

Seconds later, she appeared around the kitchen door, wiping her hands. Her brown face was round like Abu Hassan’s, but without the thickness. It was lined beyond its twenty-five years – like so many Arab women deserving a greater serving of happiness than life had seen fit to allot them.

‘Lovely,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘Did they all go out and leave you in peace again?’

‘Oh yes, there’s a lot happening today,’ she said breathlessly. ‘My goodness, you must be hot, let me get you some water.’ And she was off again, scurrying into the kitchen like a mouse through sacks of grain.

The apartment of Tareq and Nadia Al-Ghanem was a perfect reflection of its owners – neat, ordered and conservative. A kind home, stretched beyond its tiny limits to accommodate five more people than it was ever meant to hold. The shameful fact of Nadia’s childlessness – one dead infant and three miscarriages – had become cause for celebration. Had her own children been here, where could the family have gone?

Nadia returned with a glass of water, and sat down next to Salim. He saw that her hands were nervous, fidgeting in her lap.

‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘Do you have a boyfriend hiding in here somewhere?’ She didn’t slap the back of his neck as he expected. The absence of her touch sent a warning chill through him.

‘Listen, Salim,’ she said and then stopped. Her hand reached over to touch his arm. ‘Please, Salim, promise me you won’t get all crazy.’ That word, majnoon, was his father’s favourite insult. That Nadia used it now told him there was some problem, something to do with Abu Hassan.

A door opened behind them with a click. Salim turned to see Rafan emerge from the bedroom. His small face was sleepy and white, his mother’s green eyes hiding under pale eyelids.

‘What are you doing home?’ asked Salim, opening his arms for the boy.

‘I was sick so Mama let me stay home from school.’ Rafan came slowly, trailing his fingers along the chair backs. When he reached Salim, he curled his thin body into his brother’s side and looked up into his face.

‘Did Nadia tell you?’ he said, small fingers tapping Salim’s arm. ‘Baba is going back to Jaffa, to sell the house.’

‘What?’ Salim went rigid, panic rushing through him like ice water. ‘That’s impossible. Baba would never do that, never.’ He turned to Nadia, who spread helpless hands. She slapped Rafan on his forehead, half-loving, half-scolding.

‘Rafan, you’re a real troublemaker,’ she said. ‘What do you know about anything, you monkey?’ Then to Salim, ‘Habibi, don’t get upset. Nothing is decided. Your father is at the office with Tareq, talking to Abu Mazen.’ Tareq was a family lawyer, making a little living piecing together the broken parts of Arab lives.

‘But he can’t sell,’ Salim said. He felt seven years old again, pleading. ‘It’s the last thing we have, now all the money’s gone.’

‘That’s just it, Salim. The money has gone. Your father and mother want you to have something to live on, not just dreams.’ Nadia’s eyes were sympathetic, but life had taught her that sentimentality does not feed you, or keep you warm at night.

‘Where’s Mama?’ Salim asked. She would never let this happen.

‘She went to Al-Jameela’s for a haircut,’ said Rafan. ‘She knows about it, though. She told me.’ Salim stared at his brother in disbelief. Rafan was only eight, a baby still – what right did he have to her secrets?

Nadia took Salim’s hand. ‘I know how important that place is to you, habibi, believe me,’ she said gently. ‘But please, don’t worry yourself sick. They’ll all be home soon. We’ll talk it through.’

He nodded and detached himself from her. Hoisting his schoolbag onto his shoulder, he walked into their little bedroom.

It was close and hot, the air motionless. He lay down on his mattress underneath the window.

The boys had all shared a room until Hassan left for England two years ago, to live with Tareq’s relatives. Hassan’s bed was still just as he’d left it, his blanket patterned with little black footballs. Rafan’s mattress was on the floor beside it, filling the room with a sour stink. At first the little boy had tried to climb in with Hassan, who had no time for him. ‘He pisses every fucking night,’ he’d complained. ‘Pissing or crying is all he ever does.’ So Rafan had started crawling onto Salim’s mattress in the dark, whenever his own bed became too wet or full of pursuing dreams. Sometimes Salim woke up damp and smelling of urine, but he couldn’t find it in him to deny his brother’s need.

Something to live on, not just dreams. It was all very well for them to say. But what was life worth, once all the dreams have become dust?

After a while a key turned in the front door, and he heard Rafan’s shrill voice crying out ‘Mama, Mama!’

Swinging his legs off the bed, Salim moved towards the door, opening it a crack. His mother passed him by, her copper hair shining in the sunlight as she leaned forward to scoop Rafan up in her arms. She looked fresh and even happy – perfumed and coiffured, wearing a light red dress with flowers stitched along the hem.

He opened the door and said, ‘Hi, Mama.’ She turned, Rafan with his arm around her legs.

‘Salim, habibi. How was school today?’ She smiled, reaching out her hand for him. Surely, surely, this nonsense about the house could not be true?

‘Not bad. They think I’m doing well.’

‘So they should, that clever brain of yours. If only I had half of your brain, I’d be rich by now.’

Salim shrugged to hide his pleasure. Nadia, standing in the kitchen door, came to put her hand on Salim’s shoulder.

‘He’s a very smart young man, for sure,’ she said, almost defensively. It irritated him; sometimes Nadia acted as if she didn’t trust his mother.

‘Mama,’ Salim said, as his mother turned to walk into her bedroom, ‘the house – our house in Jaffa.’

‘What about it?’

‘Are we selling it?’ The words came out in a higher pitch than he’d wanted. His mother’s face smoothed into a blank.

‘It’s more complicated than that, Salim,’ she said – but then the sound of the door stopped whatever she had been planning to say. Abu Hassan and Tareq were home.

Nadia hurried over to kiss her husband and help her sweating father to his armchair. Casting a glance over at Salim she said, ‘I think the boys are keen to hear what’s been happening, Baba. Can you tell us anything?’ Salim realized she wanted to keep him out of trouble, by asking the first question herself.

Abu Hassan shook his head. ‘These Yehudin make it all so difficult,’ he said. ‘First it’s my house, then it’s not my house. Shit on these new laws! By God, what right do they have to say it’s not my house?’

He reached for the salted sunflower seeds and began crunching. Salim had never seen him so flustered. He remembered that day, long ago in Jaffa, when Mazen had joked about their fathers. For all their money, he could see that Abu Hassan was drowning, like a flounder in the net.

‘Baba, why would you try to sell the house?’ Salim asked, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘We always said we would go back one day, didn’t we?’ He’d dreamed of it; the misery of the past eight years wiped out by the turn of their key in the lock.

His mother answered. ‘It’s not a question of wanting or not wanting, Salim,’ she said. ‘We must think of our future. Who do you think can pay for that school uniform of yours, or that university you say you want to go to?’

Salim looked from Tareq to Abu Hassan, his heart still racing and his fingers numb.

Tareq said to Abu Hassan, ‘Maybe we should take Salim with us tomorrow?’

‘What’s happening tomorrow?’ Salim asked.

‘We’re going to the municipal offices in Tel Aviv,’ Tareq said, setting his briefcase down on the coffee table. ‘There is some dispute about the house, it seems. We’ve been on the telephone all day, to Abu Mazen and the Israeli authorities.’

He gave Salim a wink and nodded towards the kitchen. ‘Let’s go and help your sister, habibi, and I’ll tell you all about it.’

The kitchen was just big enough, Nadia used to say, for one person not to step on a cat’s tail. Nadia busied herself on the balcony hanging out the washing. Tareq put on a pot of thick, black Turkish coffee, adding four teaspoons of sugar and stirring. Salim waited, impatient. Finally Tareq sighed.

‘Okay, so here it is. When the war ended, the Israelis started planning how to claim all the land left empty by the Arabs. So they passed some laws saying the people who fled – well, they had no right to come back again. The State took their homes and gave them some money, to say it was fairness. Do you understand me?’

Salim nodded, desperate to show he could follow it all.

‘To stop the Jews taking your father’s house under these laws, his friend Abu Mazen moved in and pretended to be his cousin. And now your father is thinking to sell up,’ this, very gently, ‘to get the money he needs for your education and your future. But, it seems there are some problems. So we will meet Abu Mazen tomorrow at the City Hall in Tel Aviv, to speak to him and the Israelis together. Then we’ll see.’

‘OK, habibi?’ His uncle squeezed his shoulder and Salim forced a smile. ‘Things will work out, don’t worry.’ Then suddenly Nadia was between them, complaining to Tareq about another problem with the stove, cutting off Salim’s questions before they’d been formed.

A strange atmosphere filled the flat as evening fell, like a thunderstorm brewing in the far distance. Supper was cleared and the men relaxed in front of the radio listening to General Nasser of Egypt rant about the Suez Canal. Rafan had his ear to the box, bewitched by its tinny sounds, his small fingers tapping and twisting. Nadia stayed in her room, mending clothes.

Salim sat alone with his bubbling thoughts. A great desire to see his mother filled him. Rafan was distracted for once, and she would be alone.

Finally he found her sitting out on the balcony. As he hurried towards her, her head twisted away and he faltered in sudden unease. Is she crying? There were lines on the sharp planes of her cheeks and her eyes were in shadow. A piece of paper lay open in her hand, yellow with black type. Salim thought it was a telegram. When she saw him, her hand closed over it, covering the sender’s name.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ She turned away from him, out towards the north. ‘A letter from an old friend.’

‘From Lebanon?’ he said, half-joking. Away to the north, the hills of the Lebanese border were split into red and black chasms.

She stiffened. ‘Why ask me that, ya’eini?’

‘No reason,’ he said, surprised. ‘You just say sometimes that you miss it. I guess you miss it just as much as Jaffa. Do you?’

Salim saw her glance at his face, a questioning look, hard to read. ‘I do,’ she said at last, her voice slow. ‘I was so young.’ A laugh came from her, scornful. ‘A young fool. My father used to call me the prize of the house. I was so proud, so special, and I thought he meant my life ahead was going to be the prize. But really he meant it was me. That I would be his gift to the highest bidder.’ Her eyes were almost black, looking past him to the empty horizon. ‘And now look what has happened to us.’ She reached out her hand, palm facing forward to the setting sun, a gesture of denial. Then she dropped it to her side. ‘No one understands,’ she said quietly. ‘I hope one day you can understand it, Salim. Why things had to be this way.’

‘What things, Mama?’ A torrent of love streamed through him and he went to hug her. Her arms were about him and all wondering left him. He was perfectly content.

After a time, he asked her, ‘Why did Baba never go back to Jaffa?’

‘He did – once,’ she replied. ‘During the second truce. He went to see Abu Mazen, to give him a copy of the title deeds for the house. He was gone for three days,’ she laughed suddenly, ‘and you boys, you didn’t even notice. Then after that,’ she sighed, gesturing out at the deepening skies, ‘we were all in this Israel and it was very difficult to make sense of it. Things moved on – you were in school, Hassan left us for England… it needed an energetic man to sort it out. And your father is not an energetic man.’

‘But you want to go back, don’t you, Mama? It’s your home too, more than Lebanon.’

She laughed again.

‘Ah, Salim, you know better. It’s not how long you live somewhere that makes it a home. Home is a feeling here,’ she tapped his chest, ‘that you belong somewhere and somewhere belongs to you. But, I’ll tell you a secret, habibi. Some people don’t feel they belong anywhere. No matter where they are, they are always unhappy.’ Her voice shook. ‘They go from place to place trying to find peace. And usually they find themselves back where they started. It’s the greatest curse under heaven.’ She took a breath, wiped her forehead and took Salim’s chin in her hands. ‘I pray you escape it, my clever son.’

‘But we know where our home is,’ he said, disturbed. ‘We were happy there. You were.’

‘Were we?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Even in Jaffa, you and me, we had restless feet.’

She stood up in a sudden, fierce movement, her body turning northwards like a needle towards the deepening shadows.

‘Let your father dream of Palestine,’ she said. ‘He’s the one who really knows where he belongs – with all the other useless ay’an, eating nuts and drinking coffee. Their time has passed for ever now. That’s why he’s selling up. But you, Salim. You’re made for better things. Don’t forget it.’

