Read By the Rivers of Babylon for Free Online

position to change the currents of history for better or worse.
    Miriam Bernstein was a fairly typical product of the European holocaust. She had been found by the advancing Red Army in a concentration camp, whose purpose was as obscure as its name, although the words
Medizinische Experimente
stuck out in her mind. She remembered that she had once had parents and other family—a baby sister—and that she was Jewish. Beyond that, she knew little. She spoke a little German, probably learned from the camp guards, and a little Polish, probably learned from the other children in the camp. She also knew a few words of Hungarian, which had led her to believe that this was her nationality. But mostly she had been a silent
child, and she neither knew nor cared if she was a German, Polish, or Hungarian Jew. All she knew for certain, or cared about, was that she was a Jew.
    The Red Army had taken her and the other children to what must have been a labor camp, because the older children worked at repairing roads. Many of them died that winter. In the spring, they all worked in the fields. She had wound up in a hospital, then was released into the custody of an elderly Jewish couple.
    One day, some people came from the Jewish Agency. She and the old couple, along with many others, traveled across war-ravaged Europe for weeks in crowded railroad cars that gave her nightmares. They boarded a boat and went to sea. At Haifa, the boat was turned away by the British. The boat attempted to unload the people further up the coast at night. A fierce battle broke out on the beach between the Jews, who were trying to secure the beachhead, and the Arabs, who didn’t want the boat to unload. Eventually, British soldiers broke up the fight and the boat sailed away. She never knew where it went because she had been one of the people who had been landed on the beach before the fight. The old couple, whose name she could not remember, disappeared—dead on the beach or still on the boat.
    Another Jewish couple picked her up from the beach and told the British soldiers that her name was Miriam Bernstein and that she was their child. She had strayed from their house and gotten caught in the fighting. Yes, she was born in Palestine. She remembered that the young couple were very poor liars, but the British soldiers just looked at her and walked away.
    The Bernsteins had taken her to a new kibbutz outside Tel Aviv. When the British left Palestine, the Arabs raided the settlement. Her new father went to defend the kibbutz and never returned. As the years passed, she discovered that her older stepbrother, Yosef, was also an adopted refugee. She found nothing unusual about that because she imagined that most children in the world—or in her world—came from the camps and rubble of Europe. Yosef Bernstein had seen what she had seen, and more. Like her, he knew neither his real parents nor his real name, his nationality nor his age. They became young lovers and eventually married. During the Yom Kippur War, their only son, Eliahu, was killed in action.
    Miriam Bernstein had taken an early interest in private peace groups and had cultivated the good will of the local Arab
communities. Her kibbutz, like most, was hawkish, and she felt increasingly isolated from her friends and neighbors. Only Yosef had understood, but it was not easy for him, a fighter pilot, to have a dovish wife.
    After the 1973 War her party appointed her to a vacant seat in the Knesset in recognition of her popularity with the Israeli Arabs and with the women’s peace movement.
    She quickly came to the attention of Prime Minister Meir and the two became personal friends. When Mrs. Meir resigned in 1974, it was understood that Miriam Bernstein was her voice in the Knesset. With Mrs. Meir’s backing, she rose quickly to a deputy minister’s post. Long after the grand old woman no longer sat in the wings of the Knesset, Miriam Bernstein held on to her seat and her post through one government