his twentieth birthday. Jacob did still insist on helping financially, which

his twentieth birthday. Jacob did still insist on helping financially, which allowed my father to enroll at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He did well in his studies — literature, history and philosophy — but abandoned them after two years. His explanation for not staying on, when I asked him years later, was that with the accelerating activity of the Zionist pioneers, it felt wrong to him to spend his days going to lectures, reading books and writing essays. I am sure that he also felt isolated and alone, with Meir, the only link to his life before Palestine, working in Haifa on the coast, four or five hours by bus from Jerusalem. When he began looking for a way to become part of the changes going on around him, Mishmar Hasharon didn’t yet exist. Its founding core — a dozen Russian Jewish pioneers — was still working on argicultural settlements near Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, until they found a place to start their kibbutz. But they had been joined by several young men and women who, though a year or two older than my father, had been with him at the Hebrew High School in Ponovezh. He decided to join them. Late in 1932, the Jewish National Fund, supported financially by leading Jewish figures in western Europe and the US, bought 2,000 acres from an Arab landowner near Wadi Khawaret. The area was set aside for three Jewish settlements: a moshav called Kfar Haim, where the land was divided into family plots, and two kibbutzim. One was called Ma’abarot. Next to it was Mishmar Hasharon. My father was among the seventy youngsters who set off in three trucks with everything they figured they would need to turn the hard, scrubby hill into a kibbutz. They built the core from pre-fab kits: wooden huts to sleep in and a slightly larger one for the dining hall. They dug a well and ordered a pump from Tel Aviv, at first for drinking and washing, but soon allowing them to begin a vegetable garden, a dairy with a dozen cows, a chicken coop with a few hundred hens, and to plant a first orange grove and a small vineyard. Still, by the time my mother arrived three years later, there were not enough citrus trees, vines, cattle and chickens to occupy a membership which now numbered more than 200. Along with some of the others, my father worked outside the kibbutz, earning a regular paycheck to help support the collective. On his way back, he would stop at the post office in Tel Aviv to pick up letters and packages for the rest of the kibbutz — including Ya’akov Margalit’s love letters to my mother. That was how my parents’ friendship began, how a friendly hello led to shared conversation at the end of my father’s working day, and how, a few years later, my mother decided to spurn her Gordonia suitor in favor of Srulik Brog, the postman. It was not until 1939 that they moved in 22 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011493