‘Okay, Mama,’ he said, softly. Then he watched her walk into the dark kitchen, the tall line of her back disappearing, the telegram clutched tightly in one elegant fist. And he suddenly thought of a felucca he’d once seen drifting on the sea, cut loose from its moorings, its white sail tall and straight against the falling sun.

Later, Salim sat in his bedroom trying to concentrate on his maths homework. He was good at sums. They comforted him, hinting at a universe where rules right and wrong were clear and dependable, obedient to fundamental laws.

But today the numbers swam before his eyes. What did it matter if one and one made two? The Israelis didn’t care about any laws but their own. They could claim one and one makes ten as easily as they said what’s yours is mine.

Pushing his books to one side, he reached under his pillow. The hard edges of the picture frame met his fingers, cool and reassuring. For eight years it had lain with him while he slept, blending into his dreams.

Now his fingers traced the pale tree under the glass, a dark sliver against ghostly white walls. It was a lifetime ago that they had left it, so sure that they would return one day in triumph.

When he closed his eyes, he could still feel the terror of that day. Jaffa’s familiar streets had transformed into a locked labyrinth, threatening to trap them forever until they followed the thousands of others into the churning sea. The Al-Ishmaeli car had frantically hurled itself around, turning countless times, until at last they found their way into the quiet hills and Nadia’s waiting arms.

Since then he’d never given up hope. When they heard Mayor Heikal on the radio saying that Jaffa had fallen, he wouldn’t believe it. Heikal’s an idiot, he’d shouted, like Mazen in the Square that day. Even when he heard Jews had rounded up all the Arabs behind barbed wire fences in Al-Ajami, he trusted Abu Mazen to keep their home safe.

As the summer burned and the smell of dried sweat filled every corner, he’d begun to understand that the Najjada and the Arab Liberation Army and the five nations who’d promised to save them were all failing. And when the green-shirted Jewish army finally came marching into Nazareth, Salim had climbed onto the balcony and screamed Come on! Drive us out! Send us back! But Tareq came to tell them that the kindly Jewish commander had refused to expel them – and he’d wept in disappointment.

Now he remembered the worst moment, how Hassan had been parroting something about driving all the Jews into the sea as revenge for Jaffa – for Clock Tower Square and Deir Yassin. Tareq had shaken his head, saying, ‘Talk like this will give us more Deir Yassins. Maybe it’s time for peace, before we lose the little we have left.’ Abu Hassan had slammed his fist on the table, making everyone jump. ‘Abadan!’ he’d shouted. Never!

His voice sent a spear through Salim’s heart; at that very instant he’d been looking at his picture, planning his day of return. Abadan! Never! The word came back to him now, ringing through long years of waiting.

He’d heard it in his dreams, seen it in the new world around him and the Star of David flying in their streets and schools. He would not believe it.

Putting his hand on the fading image he whispered his promise: I will come back. It’s not too late. I’ll come back to you, and we’ll have our harvest.

The great Tel Aviv adventure – as Nadia deemed it – dawned on a bright and scorching Thursday. Salim had the day off school; Tareq loaned him a smart pair of trousers and a clean, white shirt.

In the gloomy basement, Salim, Abu Hassan and Tareq squeezed into the faithful old Austin. The deeds to the Orange House and lands were tucked safely away in Tareq’s briefcase. The two women and Rafan came downstairs to wish them all good luck. For the first time in his life, Salim felt like a man.

He leaned his head out of the back window and smiled at his mother. Her clothes were so plain that day – a long black dress and clumpy black shoes – not her usual style at all. Salim thought it must mean she was going to miss them. She’d be spending the day in the flat on her own; Thursday was Nadia’s turn for coffee and chat at the market.

He wished they were all going together, for a family trip somewhere wild and fun like the old carnivals in the desert of Nabi Ruben. Maybe they would do things like that again, once the business in Tel Aviv was done.

‘Goodbye, Mama!’ he called. ‘We’ll come back with good news, I promise!’

She crouched down beside him. ‘I know you will, ya’eini,’ she said. ‘You’re such a man all of a sudden.’ She touched his cheek for a second. ‘Take care of him, Tareq,’ she said.

‘For sure I will!’ Tareq replied cheerfully, leaning back from the driver’s seat to slap Salim’s shoulder. Rafan pushed past his mother to press his gap-toothed mouth to Salim’s cheek. As they pulled away Salim saw the little boy waving, one half of his face alive with smiles, the other hidden in shadow. And then they all dwindled away, lost in the blackness of the garage.

The drive from Nazareth to Tel Aviv was a journey from the old world into the new. At the edge of the Galilean hill country, ancient Arab towns and villages balanced precariously on the land’s broken bones. Heading south-west and downwards, these dark green, rocky slopes smoothed into the undulating yellows of the Jezreel Valley.

At school they’d learned about the centuries of Turkish rule, when great Palestinian granaries were sown here in the Vale of Esdraelon. But that was before the Sursuk family from Lebanon sold out to the Jewish National Fund. They reached out their arms from Beirut, Nadia told him on one of their sad evenings, and cleared nearly seven hundred fellahin out of their farms. The Jews paid the peasants for their trouble – a pittance of silver for an easy conscience. And that’s why they came, she said, the fellahin – flooding into Haifa, and Jaffa and Nazareth, with nothing but their names and a handful of coins. Their fields were handed over to the Jews, empty but for birds and mice.

As the Jezreel Valley ended Salim began to sense the tang of the sea. The wide coastal plain stretched out before him – a bare and hard world where Arab and Jew had once worked side by side, draining swamps and raising great plantations from Jaffa to Acre. But then the Zionists came, Nadia said. And soon no Arabs were working on the colonies springing up along the plains. Nadia told him that foreign landlords and even the ay’an, men like his father, had sold dunam after dunam to the Jews, transforming tenant farms and pastures into mountains of fodder for the Jewish dream. ‘They let the land slip away from us,’ she said. ‘It slipped away until only stones and bitterness were left.’

On the intersection of the Plain of Sharon and the Philistine Plain stood Tel Aviv. Salim saw it rising out of the haze less than an hour after leaving Nazareth, the sun glinting sharply off its razor-thin edges and smooth, eyeless façades.

It was blisteringly bright and, as they got nearer, snarled in traffic and smoke. As they slowed to a crawl, Salim began to worry that they would not make their appointment at noon. Tareq was tapping anxiously on the steering wheel as the horns blared all around them. ‘Insha’Allah we’ll make it,’ he said.

Salim pressed his nose to the window, his breath coming back to warm his cheeks. The roads were wide and full of expensive-looking cars, surrounded by a world of angles, glass and glare.

By the time Tareq parked the car across the road from the City Hall it was already five minutes to noon. Salim jumped out of the back seat and opened the door for Abu Hassan.

The building was a quaint old hotel, sadly dilapidated next to its newer neighbours. It was thronged with a mass of motorbikes and people pushing past them. Salim and Tareq both had to elbow their way through, pulling Abu Hassan behind them, until they reached the cool of the lobby.

Tareq started looking around for Abu Mazen. ‘We’re on time,’ he said, shaking his watch to his ear. ‘So where is he, by God?’ Then, something made him catch his breath.

Standing at the receptionist’s desk was a tall figure, almost as shabby as the building itself. On seeing the Al-Ishmaelis coming up the steps, he walked towards them, speaking the Arabic greeting: ‘Ahlan wa sahlan, Abu Hassan’ – you’re as welcome as my family. Salim could not believe his eyes. It was Isak Yashuv.

Abu Hassan looked dumbstruck too. He took Isak’s hand in a daze and stuttered the traditional return, ‘Ahlaeen.’

Isak then turned to Salim and said, ‘How’s life, Salim? How’s your mama? Elia wanted me to say hello to you. He misses you.’ Salim nodded and tried to smile. It was wonderful and painful to see him again. But what in the world could bring him here?

‘Forgive me for coming here without an invitation,’ Isak said, spreading his hands to Abu Hassan and Tareq. ‘I am working now, as a… liaison, you might say, between this municipality and the Arabs in Jaffa. I guess because I speak Arabic and, frankly,’ he ducked his head, looking embarrassed, ‘I’m not much use for anything else these days, with my eyes too bad for sewing. Anyway, I saw your name on the appointment list and I wanted to ask if I could help you at all. I know the man you’re seeing – he’s not a bad one, but young.’

He looked from Abu Hassan to Tareq, his dark eyes narrow as ever but more clouded now. With his dusty and deeply lined face, Isak looked more like a fellah than anyone else Salim knew.

Abu Hassan shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome to help if you can, Abu Elia,’ he said. ‘My son-in-law here,’ he motioned to Tareq, ‘is a lawyer, and he tells me he understands your laws.’ His emphasis was clearly deliberate but Isak didn’t blink.

‘Help would be wonderful.’ Tareq’s reply was instant and firm. ‘Thank you for your kindness.’

‘All right then,’ said Isak. ‘Well, let’s go up. I’ll show you the way.’

The sign on the door of their appointment read: Office of the Custodian, Tel Aviv Municipality. A young, pale man sat at a cluttered desk inside, wire-rimmed glasses over his blue eyes and sweat beaded on his receding hairline.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said, in Hebrew. ‘You’re on time, that’s a good start.’ Hebrew was now compulsory in school; Salim was now reasonably fluent but he had yet to hear Abu Hassan utter a single word. It put them at a disadvantage now. Doing business in Hebrew was like trying to do arithmetic while balancing on a log.

Isak gestured for Abu Hassan to take the seat in front of the desk, while Tareq and Salim stood behind. ‘Saeed Al-Ishmaeli, this is Mr Gideon Livnor,’ he said.

Mr Livnor reached out his hand to Abu Hassan; it was a second before the old man took it, and then dropped it quickly.

‘Thank you,’ said Livnor, briskly. ‘You’re welcome, Mr Al-Ishmaeli. I hope we can sort this issue out for you today. I have some records here,’ he indicated a folder in front of him, ‘and I believe you have some with you? The deeds to the properties?’

Tareq translated quickly for Abu Hassan, who replied, ‘Yes, yes,’ and held out the papers from Tareq’s briefcase. Livnor took them, and looked them over, occasionally rubbing the steam off his glasses. Opening the file in front of him, Salim saw he was comparing another set of papers inside. It confused him for a moment before he realized – these must be the papers Abu Mazen protected for them all these years.

At last Livnor sighed and took his glasses off again. Salim began to wish he would leave them alone. Grimy and misted, they seemed to bode ill.

‘I want to be sure I understand things properly here,’ he said. ‘Mr Al-Ishmaeli, you claim to own two pieces of land in Jaffa – a house in Al-Ajami district and fifteen dunams of citrus farm outside of Jaffa. Correct? And now you want to sell these lands to the State?’ Abu Hassan simply stared, but Tareq answered in Hebrew: ‘That’s right.’ Livnor looked from one to the other before turning back to his papers.

‘Well, there are two problems, Mr Al-Ishmaeli. First, our records show that you left your property here in Jaffa in May of ’forty-eight. This house and your other dunams have been vacant since then. Which classifies you under our national legislation as a “present absentee”.’ The words nifkadim nohahim sounded almost funny in Hebrew, like a child’s skipping rhyme.

‘I never left,’ interrupted Abu Hassan. ‘My family has been there the whole time.’

‘You may not have left the country, but you left your farmlands,’ Livnor said. ‘As a present absentee, your land defaults to the Custodianship Council. Our records show that your orange groves outside Jaffa have already been appropriated, Mr Al-Ishmaeli.’ His voice was flat, mechanical, and Salim found himself wondering how many people he’d delivered this bitter news to, and whether he wept for them later in his bed at night.

‘It is morally, legally and in all ways wrong, this thing you are doing,’ said Tareq, his voice thick and furious.

‘It’s the law. Many people left their homes. Hundreds of villages and farms were standing empty. They could have been fallow for generations. Now they are being put to good use, for all Israeli citizens.’

‘Did you take the homes that the Jews left?’ Salim asked, his voice shaking in his throat. Tareq shot him a warning look, but Livnor ignored him completely.

