In Those Days, In These Times

Grandma had story after story about her intimidating headmistress, Annie Landau, who revolutionized Jewish girls’ education in Palestine. She could recite the devar Torah she had to prepare for parshas Parah.

I would listen politely to these snippets of everyday life, waiting with thinly disguised impatience for Grandma to get to the interesting bits. What about the worldwide political changes that were sweeping continents at the time? What about the wars in Europe? What about the hangings of rebellious Jewish boys by the British? What about the British curfews, and the raids on the Jewish houses, and the increasingly fatal fights between the Jews and Arabs that kept breaking out? What about the bombings, and the prisons full of Jewish boys incarcerated by the British?

And what about the great rabbanim? Grandma grew up a stone’s throw away from Rav Aryeh Levin! And up the road from a leper’s colony, for goodness’ sake!

But when I’d ask her, she’d make a noncommittal sound and say vaguely, “Yes, I mean, there was always trouble, wasn’t there?” And then she’d go on to talk about other domestic matters: how gallantly her brother Desmond would escort her and wait for her outside her friends’ houses when she visited them; how the family joined a Pesach Seder at the King David Hotel; how her favorite dress when she was five was yellow with a light-blue ribbon on the front.