Let me add that I’m not excusing myself either. Mea culpa. I did him and his brother a great wrong. All through their childhood I was so busy bringing about the kingdom of heaven for the party and the movement that I left their education to the kibbutz. Not, incidentally, that you have any right to talk. From what I hear, you haven’t fared much better. Well, we sowed the wind and we have, as it was written, reaped the whirlwind. But the true, the one real culprit is none other than Ben-Gurion. He and his lunatic Canaanite theories about the new generation of biblical Gideons and Nimrods that we were going to raise here, a pack of wild prairie wolves instead of little rabbis. No more Marxes, Freuds, and Einsteins; no more Menuhins and Jascha Heifetzes; not even any more Gordons, Borochovs, and Berls—no, from now on nothing but sunburned, ignorant, illiterate warriors, Joabs and Abners and Ehuds.

And what came out of all this hocus-pocus? Nabal the Carmelite, I tell you, and all the other little pisspots we see on all sides. You yourself are surrounded by these gangsters—wild-eyed kulaks plucked by Ben-Gurion from behind the plow, Jewish Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon heroes, moronic rednecks, circumcised Cossacks, biblical Bedouins, Tatars of the Hebrew faith. To say nothing of all the calculating, diplomaed, foppish young scoundrels with their expensive suits and silver tie clips, all those decadent Anglo-Saxonish dandies and their flashy American elegance. What a far cry they all are from the provincial scoundrels, the mystical Jewish cutthroats, the somnambulists in love with ideas that you and I were! Na. That’s just the tone that’s between us. Don’t you be angry with me. I’m writing from the depths, and they are seething.

Not that I’m looking to pick a fight with you. We’ve fought more than enough, you and I. Although, to tell the truth, I don’t envy you. Yet maybe things would be better if I were in your place. You’re too quick to give in and forgive. Whereas I’m just wicked enough to squelch this wild bacchanal once and for all. Still, I don’t envy you. On the contrary, my heart goes out to you. Thank God I’m not responsible for this mess and can, biblically speaking, sit quietly beneath my grape vine and my fig tree. Something tells me, though, that deep inside you, you too are heartsick with weeping for Rachel’s lost dream. For, though it dare not speak out, the heart knows that we have been hopelessly, irrevocably, eternally defeated. All is lost, Eshkol. Geendikt.

Enough beating about the bush. Time to get down to what’s really on my mind—my son.