‘The State will give you the compensation to which the law entitles you,’ he said, eyes fixed on Abu Hassan. ‘Our taxation records,’ he brandished another paper from the file, ‘show that your orange groves were valued at four hundred and fifty Israeli pounds in ’forty-eight. Unfortunately,’ and here he glanced up at Tareq, ‘our records also show a large tax debt to Mandate authorities, which remains valid. Taking this debt into account,’ he scribbled on the ledger in front of him, ‘you can claim three hundred Israeli pounds in compensation for these abandoned lands.’

He tore the paper from the ledger and passed it to Abu Hassan. Salim was reeling from shock. From wealth and independence to three hundred pounds! He clutched the back of his father’s chair.

‘This is a joke,’ Tareq protested. ‘Even if these were your lands, which they are not by the way, the market value would be considerably higher today than four hundred and fifty pounds. I don’t know where you get these numbers from.’

Livnor made a small gesture with his shoulders and hands, between a shrug and a dismissal. ‘I’m sorry. This is the law. If you want to appeal the amount it’s up to you. Or you could take the money and save your family more difficulties.’

Abu Hassan was holding the paper without comment and looking at it through unfocused eyes. He was silent so long that eventually Tareq said gently, ‘Baba?’

The word seemed to jerk him out of a stupor. Abu Hassan’s head snapped up and he said, ‘What about the house?’

Livnor looked back at his papers, this time more thoughtfully, and drew two identical-looking deeds out of the file.

‘I’m seeing this deed today for the first time, Mr Al-Ishmaeli,’ he said, waving the yellowing document that Abu Hassan had just given him. ‘It says that you are the freeholder of the house in Al-Ajami district.

‘But I have another document here, lodged with us many years ago, before my time,’ he pointed to his file. ‘It tells me that you were just a tenant in the house. The legal freeholder, according to this paper, was Hamza Abu Mazen Al-Khalili.’

This time Abu Hassan sat up straight. Salim gasped.

Livnor took his glasses off again, leaned forward on the table and tried to catch Abu Hassan’s eye. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, with a trace of sympathy. ‘This house is no longer yours.’

Isak reached over and took the paper out of Livnor’s hand.

‘Mr Livnor, I don’t know about these papers,’ he said, ‘but I can promise you that Abu Hassan here was the rightful owner of the property. I have known his family for many years.’ His voice was wheezy and cracked in distress. ‘I can personally vouch for him.’

Abu Hassan put his hand out across the desk in what looked strangely like supplication. ‘I gave copies of my deeds to Abu Mazen, before the war ended,’ he said. ‘There has been some mistake. The house is mine. My family built it. There has been some mistake,’ he said again, putting his palm on his forehead and rocking his head back and forth under the glare of the strip light.

‘This document is damaged,’ said Tareq. ‘It’s been forged or altered. Your people must have seen that. You can’t make out the proper names clearly. And everyone would have known the house belonged to Abu Hassan.’

Livnor shook his head. ‘As I said, it was before my time.’ His hands tapped the desk. ‘There was a lot of confusion after the war. Arabs were still making trouble in Jaffa. Perhaps the checks were not as vigorous as they should have been.’

Salim felt his breath coming in shallow pants. He willed his father to speak. But Abu Hassan’s arms were slumped in defeat. His eyes seemed fixed on Livnor’s paper, the only sign of emotion a sudden heave of his chest.

Livnor sat back in his chair and wiped the sweat off his forehead, like a doctor delivering terminal news. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘There’s nothing to be done.’

‘So what does this mean?’ Salim said, light-headed and dry-mouthed. ‘What does it mean for us now?’

‘It means,’ said Livnor, ‘that the house has already been sold to the State. By Mr Al-Khalili. The money has been handed over.’ He took off his glasses and spoke directly to Abu Hassan. ‘You must take it up with him yourself, sir. Because this is now out of our hands.’

Salim could not remember getting back down the stairs. The lobby was now grey and oppressive, the air outside fierce and hostile. There was still no sign of Abu Mazen. Abu Hassan walked off to the nearest payphone, leaving the others standing wordless in the shadow of the City Hall.

Tareq stood straight with his hand on Salim’s shoulder. Isak spoke hesitantly, his eyes on the ground.

‘I’m no lawyer,’ he said, ‘but surely there must have been collusion somewhere. That document Livnor had was not right. The government probably just wanted to take the house and be done with it.’

Abu Hassan came back ten minutes later, and told them they would meet Abu Mazen at a coffee shop by the beach boardwalk. Salim did not ask why they were not meeting in Jaffa. Suddenly, he did not want to go near the place. Jaffa had betrayed him.

The Tel Aviv beach boardwalk was the light of western modernity turned up to full flood. Men and women laughed arm in arm and raced along the beach together, playing with balls or sunning themselves in a great tangle of limbs. Sheltered from the glare by the shop awnings, Salim felt a confused mix of emotions as he watched them – creatures from another world, the noon light glistening on their skin.

In the distance, Jaffa rose up from the coast in a jagged row of yellow teeth. He searched inside for a hint of desire, and found nothing. That is not Jaffa. That was somewhere else, a defeated, dirty place where all the gardens were dead and the orange trees cut down.

The worst had already happened to him, and yet he was beginning to feel lighter, like a bird on the wing. He could almost see his possible futures separating, like two bubbles waiting to be freed. There was this broken cart of Palestine, and a life hitched to it with men like his father. And then there were other dreams, worlds not yet in focus.

‘Looks like fun, eh?’ Isak’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘I take Lili to the beach on Sundays sometimes. She likes to get a tan.’ He shook his head and smiled. ‘Tel Aviv is always moving and changing, while old Jaffa has changed so little. Lili says time stands still for us Arabs, no matter what our religion.’

Before Salim could reply, he heard a boy’s voice shouting in Arabic. ‘Salim!’ Turning, he saw a young man coming towards him – paler than Isak with an earnest expression and Lili Yashuv’s long nose.

A smile surged onto Salim’s face in spite of himself and he shook the hand that Elia offered.

‘Dad told me you were coming, I could hardly believe it,’ said Elia, breathless. ‘I got out from school and ran all the way. How are you? What’s up? Are you coming back to Jaffa?’

The question pierced Salim, bringing him back to the moment; he dropped Elia’s hand, suddenly noticing the pinkness of his skin, like the cold Eastern Jews. ‘Maybe,’ he said, turning away. He sensed Elia standing behind him, felt his hurt even as he tried to wound. He remembered their last day together at the souk. Elia was right after all. Things can never be as they were.

Elia was clearing his throat to say something, but then Abu Hassan looked up sharply and said in Arabic, ‘Enough, you boys.’ Abu Mazen was walking towards their table. Behind him came Mazen. The plump child had disappeared completely behind walls of rolling muscle and a tight, modern suit. Only the tight fleece of black hair was the same, curling down his neck.

As they drew near, Mazen lifted his head; when he saw Salim he recoiled with something that looked like guilt.

‘Ya Salim,’ he said – an indeterminate greeting that merely acknowledged his presence. ‘Still hanging out with the Yehuda, I see.’ His voice touched memories that made Salim shiver. But he saw the older boy was quick to look away.

Abu Mazen had taken a seat at the table and ordered a coffee. Salim waited impatiently for someone to begin the discussion, to accuse Abu Mazen of his crime, but this was not the Arab way. First coffee needed to be drunk and pleasantries exchanged. Only then could something real be said.

Finally, Abu Mazen stretched his arms over his head and said, ‘So, tell me how it went today at the City Hall.’

‘You were supposed to meet us there, I thought?’ Tareq said, his voice cold.

‘But it looks like you had good help already.’ Abu Mazen favoured Isak with a smooth smile. ‘I would have been one big body too many.’

Salim’s father was toying with his coffee cup, swirling the thick, sweet liquid round and round. Without lifting his eyes from the table, his voice came in a hoarse whisper. ‘Why did you sell my house, Hamza? What right did you have?’

Abu Mazen’s face turned a shade darker, and he leaned forward in his chair. ‘Do I understand you, Saeed?’ He stressed Abu Hassan’s forename, a gesture of disrespect. ‘Are you feeling someone has wronged you?’

‘You wronged me,’ said Abu Hassan. ‘You made a forgery with the Jews. You pretended the house was yours. You sold it to them.’ His voice shook, but he still could not look Abu Mazen in the face. He’s afraid of him, Salim realized. All Abu Hassan’s bluster was reserved for his family.

Abu Mazen gave a short, barking laugh. ‘Wronged you?’ he snorted. ‘You should be thanking me on your knees, Abu Hassan. The Jews would have taken that house from under your feet and given you nothing. You can hardly even read a piece of paper – did you ever tell your boy here that? How could you have fought them? So I saved you, out of my goodness. I took all the trouble on myself. I sold it to them for what they would give – a good price, actually.’

Salim felt a surge of fury. ‘This was our family’s decision to make, not yours,’ he shouted.

Abu Mazen turned to smile at him. ‘Ah, the clever Salim! Maybe there are some things you should know about your family. They never did a business deal in their lives. Everything your father had, he inherited. You think you’re a man, now? All I see here is a big mouth and a small purse.’ Salim sprang to his feet, stopped by Tareq’s firm hand.

‘But don’t worry, Abu Hassan,’ he went on. ‘I’ve got the money here for you. It’s not so much, but it was the best we could get. I would take it now, if I were you. Take it back to your beautiful wife and buy her something to cheer her up.’

He slid a packet of notes over the table. To Salim it looked soiled and flimsy, like their dreams of a homecoming. He held his breath.

Abu Hassan was still for a moment. His hand jerked towards the envelope, as if it were hot to the touch. And then he grasped it, his head bowed low. Salim’s heart wrenched. He could not bear to see him exposed so brutally, like a beggar without his clothes.

‘Yallah,’ said Abu Mazen, standing up. ‘I’ll see you, then. Next time you come, come for coffee in Jaffa. My very best regards to Umm Hassan. A beautiful wife is the only luck a man needs, eh?’ And with that, he turned and strolled away.

‘Yallah, Mazen,’ he called back over his shoulder, and Salim saw his old friend flinch at the command.

Mazen paused for an instant, turning around towards the huddled Al-Ishmaelis. Salim saw his hand move outwards towards him, the fleshy palm open. And the thought came that the boy he’d known was still there, trying to reach beyond all this with an apology.

But the hand kept rising, and as Mazen touched his finger to his forehead Salim recognized the salute at once. It was the obeisance that a worker gives his master, the grateful thanks when the wages were handed over. And as Mazen’s smile broke out, more confident now, Salim knew that the boyhood jokes had finally become real. He was the fellah with his hand out, and his masters had just given him his last payment.

The envelope and its pitiful contents nestled in Tareq’s briefcase on the long, slow journey home, along with the now useless title deeds. Tareq talked during their weary drive, working hard against the persistent silence in the car. He came up with solutions and strategies, court battles and cases they could put.

Abu Hassan grunted and nodded his assent. But Salim knew it was just for show. His father had acquiesced to fate. The world would have to go on, and Salim would have to find a new place in it.

As they pulled up into the little, dark garage Salim was overwhelmed with a desire to see his mother, to feel her soothing hand on his forehead. He raced up the dim flights of stairs, through the sweaty heaps of dust, and burst into the flat calling, ‘Mama! We’re home!’

Nadia came rushing out of the kitchen, a wet cloth in her hands. She was holding it in a strange way. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Where’s Mama?’ She did not reply. A disconnected part of his brain realized that she held a wet tissue, and not a dishcloth at all. Her body and face seemed wrong too. Her eyes were red and her face bloated. She reached out her hands to him but he backed away, suddenly terrified.

Turning around, he ran into his mother’s bedroom shouting, ‘Mama! Mama!’ The room was dark, with the curtains closed. But even in the dim light Salim could see the gaping holes of open, empty cupboards where once clothes had hung.

He pushed past Nadia’s reaching hand, tearing into the bedroom he shared with Rafan. The small box of Rafan’s clothes was gone. The blanket they’d shared for all these years was missing too, along with the old duffel bag that Salim had brought from Jaffa.

His legs gave way and he fell onto Rafan’s stinking mattress, nausea filling his throat. Now I understand you, Mama. She had known how it would go. She had known they would fail. After years of pretending to belong to them, she had left at last.

