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showing my feelings, beyond my immediate family and a few close friends.
When I was in the army, this wasn’t an issue. Self-control, especially in high-
pressure situations, was a highly valued asset. But in politics, I think that it did for a
considerable time inhibit my ability to connect with the public, or at least with
the news media that played such a critical intermediary role. And it caused me
to be seen not just as reserved or aloof, but sometimes as cold, or arrogant.

I did get much that I value from my parents. From my mother, her
boundless energy, activism, her attention to detail, and her focus on causes
larger than herself – her belief that politics mattered. Also her love for art and
literature. When I would come home from the children’s dormitory to my
parents’ room – just nine feet by ten, with a wooden trundle bed to save space
during the day – there was always a novel or a book of verse sharing the small
table with my parents’ most single prized possession: their kibbutz-issue radio.

As a child, however, I spent much more time with my father. He was my
guide, my protector and role model. Like my mother, he never mentioned the
trials which they and their families endured before arriving in Palestine. Nor did
they ever speak to me in any detail about the Holocaust. No one on the kibbutz
did. It was as if the memories were scabs they dared not pick at. Also, it
seemed, because they were determined to avoid somehow passing on these
remembered sadnesses to their sons and daughters. Still, when I was ten or
eleven, my father did – once, inadvertently – open a window on his childhood.
Every Saturday morning, we would listen to a classical music concert on my
parents’ radio. One day, as the beautiful melodies of Tchaikovsky’s violin
concerto in D came through the radio, I was struck by the almost trancelike look
that came over my father’s face. He seemed to be in another, faraway, place.
When the music ended, he turned and told me about the first time he’d heard it.
It was on the train ride into Crimean exile with Itzila and Meir in the early days
of the First World War. The train took five days to reach the Crimea and
sometimes halted for hours at a time. Every evening, a man at the far end of
their carriage would take out his violin and play the second movement of the
Tchaikovsky concerto.

I have heard the piece in concert halls many times since. When the orchestra
begins the second movement – with the violin notes climbing higher, trembling
ever so subtly – it sends a shiver down my spine. I can’t help thinking of the
railway car in which my then four-year-old father and other Jews from
Ponovezh escaped the Great War of 1914. And of other trains, in another war 25
years later, carrying Jews not to safety but to death camps.

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