Home is where the heart is.

Around fifty two years ago, I began the longest love affair of my life. Those including my children who start doing their sums and remember that Ruth and I were married in 1967, may consequently be harbouring concerns and suspicions especially when I say that the affair continues, quite brazenly and in public view. Unashamedly I name the other party – it’s this crazy, special, loved by many and sadly hated by so many more, country I now live in. The secret is out.

Things were not always thus. I have a memory of my mother coming into my bedroom telling me “we have Israel”. As I was three and a half at the time this is hardly verifiable but that is the stuff of memory snaps, no one can prove them right or wrong. (I have another sadder one. We flew to America on the day of Lockerbie. Our TWA plane was “parked” next to that fatal PanAm flight and when I used a public phone to make a final call to the office, I will always believe that a young guy in the next booth was saying “it’s OK I got on the Pan Am flight”.)

But after that I don’t think Israel impinged that much on my childhood and even adolescence. We had a JNF box. There was occasional talk of our family in Bnei Brak. We toasted Israel at my bar mitzvah. A few of my friends at Carmel belonged to strange youth groups where they sang Hebrew songs and wore oddly coloured shirts. The majority of us were very Anglo-Jewish with the stress on the Anglo. We weren’t on the whole inspired by a succession of Israeli visiting teachers but then schoolboys were and are horrible creatures and the fault was probably ours.

One exception was a term when Murray Rosten, who went on to be a Professor of English at Bar Ilan University, gave us a series of lessons about the history of Zionism and the development of the State.  But on the whole as I recall Israel was something that my parents were in favour of and as an apathetic, perhaps rather than antagonistic, teenager is was against. Nobody would have put a bet at William Hill or Ladbrokes that half a century later I would be living here and walking around with a kippah on my head – at least when it doesn’t blow off in the wind.

I don’t know quite when the penny dropped. But six of us decided to go together, in the summer following our A levels. On another blog I will describe our voyage out which was memorable in many ways, But despite waiting hours for our luggage to come off the boat – our six berth cabin was on the level of the cargo, as I remember it –   I I recall being driven through the sleeping streets of Haifa, being awoken by my cousin Harold, then known as Zvi, in his sergeant’s uniform, and a day later  walking through Tiberias on a hot August night.

Slowly but surely the magic was beginning to work.  The cynical, awkward, never joining anything,  adolescent sometimes known as ARG,  knew he had come home.