‌

‌1959

Returning from Shul one afternoon, Dora called her husband and daughters together to make a grand announcement.

‘Judit’s going to have a Batmitzvah!’ she said triumphantly, one manicured hand reaching down to pinch Judith’s chin. ‘I talked to the Rebbe and he agrees completely. Hymie and Martha’s girl had one last week, and there are at least three more planned this year.’

Gertie clapped her hands, and Jack said, ‘Okay, well, if you think so, why not? She has a year to get ready, after all.’

Judith stood stock still in horror. Her eleventh birthday had come and gone almost unnoticed, to her great relief. The thought of reading the Torah in front of dozens – maybe hundreds – of Doras and their yarmulked husbands sent a chill of fear down her spine.

‘But Mummy, everyone will be looking at me,’ she said. ‘I can’t read in front of all those people.’

‘Of course everyone will look at you,’ was Dora’s breezy reply. ‘And why shouldn’t they look, a smart young lady like you? Think of your Bubby, how proud she’ll be! And your sister too, who never got to do such a thing.’

She swept away into the kitchen. ‘We can make all the arrangements later, Jack,’ she called cheerfully. ‘It won’t be a big thing, nothing like the shindig that brother of yours put on for Tony. Just family and a few friends, you know.’

Judith looked helplessly at her father and Gertie, who gave her a kind smile and a ‘what can you do?’ shrug.

‘Do I have to?’ she whispered.

‘Oh Judit, love, it’s a wonderful thing.’ Her sister was beaming through the dark-rimmed glasses pressed around her round face like a cage. She straightened them with one hand and touched Judith’s cheek with the other, fingers soft as warm bread. Outside of Dora’s hearing range, Jack leaned over to whisper, ‘These Batmitzvahs – I don’t know why girls should bother, to be honest. But it’s an innovation, and your mother’s a real innovator, God bless her.’

Rebecca also thought it was a fine idea.

‘In my day, people would have laughed at a coming-of-age for girls,’ she said, rubbing the back of Judith’s neck. ‘All we knew is that when you got your bleeding, you were old enough to marry.’ Judith blushed – Dora had sat her down for the excruciating ‘talk’ just a week or so before. ‘Barmitzvahs were only for the boys. I never had this privilege, nor did Gertie, nor did your mama. So times have changed for the better, mommellah.’

‘I don’t see why it’s better,’ pleaded Judith. ‘What if I can’t learn all the verses, and I get it wrong?’

Rebecca smiled. Her faded red hair peeped out of her blue scarf and her deep green eyes were full of life.

‘Don’t worry, my little love,’ she said. ‘Every child is frightened of growing up somehow. Even the goyim children are afraid. But you are luckier than them, because now you know exactly on which day you can stop being afraid – the day you put down the Torah scrolls and the Rebbe blesses you as an adult.’ She leaned forward and took Judith’s face in her hand, as frail as a butterfly, and squeezed gently.

‘This is a special honour, my Judit. It means you take your place as a woman among your people. So chin up, little one, and be brave. Be a mensch!’

Kath was all disbelief at Wearside. ‘It sounds mad, Judy-Rudy!’ she said as they lined up for Mr Hick’s whistle, against the echoing clamour and splash of the pool. ‘I’d be wetting me pants. But why didn’t you tell your mam about the bloomin’ Tryouts? You’re the best in the Club, you’ll make the Juniors for sure.’

Being chosen for Sunderland’s North-East Junior Swim Team seemed a far higher honour to Judith than being chosen by God. Wearside’s Tryouts were coming up fast and Judith was practising to exhaustion, coming home late with wet hair and sore eyes to avoid Gertie’s questions; she was burning through the Club’s target times. The Junior Team was her secret hope, a desire so fierce it frightened her. After her last race Mr Hicks had nodded as she emerged gasping from the water, saying, ‘You’ll do.’

She squeezed Kath’s arm, sad to think that after this summer they would never sit in the same classroom again. The Eleven-Plus was looming; Jack and Dora had their hearts set on Bede’s Grammar School. Kathleen’s mother had never even heard of it, and Kath was as likely to qualify as to fly to the moon. But they’d promised to stay friends. Blood pact, Kath said, as they’d cut the tips of their forefingers with Molly’s razor and pressed the red beads together.

‘Stop gassing, you two,’ Mr Hicks yelled. ‘First time trial for Group One. On my mark. Remember, I want flying fish, not beached bloody whales.’

Judith stepped forward, her toes curling over the slick tiles of the pool edge, feeling the pull of the water below. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kath blush and wave at someone. She just had time to see a tall red swimming cap and ice blue eyes a head above her, before the whistle sent her into the water.

Instantly the world faded into the silence of blue bubbles, the blissful cool flying past against her skin, the extraordinary rush linking her disconnected limbs, heart and legs and breath pounding out the same rhythm. Go on! someone was shouting, and between the beats of breath she felt the words rather than heard them. Go on, Judith! Fight for it! The wall loomed ahead and she reached with all her heart; her fingers touched the edge and she burst to the surface – but as she gulped in her first full breath she saw blue eyes smiling down at her, and realized the tall girl was already taking off her red cap. As Judith floated there, flushed and swallowing down air, the girl leaned over to whisper, ‘Sorry, dolly,’ before pulling her long body out of the pool and setting off towards the changing rooms.

‘Never mind,’ said Kath as they dried themselves later. ‘You’ll still be in the first Tryout group. They’re taking two from the first.’ Judith looked down. She had expected to win the first group; she’d been depending on it.

Kath nudged her arm. ‘Look, Judy – she’s coming. She’s so cool, I promise.’

Without the cap, Judith recognized her instantly: Margaret Smailes – or Peggy S as she called herself, like the Buddy song. An outbreak of tonsillitis at school had made Peggy Kath’s new deskmate two weeks ago, and Kath was already smitten.

Peggy was a head taller than the rest of the class, with straight, strong legs under a shorter than regulation skirt. At school she was always trailed like a comet by giggling girls. Now her white ponytail hung long and wet down her back and her fingers glowed with varnish. Judith could see gold draped in a chain around her neck.

Peggy pointed a white finger at her. ‘So Kitty K, this is your other friend, right?’

Kathleen grinned and said, ‘Right, this is Judy.’

Judith shifted awkwardly, hotly aware of her bunches and brown socks.

‘Who’s Kitty K?’ she asked.

Peggy laughed. ‘Can’t you guess? It’s Kitty Kallen, from the movies.’ Peggy reached out to Kathleen’s wild hair. ‘She’s sooo gorgeous with all those lovely brown curls. My mother says that she can’t be a great actress because she’s just a cheap American. But I think who cares if you’re that glamorous, right?’ Her white shirt was open revealing damp patches on a budding cleavage and a heart-shaped pendant sticking to her skin. Judith thought she saw the lace of a bra, and found she was nodding her head along with Kathleen.

‘So you’re Judy, right?’ Peggy peppered her sentences with ‘rights’ like bullets; it was impossible to do anything other than agree with her. ‘Judy’s not your real name, though, right? I saw it on the register. You’re Judith, aren’t you? You’re one of the Jewish girls. It’s okay, you can tell me.’ Her voice was warm and friendly but Judith felt a cold wind. No one had ever called her a Jewish girl before, except for Dora. She glanced at Kathleen, who smiled and said, ‘She is, but she’s super cool. My best friend, aren’t you, Judy?’

‘All right then. Well, I think we can do better than Judith, for such a cutie, right, Kitty K? I don’t think you look like a Judy. What about Jude? You could be a Jude, right?’

‘That’s a boy’s name,’ said Judith automatically.

‘What, that’s so hip. Don’t you want to be hip, Jude? You’re already such a dolly with those blonde little bunches.’ Peggy was looking at her, head on one side with a perfect, white smile. Suddenly Judith’s spirits lifted, her nerves ebbing away like a kite taking to the air.

‘Okay, I like it,’ she said.

‘Great!’ Peggy gyrated her hips like she was doing the twist on Crackerjack, her head up to the sky and eyes closed. ‘Kitty K and Jude, super swimming pals!’ And she squeezed Judith’s arm affectionately, as Judith blushed and giggled back.

For the next few weeks, Judith felt like she’d fallen in love. Peggy was the single most fascinating person Judith had ever met. At twelve she was already the kind of person Judith dreamed of becoming when she grew up. She knew how to wear their school uniform to make boys turn their heads when she walked by – how to be sweet and mean in just the right balance. She knew other things too, things they hadn’t yet imagined. She knew ‘all about’ men; she had a boyfriend, a secret she whispered to them, who was sophisticated and gave her beautiful presents like the diamond pendant lying over a red mark on her throat. A hickie, she said. Her only flaw was on her nails – red, bitten cuticles that she covered with varnish.

Under the bright glare of Peggy’s self-assurance, the shadow of Judith’s own anxiety began to retreat. Peggy taught her not to care about anything, not even the Eleven-Plus. She was going to private school next year regardless of her results – and promised to write a letter every week for them to read. ‘I told Daddy that I wanted to go to one for debutantes in London, but he said he just can’t bear to be so far away from me,’ she sighed, fingering her necklace. When Judith suggested they might go to visit her, Peggy doubled over with laughter, her skirt riding up her legs.

‘Oh, Jude, what a card! You’re going to come to my school! I’ll leave a note on the door to make sure they let you in, right? Ha ha ha.’ And she howled again, Judith joining in with the rest even through a little pain inside. Peggy was funny like that; when Judith had slipped at the poolside yesterday and fallen splayed into the water Peggy had started calling her Jude the Jellyfish.

She talked to cousin Tony about it when he came up for Passover dinner. ‘She’s my best friend,’ Judith told him. ‘She’s pretty and lots of fun.’

‘Is this the one your mother calls a shiksa goddess-in-waiting?’

‘They only saw her once at parents’ evening, so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’

‘And have you met her family?’

‘No,’ Judith hesitated. ‘They’re rich, I think, like you.’

Tony laughed. ‘Listen, being rich doesn’t make you one of the fellas, particularly if you’re a jay ee double-you. They don’t let our sort into country clubs, you know. I got my share of grief at school too.’

You don’t understand, Jude thought. None of them did. To them she was just a little Jewish dumpling, shaped by Mama and Papa to be swallowed up one day by Jewish mouths. But to Peggy she was someone else. Someone in her own right.

The week before the Junior Tryouts, Judith finally got Dora’s grudging go-ahead to miss half an hour of Hebrew class. Peggy was excited, Kath oddly morose. Peggy had taken to hugging Judith and saying, ‘I’m SO thrilled we’ll be swim teammates next year, little Jude.’ She knew they were the first and second place in the class, that Kath must be jealous, but still she couldn’t help her own triumph shining through. She was on the cusp of something sweetly, truly hers – an evolution of her half-formed self into a fullness she couldn’t explain but longed for with all her heart.

The Tryouts were on Monday. Judith was prepared for her world to change forever. Even the threat of the Batmitzvah faded in the brightness of her excitement.

On Friday Peggy S gathered them all by the school fence at lunchtime and told them she would be hosting a pre-Tryout party for her special friends.

‘I’m going to miss you all soooo much next year!’ she said, putting her chin into her hand like a movie star, her mouth pink and open. ‘Daddy’s printing special invitations for all of you. There’s only one rule – everyone has to come as someone glamorous. Kitty K, that should be no problem for you, right?’ Kathleen grinned and squirmed as Peggy reached out and stroked her wild black hair. Her other hand took hold of Judith’s, her palm as smooth as a china plate.

‘And what about my little Jude? Can you come as someone glamorous too?’

‘Who should I come as?’ asked Judith anxiously. She was the only one without a Peggy name from the world of music or film.

‘Goodness, Jude, it’s not for me to say. Just make it up! Right? Be your own person!’ She squeezed Judith’s hand and turned to her other acolytes, leaving Judith to worry about who her own person could be.

Peggy’s father drove to the school in a silver Jaguar to drop off invitations for all the girls, and Peggy distributed them on Friday at school. Judith’s had Jude written on the front of the card, with a dark swirl of balloons and hearts underneath.

