Post Mortem

CHAPTER TEN

            My first meeting with the German children was in nineteen thirty eight. The German Templars of Sharona began to march like ducks in noisy processions and to wave Nazi flags and the Arabs of the adjacent village of Sumayl cheered them. We were living in Kiryat Meir nearby. Kiryat Meir was outside town and we reached it via the planks laid on a muddy path leading through the orange groves growing between Shlomo Hamelech Street and the Kirya. At night the jackals howled and together with the other men Moshe would go out to chase them away. The Germans and the Arabs from Sumayl would lie in wait to ambush us, and we would go on spying expeditions among the orange groves and find lovers who excited us more than the Germans with their shouts. On the third entrance from the right lived a friend whose brother slept with his eyes open and we would come to marvel, waving our hands in front of his unseeing eyes, sure that this was one of the true wonders of the world. But the sight of our neighbours in their pajamas on their balconies on Saturday mornings was enough to make Moshe get us out of there fast. When our teacher in second grade spoke to us with fervent pedagogical emotion about the poor Jewish children in Germany, it took me some time to translate Sharona into the suffering sentimentalized by our teacher, and to grasp the other side of the Zieg Heil...