to the grand old Black Sea port of Constanta, and by ship through the

to the grand old Black Sea port of Constanta, and by ship through the Bosphorus, past Istanbul, and on to Haifa on the Palestinian coast, from where they were taken by truck to their bunk-bed rooms in one of a dozen prefab structures on the recently established kibbutz. Though the water came from a well, and it lacked even the basic creature comforts of the cramped Godin apartment in Warsaw, that, to my mother, was just part of the challenge, and the dream, she’d embraced and had come to define her. I know that she felt, on arriving in the kibbutz, that only now was her life truly beginning. It was a feeling that never left her. Yet it was always clouded by the memory of the family she left behind. When the Second World War began in September 1939, the Germans, and then the Soviets, invaded, overran and divided Poland. Two of my mother’s three sisters fled to Moscow. Her teenage brother Avraham went underground, joining the anti-Nazi partisans. All three would survive the war. Yet in the autumn of 1940, the rest of her family found themselves inside the Warsaw Ghetto with the city’s other 400,000 Jews. My mother’s parents died there, along with her 13-year-old brother Itzik and her little sister Henya, who was only 11. When my mother arrived in the kibbutz, her Gordonia friends assumed she would marry a young man named Ya’akov Margalit, the leader of their group back in Warsaw. But the budding romance fell victim to the Zionist cause. As she was embarking on her new life, he was frequently back in Poland training and arranging papers for further groups of pioneers. He continued to write her long, heartfelt letters. But the letters had to be brought from the central post office in Tel Aviv, and the kibbutznik who fetched the mail was a quiet, dimunitive 25-year-old named Yisrael Mendel Brog — my father. Known as Srulik, his Yiddish nickname, he had come to Palestine five years earlier. He was an ordinary kibbutz worker. He drove a tractor. My father’s initial impulse in coming to Palestine was more personal than political. He was born, in 1910, in the Jewish shtet/ of Pushelat in Lithuania, near the larger Jewish town of Ponovezh, a major seat of rabbinic learning and teaching. His own father, though the only member of the Pushelat community with rabbinical training, made his living as the village pharmacist. Many of the roughly 10,000 Jews who lived there had left for America in the great exodus from Russian and Polish lands at the end of the 19" century. By the time my father was born, the community had shrunk to only about 1,000. When he was two years old, a fire broke out, destroying dozens of homes, as well as the shtetl’s only synagogue. Donations soon arrived from the US, and my paternal 20 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011491