Inside it read: Sunday 12 noon. Judith’s Hebrew class was at noon too, she remembered. She was struggling with the readings and the Rebbe had said she needed extra help. Could Dora be persuaded to let her skip it just this once?

At the end of class, Peggy was packing up her desk with Kathleen’s help. She flashed Judith a bright smile as she approached, hesitant. ‘What’s up, little Jude?’

‘Peggy, can I come late to the party?’

‘Why on earth would you do that?’

‘It’s at the same time as my Hebrew class. My mother already said yes to the Tryouts, she’ll never agree to this too.’ Judith heard a couple of giggles behind her. Peggy looked aslant at Kathleen and Judith thought she saw Kath give a small, secretive smile back.

Peggy was looking at her now with the half-smile still on her face.

‘Hebrew class! Wow. Exciting. We wouldn’t want you to miss that, right? If you’d rather go to that, I don’t mind at all.’

‘No, no,’ said Judith. ‘I want to come to yours, but…’ she tailed off as Peggy slung her bag onto her shoulder and started walking out of the door. The tall, sharp line of her back was like an exclamation mark. In the doorway, she paused, the ponytail bobbing by itself for a second, before she turned to look over her shoulder.

‘If you want to come, then come, Jude,’ she said. ‘Be your own person. I so hope you do.’

Judith watched Peggy leave the room. Kath was still pushing books into her bag. Judith tried to catch her eye, but Kath’s blue ones seemed determinedly downcast. ‘They’re a posh crowd, Judith,’ she said all of a sudden, squaring her shoulders as she yanked up her bag. ‘Maybe it’s for the best if you’ve got other things on.’

At Sabbath dinner Judith broached the subject of missing Hebrew school for Peggy’s party.

‘Absolutely not,’ Dora said. ‘Twice in one week, forget it. Don’t you know your Batmitzvah is coming up? Rebbe Geshen says you’re already behind with your reading. First this swimming and now partying – what’s got into you?’

‘I’ll do even more next week, I promise,’ Judith begged. ‘Please, Dad?’ But Jack just shook his head and said, ‘Listen to your mother, pet.’

‘God help us, what are you thinking, Judit?’ Dora said. ‘Are you in love with this shiksa goddess? Are you converting? There’ll be plenty of parties, young lady, but only one Batmitzvah. So let’s hear no more about it.’

But the argument went on and on, into Saturday until Dora stamped off in frustration to Shul and Judith retreated to her bedroom. On Sunday morning, she toyed with the idea of just slipping out. But in an unusual streak of foresight, Dora had called Gertie to come and hang around outside Judith’s bedroom.

Gertie was terrible at hovering; her large breasts and round hips made her awkward on the cramped landing. Judith sat in her room hating even the thought of Gertie, her disapproving glasses and her sanctimonious brown stockings.

Eventually, Gertie opened Judith’s door herself and said, blinking rapidly, ‘Judit, it’s nearly time for school. Shall we go together?’ Judith glared at her, but did not have the courage to refuse. Despising herself, she stood up and hoisted her schoolbag onto her shoulder. In just a few minutes, Kathleen would be knocking on Peggy’s door dressed in her best clothes, and Judith would be sitting with a sweating Rebbe, trying to make sense of ancient scrolls.

Suddenly, she heard an odd sound from Gertie, like a puzzled cry. Her sister was looking at something on Judith’s bed, and quicker than Judith had ever seen her move she crossed the room to snatch it up. It was Peggy’s invitation, in all its embossed glory.

‘Give that back,’ Judith said fiercely, but Gertie ignored her. She turned around to face Judith, her chest rising heavily, the invitation held out like a pistol in her hand.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, in a whisper. ‘Who wrote this to you? Judit, why didn’t you tell us about this?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Judith said warily. ‘It’s the invitation to my friend’s party. What’s the big deal?’

‘But what’s this?’ Gertie said again, whiter still, one finger pointing to the name on the front.

‘That’s my name. Jude. That’s what they call me at school.’ She saw Gertie step backwards, her brow furrowing in horrified disbelief.

‘You want them to call you that? Don’t you know what that name means?’ She had started sweating, pale beads on her broad forehead shining under the bedroom light. ‘That’s the word they called us. Jude. Juden. That’s what they called us in the ghettos and the Camps.’

She walked towards Judith, who backed away. ‘How can you let someone call you that?’ She shook the invitation in Judith’s startled face. ‘How could you?’ she said again.

Judith had a flicker of shame; but it was snuffed out the next moment by a quick, cruel pinch of self-pity. Godly Gertie, she thought, resentful. Always some way to make me wrong.

‘I didn’t let them call me it,’ she said, with affected nonchalance. ‘I called myself that name. I like it. It’s cool.’

Before the words were even out of her mouth, Gertie reached out and slapped her – a blow that burned like hot bread from the oven. Judith cried out in shock and Gertie covered her mouth with her fist, tears running between her fingers. From behind her hand, she whispered, ‘How can you say such a thing, Judit? You don’t understand anything, nothing at all about who we are and what happened to us.’

Judith’s face itched and stung. She couldn’t believe Gertie had hit her. Her sister’s fingers, round and unpainted, looked so gauche holding the delicate white card. For an instant it faded and transformed into another picture – Gertrude, Esther und Daniel Kraus, Wien 1939 – and hot anger at Gertie, at the endless guilt, rose scalding into her throat.

‘No, you don’t understand anything,’ she screamed, feeling her cheeks turn red. ‘I’m sick of you people always telling me what to do and how to be. I hate being Jewish. You just leave me alone.’

As she spoke she felt her legs propel her past Gertie, who called out her name, carrying her pounding heart down the stairs, racing across the hall and through the front door, slamming it hard behind her. The rush of the cold sea wind tasted of exhilaration and pain, like the first surge of oxygen into burning lungs at the end of the race.

She caught the bus to Peggy’s house. As it rattled from Ryhope Road to the smarter part of town, Judith clutched her bag to her chest. She felt dizzy with anticipation, watching the solemn rows of semi-detached houses reel by her as the road swept away from the dockyards. They’ll be so happy to see me. They’ll laugh when they know how much trouble I’m in.

The bus stopped at the edge of the town, where the houses had back gardens as well as front ones, and the sky was a smokeless blue. Judith climbed off and watched it roar away, standing on a silent pavement.

Walking up the street to the Smailes’ detached house, Judith felt as tall and straight as Peggy herself. She pulled down her skirt and pushed back her hair. A brief worry passed through her mind like a shadow: she hadn’t obeyed the party rules – she wasn’t in the least glamorous. But after pinching her cheeks and biting her lips she hoped she might pass if she made a good story of it.

She opened the front gate cautiously and saw a flicker of movement in one large, curtained window. There were roses in the garden, pink as schoolgirls hanging their heavy heads. Smiling, she jumped up the steps and reached out to knock on the door.

Then something stopped her. Stepping back, she saw it: at the entrance to the porch someone had stuck a large, yellow sign on the wall.

Written there, in capital letters, were the words NO JEWDES ALLOWED.

At first Judith’s eyes could not take it in. The words swam in front of her; her legs wobbled until she had to hold onto the porch pillars to stay upright. Her chest tightened and her throat felt full of stones.

She heard a click and looked up. The front door had opened, and standing in the bright hallway behind it was Kathleen. At her back stood Peggy. The blonde girl was grinning, a fox in bright red lipstick, one hand on Kathleen’s shoulder. Kathleen stared at the ground, red under her freckles.

Judith stood up straight, wondering if she was expected to smile or to cry. If she reacted the right way, would it all be all right? Was it a test? It’s all a joke, she thought desperately, and they’re going to ask me in. But she saw with brutal clarity the hand on Kathleen’s shoulder, its pale pink varnish shining lightly in the gloom of the porch.

The hand tightened, and Kathleen’s head jerked upwards to look at her. There was such genuine misery in her face that tears came to Judith’s eyes, and with them a sick certainty of abandonment. Still, she thought, she wouldn’t go inside. She won’t go.

For a second no one moved. Judith took a deep, hopeful breath. Then Kathleen closed the door, the slow groan of polished oak shutting her outside.

By the time Judith got back to Ryhope Road, the world was a very different place. The first thing she heard when she opened the front door was the sound of weeping. It seemed to come straight from her own heart and she imagined it must be herself crying. Next she thought of Gertie. Then, quick as a snake, the realization struck her. It was Rebecca. She knows, Judith thought. She’s crying because of me.

Suddenly, Gertie appeared in the living room doorway. Her face was blotched and red, and she reached out to clutch Judith’s hand.

‘Oh Judit, thank goodness. There’s been bad news. Your Uncle Max – well, Father will tell you.’

Judith was trembling as she walked into the sitting room. Rebecca was on the green sofa, rocking and wailing against Jack’s awkward shoulder. Dora was on the other side, her hand tight on Rebecca’s arm.

Rebecca’s eyes opened as Judith approached; she reached out to pull her granddaughter towards her. Judith instinctively resisted, shame lying like a stench on her skin.

‘What’s happened?’ she said, her throat thick and sore.

Dora answered from Rebecca’s side, her voice low as if confiding a secret.

‘Your Uncle Max is hurt, Judit. He was on a bus, and it was attacked. They shot him.’ Judith took a moment to comprehend this, to remind herself of other lives she was still connected to. While she was mocking Gertie and running away from home, people who hated Jews were trying to hurt her family.

Dora looked at Jack, who clutched his mother tighter than ever and said, ‘He’ll be okay, Mama. Max is a fighter. He has the best care.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Oh my boy, my poor boy.’ Her voice was hoarse – it seemed to tear from her throat as she raised one open hand towards the ceiling. ‘Are we never finished with all of this? The Russians come and then the Germans and now my son gets shot on a bus. When will it stop?’

They put Rebecca to bed and Jack explained things quietly to Judith. Max was in a serious condition in hospital in Tel Aviv. Jack and Alex were going to take the first available flight to Israel they could.

Judith received Jack’s injunction to be a good girl with silent thankfulness. When he looked at her and shook his head, she thought for an instant he was going to tell her of his deep disappointment. But instead he only said, ‘It’s such a shame, Judith. He was just a farmer, growing and building things. Where’s the wrong in that?’

Later, she crept upstairs to Rebecca’s room. The house was eerily still. Dora and Gertie were sitting in the kitchen over cold cups of tea. Jack was out at the shop, scouring the books for the price of an airfare. Rebecca’s door was ajar, and Judith could see her propped up on her thin pillows. She tapped lightly on the doorframe and saw Rebecca’s head rise slightly.

‘Come in, mommellah,’ she said, her voice so frail it made Judith ache. She knelt down and took Rebecca’s hand in hers. ‘I’m so sorry, Bubby,’ she said. Rebecca nodded, turning her head towards the window and the white summer sky sailing past them. Judith sat in silence for a minute, feeling Rebecca’s gentle pulse. But eventually the weight of unsaid things tipped her mouth open and she found herself blurting, ‘I had a fight with Gertie today.’

Rebecca turned back to look at her with tired eyes. ‘Oh yes, she told me. About the name.’ Judith’s face went red and she waited for Rebecca’s verdict. But instead, Rebecca laid her head back on the pillow and sighed.

‘I’ll never forget the day she came to us.’ Her eyes turned to the window, looking far away. ‘Just a little girl, even smaller than you – and thin too, although you’d never guess it now. She came on the rescue trains, the Kindertransport from Austria. Your mother and I went down to Liverpool Street station to meet her. Gertie had a sister with her, and she held that girl’s hand so tight I thought she’d never let go. They looked like two peas in a pod and it broke my heart to separate them, but we couldn’t take both. Gertie cried all the way home and for weeks afterwards. She didn’t speak any English at all, so I had to try in Yiddish. Don’t tell your mother, but Gertie is the reason her Yiddish is still so good.’ She paused to cough into her hand.

