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oppression, and then Adolf Hitler. Thousands of Arabs and hundreds of Jews died in clashes with each other and with the British authorities. One of them was my father’s older brother Emanuel.
    In November 1933, the same month when Marsha Smulevitz was born in Chicago, Emanuel Auerbach was standing on the edge of a conflict between protesters and police in Jerusalem when a bullet ricocheted off the pavement and struck his leg. The wound itself was not life-threatening, but it soon became infected. With effective antibiotics, yet to be developed, Emanuel would have lived. Instead he died of the infection. He was buried in the Mount of Olives Cemetery, which is in East Jerusalem and overlooks the Old City. Soon after their son’s death, Ezekiel and Penina changed the family name to honor their son. On a visit to Israel in 2010, my eldest daughter and I, with the help of an ancient Arab caretaker of the cemetery and a right-wing Jewish settler cabdriver, eventually located the grave, which no one in the family had seen since at least 1948.
    Ezekiel and Penina never really recovered from Emanuel’s death. My brothers and I learned this not from my father but from people who knew him as a child. They described my father’s parents as serious, almost grim people who devoted themselves to their business and lived very quietly. As my father’s grade school classmate and lifelongfriend Batya Carmi recalled, “He grew up as an only child but under the dark cloud of his dead brother.”
    To slip from under that cloud, Ben spent as much time as possible away from his parents’ store and the apartment. Little interested in academics, but sociable and friendly, he was more like Ari and Rahm than me. Even he would admit that in school he “tried to get the most for the least effort,” which was something he would later say many times about Rahm, another second child.
    We boys loved to hear about our parents’ childhood, and storytelling was frequently part of our bedtime ritual. We visited my parents’ bed, en masse, just about every night. Usually our mom read a chapter from a book, but whenever we could get our father and mother to tell us stories from their own lives we were especially attentive.
    In later years I was struck with how world events affected the course of my father’s life. As a boy he lived at one of the great flashpoints of history and, while he escaped the Holocaust, he nevertheless knew what it was like to be the subject of violent hatred. He also participated in the founding of Israel and its development as a frontier nation. But as important as these aspects of his life were, my brothers and I were far more intrigued by the tales that revealed our father as a shovav like us.
    The Ben Emanuel we learned to know from those stories was a class clown, a middling student, a fantastic dancer, and an avid movie fan. (In one of his stories his best Shabbat white shirt was ripped to shreds in the frenzy outside the theater prior to the local premiere of
Flash Gordon
.) He told us about long days spent at the beach, lots of dances, and a class costume party where he dressed up as Charlie Chaplin. From then on his nickname was Charlie, which stuck, so much so that Batya still calls him that.
    Together, the stories they painted revealed a footloose, Huck Finn kind of kid in a sunny Tel Aviv that was more small town than big city. It was Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mediterranean, a place where a boy could roam from the shore to the markets to the cinema and get into mischief without encountering any serious trouble.
    Hovering over it all, of course, was the tension between the Jews and the Arabs and their shared anger at their British overseers. The bigotry that simmered in Tel Aviv was both conceptual and personal. For example, when my father’s aunt, a nurse, married an Arab doctor she had met in a hospital, the couple went to great lengths to obscure their relationship. The doctor, who eventually became a high