My brother keeps telling me I should be writing down the bits and pieces of biography I have of my parents – if only because he wants to write a family history and never heard many of the stories I remember clearly.  But as you know, I also have a strange imagination and may have dusted the stories with my own weird twists.  Take the story I heard many times about my mother’s capture by gypsies.  She said she was playing with her friends in the clearing by the forest and a man came by and gave all the children apples – except her.  When she asked for her apple, he invited her to come along with him and he would give it to her.  That evening my grandfather came to the camp to ransom her.  Her face was smeared with mud to disguise her coloring and her ears had been pierced with gold earrings.  Yesterday my brother asked me, “Did she get to keep the earrings?”  I assumed so because otherwise the hole would close up, and then he trapped me, “Who paid for the earrings?”  And the hole in my story was revealed.  Maybe she didn’t get to keep the earrings.  Maybe they N ow really pierce her earrings.  Maybe she made up the story (as my grandchildren assert).  

I know the impossibility of determining truth – as a scholar, as a daughter, as a person.  How do we do it on the grander scale – in politics, for instance, especially when everything is so far away and the information so incomplete.  Even in Israel.