A Tale of Love and Darkness

IN ROVNO, your mother had a boyfriend, a deep, sensitive student whose name was Tarla or Tarlo. They had a sort of little union of Zionist students that included your mother, Tarlo, my sister Haya, Esterka Ben Meir, Fania Weissmann, possibly also Fania Sonder, Lilia Kalisch, who was later called Lea Bar-Samkha, and a few others. Haya was the natural leader until she went off to Prague. They would sit around concocting all sorts of plans, how they would live in the Land of Israel, how they would work there to reinvigorate the artistic and cultural life, how they would keep the Rovno connection alive. After the other girls left Rovno, either to study in Prague or to emigrate to the Land, Tarlo started courting me. He would wait for me every evening at the entrance to the Polish Military Hospital.

I would come out in my green dress and white headband, and we would stroll together down Trzecziego Maya and Topolyova Streets, which had been renamed Pilsudski Street, in the Palace Gardens, in Gravni Park, sometimes we walked toward the River Ostia and the old quarter, the Citadel District, where the Great Synagogue and the Catholic cathedral stood. There was never anything more between us than words. We may have held hands two or three times at most. Why? That's hard for me to explain to you because your generation would never understand anyway. You might even make fun of us. We had a terrible sense of modesty. We were buried under a mountain of shame and fear.