My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

Aharon Barak, who from 1995 until 2006 served as Israel’s chief justice, sits in his cozy office at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He is a brilliant liberal jurist who reshaped Israeli jurisprudence and is admired worldwide. But I come to him in the same way I approached Sternhell and Appelfeld. I listen to his life story because I want to understand my own. Listening to Barak, I try yet again to comprehend the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century. “When I was born in Lithuania in 1936, my name was Erik Brik,” Barak tells me. “My father was born into a rabbinical family, but he turned his back on all that. He went to the university, studied law, and became the head of the Zionist office in Kovno. My mother was a woman of outstanding intellect. She went to the university and then taught history, German, and Russian. Our home was modest but happy. With my parents I spoke Yiddish; with the Lithuanian nanny I spoke Lithuanian. I was an only child. “I do not remember life before the Holocaust. Perhaps I have repressed it. So my first memory is of the Holocaust. The German Luftwaffe bombarded the city and soon after that we left home. We put a few of our belongings on a horse-drawn cart and we moved to the ghetto. My next memory is of the Germans arriving in the ghetto, rounding up the Jews and assembling them. A German officer divided everyone: right—left. Those to the right were sent home. Those to the left were sent to death. I was five or six years old. My m...