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army, he asked, his voice rising. And from the National Exhibition? I didn’t bother denying it. I suppose I felt lucky they hadn’t found out about our raids on the kibbutz armory. He did not administer my beating. That came a few weeks later from one of the kibbutz elders. He simply took me by the shoulders and shouted: “You must never do this again.”

It was worse for my parents. At first, they believed I was an innocent party. They were convinced I couldn’t have got involved in something like this without being dragged in by the others. My father even asked me whether the reason I’d been “drafted” by Ido and Moshe was because I was small, and able to squeeze through tight spaces in windows and doors. As it happened, that did sometimes come in handy. But I told them, no, I was not an unlucky bystander. I was as much a part of it as the others. My father was angrier than I had ever seen him. My mother, faced with what must have seemed like a betrayal of every one of her Zionist principles, told me that if the kibbutz had decided to report us to the police, she would not have objected.

Their mood lifted slightly when I began my final year of high school in September 1958. After two years back in the kibbutz school, our age-group was sent out again in another shift in policy. This one was in response to signs of growing support in Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim for the argument my father had made against the quality of education we were offering. In order to go at least some way toward meeting that objection, Mishmar Hasharon was banding together with two dozen other kibbutzim and sending all 12th-graders to one of two outside high schools. The first, called Beit Berl, was a Labor Zionist institution focusing on the humanities. In addition to a few of the less academic boys, most of the girls were sent there. The rest of us went to a place called Rupin. It was a few hundred yards past the regional high school. It specialized in agriculturally related scientific research.

A few of the teachers were enormously gifted, and they were in the areas that most interested me: math, physics and biology. Yet the rest of the curriculum was almost numbingly uninspiring. I did not miss a single math or science class. But otherwise, I began setting my own schedule. Some days, I would sleep late, or not go at all. When I did go, I’d often show up without having done the homework. Neither Ido nor Moshe was with me at Rupin. They were starting their military service. But I assembled a new band of mischief-makers, and it was not hard to entice them to go AWOL.

I was warned several times by the school administrator. He said he could not accommodate a student who seemed oblivious to, or dismissive of, the rules. He

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