CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 35Visible text2 paragraphs
MY PARENTS put on my shoulders everything that they had not managed to achieve themselves. In 1950, on the evening of the day they first met by chance on the steps of Terra Sancta College, Hannah and Michael (in the novel My Michael) meet again in Café Atara in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Hannah encourages shy Michael to talk about himself, but he tells her instead about his widowed father:
His father cherished high hopes for him. He refused to recognize that his son was an ordinary young man. His father's greatest wish was for Michael to become a professor in Jerusalem, because his paternal grandfather had taught natural sciences in the Hebrew teachers' seminary in Grodno. It would be nice, Michael's father thought, if the chain could pass on from one generation to another.
"A family isn't a relay race, with a profession as the torch," [Hannah] said.*