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Canada.
    But I decided to at least see what this new opportunity might offer. I made arrangements to head to Tel Aviv—two bumpy, winding hours away on an Egged bus. After tracking down the address on the letterhead, I found myself in a nondescript office with a small waiting room filled with other young people. Eventually I was ushered into an equally generic office, where I met a fellow named Ari. After mechanically repeating some of the jargon I’d read in the letter, he explained that I’d been selected as a candidate for an overseas Israeli government “function.” His manner was reserved and bordered on obtuse. Indeed, the whole exercise was surreal. But I played along.
    Ari handed me a questionnaire with a series of twenty questions, each requiring a one-word response. For example: “When attacked, the young man——?” or “The boy——his parents?” I did my best to produce sensible answers and handed Ari my completed questionnaire.
    He gave a cursory glance at what I’d written, then put down my test and suddenly changed his tone. Dropping the jargon, he asked me all kinds of probing questions about my life, ideals, goals, and experiences. The interview lasted about an hour, and he took notes throughout. In many cases, he repeated questions, or otherwise revisited subjects he’d already covered. (I learned later that the point of the interview was to test an applicant’s honesty. Telling a lie is easy. Telling it the same way twice is more difficult.)
    There was also a test in which I was sent into a room with a pencil and a piece of paper. I was told to close my eyes and make X’s in a series of circles printed on the page. The ostensible purpose was to test my “spatial” response, but I found out later that it was another honesty check. (A candidate who successfully puts all the X’s in the circles is clearly cheating.) I didn’t know that, however. So when I handed in my test—some X’s in and most out—I thought I’d failed.
    I finally got up the nerve to ask what this was all about. Ari said, “If you are interested, and we find you suitable, we will send you on a training course for about a year and then put you to work.” Despite Ari’s evasions, I had an inkling of what was going on. Only one employer was this secretive about recruitment: Israel’s famous intelligence service, the Mossad. When I realized this, I felt a slight tug in my gut.
    To this day, I’m not one hundred per cent sure why the Mossad specifically recruited me, but I can assume that my nationality and Anglo-Saxon background were contributing factors in their decision. By the same token, I had many foreign-born Israeli friends who never received an invitation from the Mossad, so perhaps in their mysterious method of separating the wheat from the chaff, they saw a few grains of possibility in me that could be trained and indoctrinated for their purposes.
    At the end of the interview, I told Ari that I was planning on returning to Canada for a year or so, and he gave me a plain white business card with a telephone number on it. He told me to call when I returned to Israel if I was still interested. I kept the card—all through the time I was in Canada.
    I spent two years with my family in beautiful Vancouver. Upon my return to Canada, I quickly lucked into a decent-paying federal government job. I never had to take work home with me, and had every weekend and statutory holiday off. But despite the long lunch hours and slacker work schedule, something told me I needed to go back to Israel. I hadn’t put in hard time during my conversion and army duty so I could stroll down streets or lie on a beach.
    On this point, Dahlia didn’t need much convincing: she was homesick. And so in the summer of 1988, we boarded an El Al flight and returned to Israel.
    Once back, I didn’t waste a lot of time before calling the