We never really had a close private conversation, so I am not the absolute judge of his character.  And I really didn’t want to get into the subject of his second daughter’s book about her father’s abuse of her.  My own experience of parenting when I was a child was that physical violence was a legitimate means of punishment.  In one of the families who lived with us when I was a child ear pulling and twisting was common and not the most extreme.  Kids going to emergency because their shoulder was dislocated was also not unusual.  But that was then, and the parents were survivors of camps with numbers on their arms…  

I was probably ‘patched’ once or twice.  But I don’t remember because that wasn’t part of the atmosphere.  

For Galia Oz, that WAS part of her atmosphere.  I gather that as the middle child she had the standard behavior problems and was treated differently.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if she wanted to sleep at her parents’ home and her father roughly ejected her and sent her to her kibbutz home.  And it was probably too harsh, but not outside the norm of behavior for the kibbutz.  

It sounds like she interpreted his every move afterward as aggressive and violent, even when it was conciliatory and friendly.

But from her obvious enjoyment at all the attention she is getting at the unmasking of our literary hero, it is clear she also has another agenda than just clearing her conscience about her past.  

And she’s gotten more attention from me than I would have liked to give