‘Gertie didn’t want to talk about her mama or papa or the brothers she’d left behind. She didn’t want to eat or sleep. She just wanted to see that sister of hers. I thought it was a strange thing to rescue a child from murder only to have her die of sorrow in a safe place. Then I found out that her sister was living just a few miles away, so Dora and I took turns to walk Gertie there every Friday before prayers. It took us four hours there and back but we never missed a Friday. I’d listen to her and her sister talking away in German and Yiddish, and it did my heart good. But that was before the war. Her family went to the Camps, and they never came out again. Then the sister moved away because their house was bombed. And that was the last Gertie saw of her, apart from letters.’ Tears were running down Judith’s face, and she didn’t dare wipe them away. Gertrude, Esther und Daniel, she remembered. Rebecca’s voice was running on.

‘You don’t know how hard it was for Jews when the war came. The Nazis had plenty of friends here who thought they had the right way with us. When the dockyards were bombed I saw it in people’s faces. They thought we’d brought a plague on them. Maybe they were right. Wherever we go, hate follows. We always dream the next generation will shake the curse.’ She sighed and squeezed Judith’s hand.

‘I said something terrible to Gertie.’ Her confession was a relief. ‘She didn’t like my nickname and I was angry, so I told her I wished I wasn’t a Jew.’

Rebecca smiled and tapped Judith on the cheek. ‘You and that name of yours!’ she said. ‘Let me tell you something. Your name has a very impressive history. When Nebuchadnezzar sent a wicked general to destroy the Jews, young Judith came sneaking inside his tent. And then do you know what she did? She got him drunk and cut his head off. His army ran away. So Judith saved her people. A modern woman, my Judit. Not a bad name to have, don’t you think?’

Judith forced a smile. From inside the haze of exhaustion, Peggy, Kathleen, Gertie and the faceless children of the Kindertransport all seemed to be calling her. She wanted to lie down and block them out.

‘You’re tired, Bubby,’ she said, standing up. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea.’ Rebecca nodded and said, ‘Let me give you something first, mommellah.’ A pale arm was pulling open the bedside drawer, and Judith saw an envelope with her name on it, in Rebecca’s slanting scrawl. ‘I was saving it for your Batmitzvah, but I’ve finished it already so you should have it. Don’t read it until the day, though. It’s bad luck.’ Judith took it carefully and her grandmother settled back down onto the bed and closed her eyes. ‘What is it?’ Judith whispered, feeling the weight of paper inside.

‘Nothing special,’ came the answer, even softer. ‘But promise you’ll read it when the time comes.’

Judith said, ‘I promise,’ but this time Rebecca showed no sign of hearing. She stepped quietly from the room, stopping at the door to look back at the sunken form in the bed. ‘I love you, Bubby,’ she heard herself saying. But her grandmother was already breathing gently, lost in the beguiling sleep of old age.

She set the letter down on the bed, which still bore the imprint of Peggy’s invitation. After a moment of hesitation, her hand eased under the envelope flap. Several sheets of paper fell out, crossed with Rebecca’s writing. She read the first line:

Judit, my darling girl,

Today is your Batmitzvah – such a special day for you, to become a grown woman. I know that you will do everything so beautifully, and that you will make us proud.

Her eyes blurred and she rubbed them, pressing fierce hands down until they ached. As her room came into focus again, she saw her swimming bag hanging over the doorknob. Pulling it down, she clutched it to her chest. The bright red canvas was still musty with friendly smells, the sharpness of chlorine and damp rubber. Kath had drawn a yellow heart on the fraying corner, on her first day at Wearside. She felt the hard outline of tomorrow’s Junior Tryouts schedule pressing against her shirt.

Shame and revulsion rose inside her; pulling out the schedule she ripped it up and thrust the pieces under the bed. Then she opened her cupboard door and pushed the bag into the depths at the back, heaping shoes on top of it until it was buried, until she could pretend it had never existed. Then she curled back under the blanket, Rebecca’s letter falling to the floor. Make us proud. How could she, with only a hole inside her where certainty should live? I’m not a mensch, Bubby, she whispered to the pillow. I’m not, and I never will be.

There was no frantic scurrying to get Salim’s mother back, no threats or phone calls or demands. She was gone as completely and irrevocably as if she had just lifted herself out of the sea.

Even in his anger at being left, at being cast on the scrapheap of her life, Salim could not find it in his heart to hate her. Pain pulled the needle of blame towards the Jews, towards fate, and most of all to his father. He came running out of his room that day and pulled Abu Hassan’s hand; clutching it to his chest he begged him to find her. ‘She can’t be far,’ he sobbed, feeling his stomach twist and the shame of water leaking down his leg in a child’s grief. But Abu Hassan just stood there, his mouth gaping, his eyes muddy pools. Something came out of his throat that sounded like ‘No, no,’ and then he turned away from his son, as Salim screamed, ‘It’s your fault! You made her miserable! You did everything wrong! Now we have nothing.’ Tareq pulled him roughly into his arms, half a restraint, half a hug. He whispered into his hair that he should never blame his father, who loved him despite everything. ‘He only can’t tell you because he’s old, and life has buried his words.’ But at that moment Salim knew only rage and despair; so much that if Abu Hassan had still owned the Orange House, Salim felt he could have burned it down himself.

At night there was a cold space beside him where Rafan used to sleep, an empty room where all three brothers had once lain and plotted their return. And his dreams were full of his mother, of opening the door of strange houses he did not recognize, and finding her there.

The ache in his heart refused to fade with the months. Most of all he grieved that she had taken Rafan and not him, hooks of jealousy and sorrow catching him whenever he tried to rest.

But despite himself he spent hours picturing where she might be, a flutter of excitement in his throat. Maybe the tall boulevards of Europe, or the bright streets of Beirut. And then the pain of her escape became somehow animating – cutting through his ties to Palestine, letting his imagination float upwards into the sky, over Nazareth’s crowded tenements into the great unknown.

In one concrete way, his mother’s flight did set him free. Buoyed up by Abu Mazen’s blood money, and with two fewer mouths to feed, Abu Hassan became more persuadable on the matter of how to dispose of his remaining son.

Nadia and Tareq truly loved Salim, and worried for his future. Sensing trouble ahead if he stayed in Nazareth, they began to concoct a plan. Suppose, Tareq said to Abu Hassan one night, Salim were to improve his English and learn a proper trade? If he were to go and stay with Hassan in England, he might be able to send money back here and be a better support to his father.

Abu Hassan was quick to acquiesce. After all, he was too old to be looking after a teenage boy. Visas these days were not hard to come by if a sponsor could be found.

Salim was elated when Tareq broke the news to him. He agreed to work hard, get good grades, stay out of trouble and not to upset his father. He longed to leave the dusty powerlessness of Arab life and remake himself. Every speck of desire to stay in this new land of Israel had been extinguished.

On his last night in Israel, he gathered together his clothes, books and flimsy photographs. The clothes went into a small black bag. He laid the pictures carefully in the bin on the floor. Reaching into the back of his cupboard, he lifted out a shoebox and opened the lid.

The photograph of the Orange House had yellowed after so many years. It was the first time he’d looked since coming back from Tel Aviv. What was the point of it now? He tipped it into the bin, hearing the sad little thud as it hit the bottom. Then he sat down on the bed, breathing hard.

After a moment, he bent down slowly and retrieved it. The baby boy’s eyes stared at him from the frame, accusing. Salim answered: I have new dreams now. But he pushed it quickly into his suitcase.

In the autumn after his seventeenth birthday, as the orange harvest season approached, Salim stood at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv to catch the El-Al flight to London. In his pocket he carried a one-way airline ticket, his Israeli passport, his national identity document and his Palestinian birth certificate. His father had given him the equivalent of one hundred British pounds to start him in a new life. This was his total legacy from the past, the last gift of the Orange House.

Tareq and Abu Hassan walked him to passport control. Nadia had been unable to contemplate coming too, overcome with grief. Salim had felt tears welling up when he hugged her goodbye, aware that in some ways she too was losing a son.

Tareq leaned over to give Salim a rough embrace, pulling the young man tight to his chest. ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ he repeated, tears wetting his cheeks. ‘Take care of yourself. You know that you always have a home with us – always.’

‘I know,’ said Salim, deeply moved. He wanted to tell Tareq how much he loved him, that he had been brother and father to Salim all at once. But with his own father standing nearby, he could not bring himself to say it. All he said was, ‘Tell Nadia goodbye. Tell her I’ll eat, and study – and I’ll miss her yelling at me.’ Tareq nodded and turned away, to allow Abu Hassan the last farewell.

The two stared at each other slowly. In the harsh light of the departure hall, Salim saw more clearly than ever how old his father had become. He remembered they were Abu Hassan’s second family, the last gasp of a long life. He saw the weakness in his body and legs, and the greyness of the old lips, and a tenderness came over him that he could not explain.

He reached over and put his arm around Abu Hassan’s shoulder.

‘Goodbye, Baba,’ he said softly, searching for words that were both true and kind. ‘I’ll… I’ll write to you often. Take care of yourself.’

Abu Hassan brought up a shaking arm and let it lie for a moment around his son’s back. He pulled Salim to his chest quickly, and Salim felt the old heart hammering against his ribs like a woodpecker’s beak. Then Abu Hassan let go and said, ‘Ma salameh’ – go in peace. Salim stood for a moment, then hoisted his rucksack on his shoulder and turned towards the gates.

It was all too quick, the jump from one life to another. Within the hour, Salim sat strapped to his seat while the El-Al plane rose out of the clouds of yellow dust sent skywards by the summer heat.

They crossed Israel’s narrow waist before the jet had risen. Looking out of the window, Salim saw the strip of land so many had fought over, as it slipped out of view. It was so small that it took his breath away.

As they reached into the radiant blue sky, he felt as if he was entering a void inside himself as profound as the one outside his window – a terrifying, exhilarating emptiness ready to be filled.

Four hours later, they touched down at London Airport. The grey and gloomy skies and great green expanses were oddly refreshing. Salim was ready to welcome the differences between the world he’d left and the one he would soon belong to.

As he stood in line to show his passport and visa, he watched the other faces standing next to him – some dark, some fair, all with the same contained expression. He wondered how many were like him – starting over again. He looked across at the fast moving line of British passport holders. He promised himself that next time he would be standing in that line.

Waiting in the arrivals hall was one familiar face. Hassan – still broad, fleshy and jolly – was standing waving frantically, a smile smothering his face. ‘My God, Salim!’ he said, rushing over to give his brother a hug. He was bundled up in a bulky jumper and a black leather coat. ‘You look just the same. What a mug you have! Like a movie star! I’m going to take you out, and maybe I’ll have better luck with the girls!’

‘Not if you wear that sweater, you idiot,’ Salim laughed. He was genuinely happy to see him, relieved to find something familiar here to cling to. Hassan slapped him on the back and said, ‘Come on. Let’s go home.’

Outside, the air was wetter and heavier than Salim had ever experienced. How do people live here? It was all so disorienting – the oppressive sky, the vastness of the airport, the rows and rows of cars shining in the gloom and the howl of traffic from the dozens of roads spinning off in every direction. It was nearly half an hour before they found the car and could be on their way.

Driving through the rainy, busy streets, Salim listened with half an ear to Hassan’s stories about his car repair shop, the exciting new projects they could start together and the girls they’d meet. When Hassan asked him what his plan was, he fingered the money in his pocket and said, without thinking, ‘Take a course in English, and try to get into university.’

‘University? What do you want to do that for? Believe me, Salim, you don’t need all this studying rubbish. There’s plenty of money to be made with me in the garage.’

Salim didn’t answer. He watched the grey, endless concrete roll by outside the window and wondered how he was going to make his mark on it, make this alien country work for him.

Eventually, they pulled up in a dirty little side-road under a railway bridge. By the crumbling buildings lining the road and the darkness of the faces walking down the street, Salim assumed they were in a poorer district, reserved for foreigners like him. Hassan heaved Salim’s bag out of the trunk and dragged it over to a little brown door. It stood next to a shop selling Indian food, with a green and yellow illuminated sign blinking cheerlessly in the drizzle.

‘This is it!’ Hassan said, as they reached the top of a dim, brown stairwell. ‘Not a palace, but cheap and very convenient. You’ll see.’

