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family? No one.
    “Still, you ought to be careful,” the doctor says insistently.
    It is imperative, he says, that I treat my body as a friend. Otherwise, it might become my enemy. And then it would be a nuisance for my physician, and even more so for me.

ISRAEL: I DIDN’T EXPECT such emotion to arise in me from being there. I saw my two sons again and wept: my heart overflowed with pride. We spent a week together. I thanked heaven for each hour, each sigh, and each gaze. Suddenly turning sentimental, I catch myself using religious terms. What the Besht and the Gaon of Vilnius, Rabbis Berdichev and Wischnitz, in exile, could see only in their dreams, I am enjoying in reality.
    Jerusalem: as I climbed up its hills, monuments of green vegetation soaring up to a blue sky, my heart began to race and I almost forgot to breathe. This is what my distant ancestors must have felt when they made their pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year. In the Talmud it says that the pilgrims could number one million, yet no one complained of lack of space or discomfort. My grandfather believed this. Were there any journalists in those days?
    This trip still leaves its stamp. As incomparable as the city of David itself. Wherever I walk, said Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, each step brings me closer to Jerusalem, the citythat, more than any other, embodies what is eternal in the memory of my people.
    After the Sonderberg trial and its unexpected outcome, Paul, my boss and friend, appointed me, at my request and for a very brief period, special correspondent in Israel. You need a change of scenery? The choice was Europe or Israel. Just as in the past when it came to theater and journalism, it was my grandfather who suggested the Holy City.
    “Go there as my ambassador,” he urged me. “As my personal family representative. Remember carefully: like my father and his father, I live with the feeling of having lived in Jerusalem; I’m eager to return there with you, through you; I’ve prayed in front of the Wall, and I’d like to see it again through your eyes. Through you, I’ll reimmerse myself in my memories. Don’t forget: my memory and yours must blend into his.”
    In fact, he had been there only once. At a time when he was still in mourning for the death of my grandmother. Disconsolate, inconsolable, he spent his days studying and his nights praying. A forty-eight-hour lightning-quick visit. Officially he was supposed to see an old companion who was ill. But his real objective was more sentimental: to stroll around the Old City of Jerusalem. Recite the Psalms there. Find an elusive nostalgia. Hear reverberations of the prophets’ tragic warnings. Commune in front of the Walland think about our ancestor, the illustrious Cabbalist, Rabbi Petahia, whose interpretation of the Names fires the imagination. Why didn’t he stay there? Was he unwilling to part from us? Was he afraid of starting a new life? No. I think I heard him murmur that regardless of where he’s from, a Jew feels at home on the soil of the prophets. That, for a Jew, living in Israel is a privilege: the privilege of coming home again. And that this privilege he didn’t deserve.
    But he came home a changed man.
    “That whole story concerning the young German that you’re obsessed with, over there, you’ll understand it better, and more deeply,” he said to me one day. “So many enemies have tried to destroy our people; the most recent one, in Germany, almost succeeded. Could all civilizations be mortal? You might think so. But there is Jerusalem.”
    “According to the wise Rabbi Shaul,” my grandfather said, “the God of Israel did not invest four thousand years of faith and defiance in the history of his people in order to one day see them annihilated. And yet, at the time of the great Tragedy, the enemy had almost succeeded at it. Far from Jerusalem, it had almost destroyed Jerusalem. You’ve read the book of Ezekiel, haven’t you? He describes his vision of