My late father-in-law Bandi always talked about his father with great love, and he always aroused my curiousity.  “You have no idea how great he was,” he told me all the time.  But he never gave me any details.  But one day, long after Bandi had died, I was standing in Jaffa Port, and looking at an old wooden boat.  i asked the two Arab men sitting next to the boat why this boat is displayed on the shore, and the older one said, “My grandfather built this boat.”  He was so proud and i was impressed.  And then I heard Ezi just behind me saying, “My grandfather built this hangar.”  It was the first I’d heard of it, but soon after I began to discover dozens of monuments Arpad Gut (Api) had built – the water towers in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, the dome of the big synagogue on Allenby, the famed historical Casino, the Nesher factory near Nahariya…We went to Hungary with the kids and stayed in the Gellert Hotel, where Api had built the famed dome over the spa, other hotels, department stores, many other places.  In Siofok there is a gorgeous water tower that he built. Then there was the famous bridge in Raqqa during World War II, about which i wrote a series of poems.  The list went on and on.  I thought we had found everything. 

Yesterday I was translating a poem and there was a reference to the prophecy of Ezekiel.  Ezi decided to look it up in English and took the Bible from the shelf above my computer, with the words “Api’s Bible” on the cover,

When he had finished comparing the English with the original, he turned to the frontspiece and saw that it was stamped with the name of a bookshop in Aleppo.  How had Api come to buy a book in Aleppo?

Ezi looked again and noticed that the first two pages seemed stuck together – and there it was – a dedication in Hungarian, with a translation into English glued into the opposite page.

while Ezi read the dedication I recognized the dot matrix printer of Bandi that we had worked on together.  But it was the dedication that stunned us both – a love letter by Api to his wife, explaining that he was busy building an Aerodrome in Aleppo.  It was June, 1941.  What was he doing there? then?  

but that’s for another day.  

it’s time to return to biting my fingernails over the election.