And here we are in another bright shiny morning. “The best country to dry laundry,” my mother used to say. And I wonder if they are looking down from above – my mother who was a fervent Zionist and my father who believed in universality and Yiddish. Actually, they held down both forts – because they learned Esperanto as the universal language, and prayed. Neither solution worked.
What worked was flexibility, luck, alertness, and the ability to fit in. And health. My father who had been beaten very severely in Danzig, contracted perontinitis only later in England, but stayed healthy afterward for a number of years. Until her lymphoma my mother was a picture of health – or rather – the usual complaining woman. (I”m like that – a thousand illnesses)
So they survived. But when they got to know the daily life of Israel, they were not happy about it. My father – who had spent years in prison – did not like the way they pushed in line.