He pushed open the facing door and they entered a place smaller even than Tareq and Nadia’s, with one bedroom and a small kitchen off the main living area with its spiral orange carpet. ‘You’ll have to sleep on the sofa at first,’ Hassan said. ‘But with the money you bring in, soon we’ll be able to move to a bigger place! Right? You want a beer?’

Salim nodded, cold and tired to his bones. As Hassan went into the kitchen, he sat down on the brown sofa. It creaked and wobbled with his weight. Looking through tiny windows across the street, he saw a small, green park. A children’s playground was at its centre, a striking patch of colours against the grey.

Hassan brought him a can of beer and he cracked it open. It tasted strangely sweet and sharp against his throat. Children were playing in the park outside. He could see them, a misty blur of waving arms and bright clothes. They seemed a world away from him, there in that dirty little room. As he sipped his beer he had the strangest feeling of disconnection – as if he were not really there but just a character in an old film, sad and soundless, painted in the vivid colours of loss.

Later Hassan sent Salim down to buy groceries – ‘to get the hang of things’. He took Hassan’s wallet, heavy with coins, and headed out under the drizzle. The streets were nearly empty, and the few people out walking passed quickly by him, heads down. There was nothing there, no flicker of recognition – they were all strangers caught in their own troubles, looking straight through each other. Homesickness swelled in his throat, trickling into him with the watery cold.

The sign on the cornershop Hassan had directed him to said Freddy’s. The shopkeeper looked up as Salim walked in to the jangle of warning bells, white bearded under a dull orange turban. Salim walked up and down the aisles, looking at the brands. He picked up the ones he recognized from the days of the British in Palestine, when Private Jonno would sneak him cigarettes. When his basket was filled it struck him as ludicrous that his English kitchen might be the closest he’d been in years to their pantry in Jaffa, to his mother and the English tea she used to drink, the imported biscuits she’d prized.

At the counter, he fumbled with the strange silver and bronze money, turning over coins in desperation as the queue behind him grew restless. A man behind him called out, but Salim couldn’t understand the words. Perhaps it wasn’t even English. Irritated, the shopkeeper pushed Salim’s hand away and gathered coins and notes together himself, beckoning the next customer. Salim picked up his bags and went outside.

The rain was lifting, and the rolling clouds had changed from iron to shining steel and marble, brilliant at their edges. The bags weighed him down – but it was a start, just a start, he told himself. Everything else would come in time.

As he walked down the brightening street, he heard the children again, high voices drifting above the sound of the traffic. They reached into Salim, pushing past his sorrow with their small song of delight.

As he saw them, just a touch away, he thought – there may be harvests to be reaped here too. He stood there for a time, watching them while London moved past and around him in a blur of faces and car horns. And all the while the children chased each other with oblivious laughter, defying gravity as they swung round and round deliriously in the light rain.

On the morning of Judith’s Batmitzvah, she stood beside the Rebbe with her parents, dazed and resigned. Her portion of the Torah was committed to memory. Pieces of it had been flitting through her dreams for weeks, like bats under a dark sky.

She was dressed for the part: a new skirt, heeled shoes, a smart blue shirt and a woollen waistcoat. Her nails and hair had been done the day before. She looked like a mini-Dora, or a doll that Dora might have picked out as a child. It’s all a game, dressing up and pretending, she thought. I’m not really a grown-up today and I won’t be tomorrow either.

Without warning, the door opened in the Rebbe’s office; urgent voices were raised in the corridor and Judith saw Jack grip Dora’s arm. The gesture was chilling, a stone falling from the dam around her heart, letting in a flood of sudden fear.

A man in a yarmulke was saying, ‘Come quickly, she’s just outside.’ As if in a dream she trailed behind her parents as they raced to the front door. A wailing noise poured in from outside, a distorted, inexplicable sound. When the door opened and the light came in, she saw Gertie standing there, red with hysterics.

They ran the five hundred yards back to their little home, Jack and Dora ahead, Judith behind them, holding tight to Gertie’s hand.

From halfway there she could see the ambulance, its siren flashing without a sound. The silence was a terrible omen as she pounded the pavement in new heels, pain shooting up her legs.

The front door was wide open and she stumbled in. A man stood in Rebecca’s doorway, talking to Jack. Dora’s mascara had run, and Judith heard the words pneumonia and congestive heart failure. Jack shook his head like a dog with water in its ears and Dora put her hand to her mouth.

Judith walked slowly up the stairs to stand beside her father. Jack’s face was grey, tears pooling in the hollows of his cheekbones.

‘What’s happening to Bubby?’ she whispered.

It was Dora who spoke, her voice steady and kind.

‘Your Bubby is leaving us, Judit. There’s nothing we can do. She had a wonderful life. They want to take her to the hospital but your father thinks,’ she reached out and took Jack’s hand, ‘that she should stay here. It’s what she would want.’

Judith nodded. Be brave. Be a mensch. ‘How long will she stay?’ she asked.

‘Maybe a day or two, pet,’ Jack said, hoarse. He was holding the top of his balding scalp, his hand clapped to the thin black yarmulke as if it pained him. Judith’s starched hairdo itched at the sight. ‘Not more. She’ll go to sleep soon and have her rest.’

‘Can I see her?’

Jack looked at Dora. Her mother nodded. ‘It’s right you should see her, Judit. She loves you most of all, you know.’

Judith walked into the little room as she had done hundreds of times, seeking comfort. Now she would have to give it.

Rebecca was lying on her pillows with an oxygen mask over her mouth. Her eyes were half-open and her mouth slack. The only colour on her body came from her Star of David necklace, still bright against the grey skin.

In Judith’s Torah lessons the Rebbe has said all kinds of things about the dignity of death. But there was no dignity here. Her grandmother looked defeated, life beaten out of her. The anger inside Judith frightened her; she felt fooled by them all. They told her she would grow up today, and everything would be better afterwards. You know the day you can stop being afraid, her grandmother had said. The day you put down the Torah scrolls and the Rebbe blesses you as an adult. But what was the point of it all, if Rebecca would not see it?

Leaning forward, she took Rebecca’s motionless hand in her own. It felt strange, empty somehow, as if a fire was burning Rebecca away from the inside, leaving nothing but heated bones and skin that crinkled like paper. ‘I’m here, Bubby,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid. We’re all here.’ Rebecca’s eyes opened. Her pale red head turned towards Judith and she made a small noise, from deep inside her throat. The bony hand clenched and gently squeezed Judith’s, the faint pressure of a feather landing on the ground. Then a doctor came between them, pushing Judith back and leaning over Rebecca until she vanished behind a wall of white coats.

Jack met her at the doorway. ‘Pet, we have to decide about the service and reception. We think we should cancel it. Your mother agrees. Everyone will understand.’ Judith stood for an uncertain moment. Part of her wanted to cry with relief, to take off her coat and new shoes and be a child again. She closed her hand in a fist, her fingers curling around the memory of Rebecca’s touch.

‘Can we wait?’ she asked, finally. ‘I need to pray for Bubby.’ It was a lie. If a God created such a world, one that stole so much from people, then Judith wanted no part of Him. But it was good enough for Jack. He passed his hand over his brow and said, ‘Of course. We have a little time.’

In the silence of her bedroom, Judith reached under the bed and pulled out the crumpled papers hidden there, beside the ripped pieces of the Junior Team Tryout schedule. Rebecca’s writing leaned across the page like falling branches. Judith’s eyes could not focus and she wiped them in frustration. Be brave. Be a mensch. She’d made a promise. Taking a deep breath, she felt the rest of the house fade away. Judith started to read.

Later she came out onto the landing where Dora and Jack were talking in low, heavy voices. Gertie stood beside them, her arms wrapped around her waist.

‘Don’t cancel the Batmitzvah,’ she said. ‘I can do it. I want to do it.’

‘Are you sure?’ Jack said, astonished. Dora clapped her hand to her chest as if to calm her heart.

‘I’m sure,’ said Judith, steady and without a trace of doubt. Her back was to Rebecca’s room, and the light that came streaming in through its open door traced the determined lines of her face.

Afterwards Judith remembered that coming-of-age day as a whirlwind of frantic phone calls, a blur of sympathetic handshakes at the reception and a dull sense of grief growing inside her like a young tree.

She could not recall anyone familiar in the sea of people in front of her, even though Jack must have smiled at her from the front row and Dora and Gertie would have been wiping away tears beside him. The only clear memory, the single lasting picture in her mind, was woven of sound not sight. It was the sound of her own voice as she picked up the scrolls – the sound of singing as if other voices had sprung up inside her, singing her way out of fear and into the adult world.

Judit, my darling girl,

Today is your Batmitzvah – such a special day for you, to become a grown woman. I know that you will do everything so beautifully, and that you will make us proud. All this past year I have watched you work so hard to prepare – sometimes it felt like I was preparing too. I was not blessed with daughters until you came. So forgive me if I think of you as myself, my daughter and my granddaughter too. When you are old, you can’t remember the when’s and who’s of life. But the real nature of things becomes much clearer. The truth is that you are all of this to me, and more.

When I was a child, it was traditional to give a boy a gift on his Barmitzvah, a piece of his inheritance. This way his family acknowledged he was no longer a child, but a pillar of his community, of our whole faith. I thought about what to give you, my Judit. There is only one piece of your inheritance that I hold for you. It’s just this – the tale of my life, which is a part of your life too. I’m sorry if it’s a poor gift. I hope one day you will feel that it was worthy of you.

You know my real name is not Rebecca at all. It is Rivka, in Hebrew. My papa chose it from the Torah. Rivka was the girl that Isaac married, who gave Abraham’s servant water from the well. The Torah says that Abraham wanted to find the right wife for Isaac, but could not find any girl good enough. So he sent his servant further and further away until he and his camels were hot and tired. When he stopped to rest by a well, a girl came to him, even younger than you, to give him water for his thirst. She said if his camels were thirsty she would draw water for them too. She was so kind that she even had time to think about a thirsty camel.

I think that is why God chose her to be the mother of all the Jews. She was kind in her heart, which is what a mother must be. She also had to be brave, to leave her home and journey so far to find her place in life. So our stories are the same in some way. When I was on the ship coming here, and I cried for my mama and papa and my sister Etka, I thought about Rivka and it made me feel better.

When I was your age, my home was in Kishinev, in Imperial Russia. Those names have changed now, as all names do. It was a beautiful city – grand buildings inside and pine trees and roses outside. We used to say the birds came to Kishinev in summer because it was cool and stayed in winter for the warmth. My father put out food for them, so we could hear them sing.

We lived on a farm owned by my Uncle Simeon on Kishinev’s outskirts. All Jews in the Pale of Settlement lived in Shtetls. My papa told me that Catherine the Great herded all of Russia’s Jews into the Pale like sheep, and told them to stay there or die. It was hard for Jews then, my Judit. The Russians would take our little boys and force them into the army for all of their lives. Some mothers would cut the index finger off a son’s hand, so they couldn’t hold a gun. The new Tsar had passed new laws against us – they called them the May Laws, and they said no Jew could live with Christians, own land or go to Christian schools.

My Uncle Simeon was one of the lucky ones. His farm was too small to be noticed, and close enough to Kishinev to walk there in just five minutes. It fooled the Mayor, and we were safe. But we did not go to school. We learned at home, while Mama and Papa sewed clothes.

Etka, my sister, was nine years older, and she was fierce and quick. Really, I was afraid of her. She would slap me on the head if she thought I was too slow. I had a little brother too, Moshe, born when I was nine. He was a funny boy, always in trouble like your Uncle Alex, and smiling too. If he’d been a dog, his tail would have always been wagging. And there were my cousins – Isaac and Chayah were the same age as me, Gurta not yet old enough to read, and Benjamin the baby. Did you know that whenever I smell a fire burning, I think of them? That wood smoke smell was always with us in those days, from stirring the pot on the stove. It is the greatest sadness of my life that I left them, to be taken by the terrible flood that took us all.

This is the hardest part, my darling. It came in April in the third year of this century. I remember it was Easter Sunday for the Christians. I was eleven like you, just about to come of age. We were forbidden to work on Christian holidays, so we stayed at home and waited for the day to pass.

