Look at it this way. No one knows better than you do that in all these years Yolek Lifshitz never toadied up to you for a single personal favor. On the contrary. Often enough I spooned you out wormwood and vinegar. During the Great Split I even published an article against you and cruelly called you a jongleur. And, more recently, during the Lavon Affair, I wrote that you, Levi Eshkol, had sold your soul to the Devil. Nor, God help me, do I take a word of it back. May He before Whom there is neither foolishness nor levity forgive us, my dearest Eshkol. The truth of the matter is that we were all jongleurs. We honestly did sell our souls. Not for filthy lucre, to be sure, or for our own worldly pleasure or comfort. We sold them, if I may say so, for the sake of heaven. And that brings me back to what I said about the thirty-six wicked men on whom the world depends. Na. I’m digressing again.

Allow me to return to my son. That is, to my elder, Yonatan. And allow me, too, to make a long story short. The boy was raised here on Kibbutz Granot with more than his share of vitamins and sunshine, yet somehow managed to grow up to be a sensitive, shy young man, a real feinshmecker. As for the rest, you can easily imagine it. A politician with high principles for a father, and for a mother—nu, Hava. Perhaps you’ve met her? A shattered soul, that one, a walking hornet’s nest. Incidentally, we’ll all fry over a low flame in hell for what we’ve done to our women. All our revolutions and utopias have been carried out on their backs. And they were the only ones who paid the full price.

On top of everything else, this young man suddenly went and fell in love with a strange, apathetic creature, one who—mind you, I write this for your eyes alone with the utmost confidence in your discretion—may even suffer from some slight mental retardation. And the two of them set up house. I must say I don’t understand the first thing about modern love. And then they had some sort of gynecological tragedy. I won’t go into the details. Of what help could you or I be in such matters anyway?