HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027873.jpg

Listening to the concert program in my parents’ room was something I
always looked forward to. It was my father who encouraged me, when I was
eight, to begin learning to play the piano. I took lessons once a week all during
my childhood along with several other of the kibbutz children. When we got old
enough, we took turns playing a short piece – the secular, kibbutz equivalent of
an opening prayer – at the Friday-night meal in the dining hall. I have always
cherished being able to play. Sitting down at the piano and immersing myself in
Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schubert or Mozart never ceases to bring me a sense
of calm, freedom and, especially nowadays, when I have finally worked to
master a particularly intricate piece, a feeling of pure joy.

* * *

As a young child, I spent most of my waking hours in the company of my
several dozen kibbutz “siblings” in the children’s home, the dining hall, or
running through the open spaces in the center of the kibbutz with our metapelet.
She would often take us through the orange groves in the afternoon, and
sometimes across the main road to the Arab village.

Wadi Khawaret consisted of a few dozen concrete homes built back from a
main street bordered by shops and storehouses. She would buy us sweets in the
little grocery store. The man behind the counter had a kindly, weathered face
and a dark moustache. Dressed in a gray galabiya and a keffiyeh, he smiled
when we came in. There was always a group of Palestinian women, in full-
length robes, seated on stoops outside breastfeeding their babies. We saw cattle,
bulls, even the odd buffalo, being led to or from the fields. I sensed no hostility,
and certainly no hatred, toward us in the village. The people seemed warm, and
benignly indifferent to the dozen Jewish toddlers and their metapelet. My own
attitude to Wadi Khawaret was of benign curiosity. I did not imagine that within
a couple of years we would be on opposite sides of a war. I enjoyed these visits,
as I enjoyed every part of my early childhood. Each age-group on the kibbutz
was given a name. Ours was called dror. It was the Hebrew word for
“freedom”.

But dror was also the name of one of the Jewish youth movements in the
Warsaw Ghetto, heroes in their doomed uprising against the Nazis. Little by
little, from about the age of five, I became more aware of the suffering the Jews
had so recently endured in the lands my parents had left behind, the growing

25
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027873