The first word of it was from Uncle Simeon. He came back from the town centre and said the Russians had left their churches and started marching in the streets. They said we had killed a boy in a town not far from us. Jewish doctors tried to save him, but he died anyway from a poison in his belly. But now the Russians were saying we killed him for his blood to make our matzos. I can’t tell you how it disgusted me to hear that, Judit. Did they think we were monsters or pigs, to eat all manner of filth?

That day my mother was supposed to go to see our friend Navtorili at his shop on Stavrisky Street. She needed Navtor’s candles for the next Sabbath meal. So she waited until the evening, when the Christians were having their Sunday dinner. Then she took Moshe with her and went into the town.

Well, we waited and waited for her. After dark, one of Navtor’s sons came with a note. There was trouble, and Mama was too afraid to come. She stayed there, in Navtor’s house. A thousand times since I’ve dreamed that she risked it, and came back after all. What would our lives be like now? It’s pointless to wonder such things.

We spent that night in fear, and when dawn came, we saw smoke was coming from the town, dark and dirty. Papa wanted to go fetch Mama, but Ekta kept saying ‘Stay, she’ll come.’

It was nearly noon when we heard the screaming. Isaac came running up the path towards the house. He said the Russians were coming up the hill with sticks and knives. When I thought of one of those knives going inside me, I went cold.

Papa and my uncle pushed us down into the cellar and locked it from the inside. I could see through the floorboards, as the men came into the house and began to break everything like mad dogs. They smashed until their sticks snapped. They tore the mezuzah off the door, broke all of our pots and threw the sewing machine on the floor. I heard the screams of the chickens outside as they killed them one by one.

I must have been afraid in that cellar, but all I remember is shame – at the stink on us, at how we hid like rats. I didn’t feel like a mensch, like a human being. We had become animals, just like they said.

When we eventually came out, it took a while for us to stop being rats and have a human thought again. For a few minutes we just picked things up without any plan. Then Papa started shouting and crying for Mama. He could not wait any more to find her. I wanted to come with him. But he told us all to wait inside the house and hide. Etka stayed with us, standing inside our broken front door with an axe in her hand.

I think I knew in my heart she wasn’t coming back, Judit. A daughter knows. I heard the screams and the weeping coming from far away, but I didn’t know if it was real or a dream. Etka knew too. I saw the tears falling onto her axe as she stood there. Now I know what really happened was this: they came to Navtorili’s shop at eleven o’clock in the morning, broke down the door and killed almost everyone inside. Mama died with Moshe behind her, and then they struck him down too. I don’t want to know if Moshe smiled at them as they burst into the room, or if Mama cried. I want to remember them as I see them in my heart right now.

Nearly fifty people died that day in our beautiful Kishinev. We buried them in fear that we would be next. Moshe and Mama lay together in the same box. Two days later, Papa took Etka and me and left our home with a donkey and a cart. The fear, Judit, the fear of those knives and sticks drove us like whips. As for me, I sat on the cart and watched my cousins getting smaller and smaller, before vanishing as if they’d never existed.

Papa told me we were going to a place called Pinsk where we had relatives. He might as well have told me we were going to the moon. Can you imagine, I had never been out of Kishinev? Just a few miles out to the river and back. Now we had more than seven hundred miles to walk, right across the Pale, taking turns resting and pulling the donkey.

After a while, walking becomes like a dream you can’t stop dreaming, and your legs even twitch in your sleep. Sometimes we slept in roadhouses and sometimes we slept on the cart. Etka used to shake her fist at the sky and say thank God this happened to us in summer. If it had been winter we would have died. There were other Jews on the road too. Some of them were heading north, like us. Others were going south, to Odessa. They were trying to get back to the holy land, they said, Palestine as it was called then. Etka said they were mad. God’s promise is broken, she’d tell them. Better go forward than back.

I came of age on that cart, Judit, but no one noticed. There was no Batmitzvah then for girls, just added burdens. Etka remembered only after we reached Pinsk, and then scolded me for not reminding her. She gave me a hug and bought me a bowl of stew. I was so relieved that we could finally stop walking that I forgot about my coming-of-age as I ate it, and just thanked God for our safety.

I lived in Pinsk with Papa and Etka for five long years. You would think it would have become a home to me, but in truth I hated it. These relatives of ours were long gone, and the town was filling up with Jews just as afraid and poor as we were. Etka ran Papa’s house, and I was like a maid – cooking and cleaning all day long. I think she was worried we might stop still like clockwork mice unless she wound us up every day. Perhaps she was right. Sometimes we would hear of a new pogrom somewhere, or there would be some ugliness in town, and my blood would freeze like puddles in winter. If it weren’t for Etka, I think I would have slowed down and never started up again.

Then Papa died. Etka couldn’t keep him wound up forever and one day his heart just stopped. She went into his bedroom to wake him in the morning, and there was just silence for a few seconds. Then she came back into the workroom where we slept, and said, ‘Papa’s dead. Go fetch the Rebbe and let’s see to his burial.’ Straight away she started heating the pot of boiled dough we ate for breakfast. I don’t think I cried then, to my shame. But later I cried when I remembered the smell of him, and how he used to chase Moshe and me, pretending to be a great forest bear.

After Papa was buried, Etka packed us up and said we were leaving. There’s no future for us here, she told me. This is a dead place for Jews, she said, and even these rich Pinskers are just waiting around to become poor corpses. I did wonder where on earth we could go now. By then I was no longer a child. I was a woman of sixteen. Other girls of my age were married with children of their own. Etka, at twenty-five, was nearly old – and it showed in her face. I was a pretty girl and I remember thinking in my pride that Etka was a shrew. It wasn’t until later, when I held my first son in my arms, that I realized she’d given up everything, every hope for herself, just to keep me safe.

We had no cart this time. So we made our way on foot nearly two hundred miles to Minsk. That was the first time I ever saw a train station, with all the Russian ladies and their fur hats. Our journey hadn’t seemed real up to then, but afterwards I knew it was going to take us to a whole other life.

We bought a ticket to Libau on the Baltic Sea. Etka had heard bad stories about Russian guards waiting for Jews on the German border crossings. This was the easier way, but longer. The fare cost us five roubles – a lot of money in those days. Etka kept our money in a purse tucked inside her underclothes. She said she’d like to see the man brave enough to look for something there.

Our journey was standing up like cows squashed in with a lot of other cows. But it was better to have those iron wheels do the walking for us. Etka only spoke to me once that whole journey, digging my ribs with her elbow to say we had crossed into Litvak – Lithuania these days. I must have looked blank because she said, ‘Don’t you know what that means, you idiot? We’re outside the Pale.’ Outside the Pale! It was such a thrilling sound. But the world looked much the same as before, only bigger and further from home.

We changed trains at Kovno and the next day’s journey took us to Libau. This is where the Jews caught their ships out of Russia to the new worlds. Those Russian port towns are nothing like our own Sunderland. Libau frightened me. It was dirty and it smelt. Everywhere there were drunken men and bad women. We took a room at a boarding house where the stench from the toilet pits was so bad I retched whenever I went inside. There was singing underneath us all the time and it was too hot to sleep.

Etka spent two days trying to find one of the Jewish relief organizations to sell us a ticket on the Danish ships leaving for England or America. On the second day she came in nearly in tears and threw two pieces of paper down on the bed. She picked up the menorah we had brought all the way from Kishinev and hurled it on the ground, shouting, ‘Thieves and devils! May God sink this place like Sodom the second we get on that forsaken boat!’ I guessed she had been forced to pay everything we had for those tickets, by some rogue after a good commission.

That night I dreamed that Etka had talked to me in my sleep. When I woke I saw that her sheets were wet and red. I must have become hysterical because I remember running downstairs and screaming. The woman who owned the boarding house called a doctor and he came quickly. He told us she had dysentery and it was very bad. Even then, I could see he didn’t have much love for Jews. He kept calling us ‘you people’ when asking questions about Etka and me.

I stayed with Etka for two nights and cleaned out the bucket. On the third day of her illness, Etka woke up from the fever and grabbed my hand so hard that it hurt. She told me to go to the Winter Harbour and take the tickets. I could sell hers, she said, to get some money for the passage to England, and take the boat myself before it sailed. Of course I refused. Not because I was brave at all. It was the opposite. Etka was my shelter. What use was I without her? She twisted my hand, her face red and angry like I’d seen it so many times before. She said, ‘Don’t be such a bloody fool, Rivka. It’s time to be a mensch. Mama and Papa will never forgive you if you miss this chance. I’ll haunt you and you’ll never have a moment’s peace.’

Well, I did go at last, but I tell you that Etka haunted me anyway. I made her promise to keep the second ticket and come on the next boat. Of course we both knew that Etka would die in that room, but what could we say? When we made our goodbyes she was just as impatient as ever. The last thing she said to me was ‘Hurry up and go, girl.’ I walked down to the docks to find my ship with Papa’s menorah, one rouble and some clothes. That’s all I had left, after so many long miles.

The boat operator was called Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab. I looked at the ticket so many times I will remember the words forever. It was big as a monster and it stank of sick cows. I walked onto it like a sleepwalker, without any feeling at all in my heart. Today they say it’s the way we keep away the things we can’t bear to feel. If so, I’m grateful for that gift.

The person who sold Etka the tickets must have been a rich man when he finished, because every Jew in Europe was on that boat. If we’d been cows, we’d have kicked each other to death before we were halfway across. As it launched I felt everything was slipping away from me – my family, my home, my care for the future.

That was my darkest time, Judit. But then something happened that saved my life. Standing right next to me on that deck was a boy the same age as me, and his brother with him. They saw I was alone and they reached out their hands to me. We spent four days on the water together, listening to the vomiting and the prayers. If you ever talk to someone – really talk to them – for only one hour you will find out most of the truth of them. So just imagine, we talked and listened for four whole days and nights. I started that journey as alone as it was possible for a human being to be. But by the time it ended I had met the man who would be your grandpa.

Had there been just one body between us on that journey, we would not have met, and all the things that flowed from that meeting would not have been. God did that for me, so I can almost forgive Him the rest.

When we docked I had to be told where we were. The port was Hull – of course I had never heard of it. Your grandpa had family in Newcastle and said we could go together there, and marry. He would set up a shop selling buttons, and I had learned enough about sewing from Papa to help us get by. Standing on that dock I had something like a waking dream, of the roses and pine trees in Kishinev under a blue sky. I could smell the flowers, as if they were right there on my filthy skin.

Your grandpa had family on the Jewish Board of Guardians, and when we arrived in Newcastle they came to meet us at the station. They were so happy to see him and ready to welcome me too as his betrothed. It was my last day of being sixteen, but I could not bring myself to tell anyone. It still felt sinful to celebrate life, when Etka, Mama, Papa and Moshe were all dead.

What to say next, my Judit? I married your grandpa and we were happy together, as much as two people can be. We opened our little shop in Sunderland and this place became my home. We changed our names and spoke English not Yiddish, and taught our children only the ways of the country of their birth, not the countries of their history. We shed those old lives like a caterpillar’s skin, because they were no use to us any more.

Your Uncle Max came, named after Moshe. Then your papa and Uncle Alex. For some years I dreamed that a girl would come, so I could remember Etka and Mama. But it seemed they were truly at rest, and God did not want their spirits disturbed. Some lost things can never be found – at least I thought so, until you were born to us.

What a long letter I’ve written you, darling Judit. I hope you can forgive me. But I wanted you to understand why it is such a joy to me to see you come of age. You take this step in a new world. Here, the Jews don’t need to hide or be afraid of the knock on the door. You can celebrate your life in a synagogue with family around you, not on a dirty old cart followed by ghosts. The Jews even have a homeland of their own, and a flag among all the goyim. Perhaps your generation will be the one to make it safe, to finally end the suffering for all of us.

The only sadness I feel is from knowing that I may not be with you to see you fulfil your promise. But you should not be sad, darling girl. Your journey is just beginning, but I am ready for mine to be done. You are walking ahead of me on the road – wherever it leads, it will shape the woman you become. You must think of me holding your hand as you set out. I only pray you find the courage to make your own way. And that your journey brings you joy in the end, as mine has done.

Always your loving grandmother.

Rebecca