A Tale of Love and Darkness

I WAS ABOUT fifteen when I went to Hulda, two and a half years after my mother's death: a paleface among the suntanned, a skinny youth among well-built giants, a tireless chatterbox among the taciturn, a versifier among agricultural laborers. All my new classmates had a healthy mind in a healthy body, only I had a dreamy mind in an almost transparent body. Worse still: I was caught a couple of times sitting in out-of-the-way corners of the kibbutz trying to paint watercolors. Or hiding in the study room behind the newspaper room on the ground floor of Herzl House, scribbling away. A McCarthyite rumor soon went around that I was somehow connected to the Herut party, that I had grown up in a Revisionist family, and I was suspected of having obscure links with the hated demagogue Menachem Begin, the archenemy of the Labor Movement. In short: a twisted upbringing and irreparably screwed-up genes.

The fact that I had come to Hulda because I had rebelled against my father and his family did not help me. I was not given credit for being a renegade from Herut, or for my helpless laughter during Begin's speech at the Edison auditorium: the brave little boy from "The Emperor's New Clothes," of all people, was suspected here in Hulda of being in the pay of the crooked tailors.