Julia’s Reviews > A Tale of Love and Darkness > Status Update

Orna. Him meeting her (and her daughter) years later

Amos leaving for a kibitz after a fight with his father. Father’s making amends by explaining the origin of the name K, seeing Amos off, waiving goodbye to a wrong bus

How the aunts fed him tons of raw vegetables, cod liver oil, etc, washed all his clothes and made him sit outside in the sun “as if I just got out of the ghetto” when he was visiting after his mom’s death

By their hard work, common sense and pioneering enthusiasm, the group manages to survive and to build up from scratch with their bare hands a prosperous homestead on the desert island. This delighted me. Imbued as I was with the pioneering ethos of Zionism that I received from my father - secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, militantly optimistic and progressive.

Nov 30, 1947

Bullies may well bother you on the street or at school some day. The may do it precisely because you a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment he have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so’s and so’s, not that, never again. From tonight, that’s finished here, forever

In those days I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace lover, a sanctimonious honey-tongued nationalist, a 9yo Zionist propagandist. We were the goodies, we were in the right, we were innocent victims, we were David against Goliath… whereas they (the B, the A, the w) … the evil hypocritical world that was always thirsting for our blood

“And now look how my memory is making an idiot out of me”

When we were conquered by the poles and then by the red army and then by the nazis… and then there was Stalin again, with NKVD. Rovno was thrown from hand to hand like a puppy being teased by Russia, Poland, Russia, Germany, Russia. And now it doesn’t belong to Poland or to Russia but to Ukraine. Or is it Belarus?.. what there was doesn’t exist anymore and what there is now will also turn to nothing

It behind this faith in the diploma there is smth else, and that is that the girls those days.. even the girls who went to universities are entitled to the education and the place outside the home but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time from when you leave your parents home until your first pregnancy. From that moment.. we had to begin to live our lives only for the children

The diploma is the Jews religion. Not money, not gold - the diploma