Personal memoir of a political figure's family history and childhood reflections

showing my feelings, beyond my immediate family and a few close friends. When I was in the army, this wasn’t an issue. Self-control, especially in high- pressure situations, was a highly valued asset. But in politics, I think that it did for a considerable time inhibit my ability to connect with the public, or at least with the news media that played such a critical intermediary role. And it caused me to be seen not just as reserved or aloof, but sometimes as cold, or arrogant. I did get much that I value from my parents. From my mother, her boundless energy, activism, her attention to detail, and her focus on causes larger than herself — her belief that politics mattered. Also her love for art and literature. When I would come home from the children’s dormitory to my parents’ room — just nine feet by ten, with a wooden trundle bed to save space during the day — there was always a novel or a book of verse sharing the small table with my parents’ most single prized possession: their kibbutz-issue radio. As achild, however, I spent much more time with my father. He was my guide, my protector and role model. Like my mother, he never mentioned the trials which they and their families endured before arriving in Palestine. Nor did they ever speak to me in any detail about the Holocaust. No one on the kibbutz did. It was as if the memories were scabs they dared not pick at. Also, it seemed, because they were determined to avoid somehow passing on these remembered sadnesses to their sons and daughters. Still, when I was ten or eleven, my father did — once, inadvertently — open a window on his childhood. Every Saturday morning, we would listen to a classical music concert on my parents’ radio. One day, as the beautiful melodies of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in D came through the radio, I was struck by the almost trancelike look that came over my father’s face. He seemed to be in another, faraway, place. When the music ended, he turned and told me about the first time he’d heard it. It was on the train ride into Crimean exile with Itzila and Meir in the early days of the First World War. The train took five days to reach the Crimea and sometimes halted for hours at a time. Every evening, a man at the far end of their carriage would take out his violin and play the second movement of the Tchaikovsky concerto. I have heard the piece in concert halls many times since. When the orchestra begins the second movement — with the violin notes climbing higher, trembling ever so subtly — it sends a shiver down my spine. I can’t help thinking of the railway car in which my then four-year-old father and other Jews from Ponovezh escaped the Great War of 1914. And of other trains, in another war 25 years later, carrying Jews not to safety but to death camps. 24 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027872