Ordinarily Isaac erased emails from the Ivy League university he had graduated almost fifty years ago without looking at them. Going there had been an error. It wasn’t coeducational back then, and he hadn’t understood how difficult it would be to cope with a party weekend social life. The entire patrician ethos of that university went against Isaac’s New York Jewish liberal egalitarianism. His high school years had been marked by civil rights marches, anti-nuclear demonstrations, folk music and jazz. Now the decision to apply to that Ivy League college and attend it when he was accepted mainly showed him how little he had understood about himself when he was a high school senior.
Anyway, he had moved to Israel seven years after graduation. Were he to make a donation to an institution of higher education, it would be to the Hebrew University, which both of his daughters and their husbands had attended, and where his wife taught.
This email was even less relevant to his life in Israel than the others he received, but it arrived during a lull in his day, and the heading was unusual. It was an invitation to join members of his class for brunch at the Maryland estate of Kazimierz Mroczkowski, a football star whom Isaac hadn’t known personally — jocks and serious students were breeds apart. After brunch, the guests would walk across the fields and watch steeplechase races on a neighboring estate. Steeplechase races? He had to look the term up on the Internet...
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