Her Masada

It all started with her deflowering on Masada. Yes, that Masada.

Charlotte was sixteen and visiting Israel with her family for her brother Morty’s bar mitzvah. It was a long way to go for a bar mitzvah, especially during the Yom Kippur War ceasefire, but her parents, Bee and Tilmon, saw a trip to Israel as a way to confront what it meant to be Jewish in the late twentieth century. While neither parent had ever expressed much passion about Israel and had occasionally even called themselves atheists, Bee kept insisting, “Our people need us. If not now, when?”

Charlotte and Morty were steadfast conspirators. Their businessman father was cold and hard, their raven-haired, aqua-eyed mother even more severe. When, at thirteen, Charlotte began to worry that she and her siblings were growing up feral, she happened to overhear an aunt remark, “They’re shockingly civilized kids.”

Morty still calls the trip to Israel the family’s last hurrah before the divorce the following spring.

They also had twin sisters three years older than Charlotte, who were not invited to the trip because they had run away to join a commune after one year in college. Charlotte and Morty agreed that if they’d been able, they’d have run away, too. They’d have driven to Japan.

The bar mitzvah was anticlimactic. It took an hour to locate a rabbi and a minyan to hold the service because most men were away on military duty. Morty, after a year of memorizing his Torah portion, had to skip  to the end of his reading because of...