By the way, I’m not ashamed to admit that it grieves me to think Ben-Gurion will apparently outlive us. Forgive me for being wicked to the last, but just between the two of us, what did he have that we didn’t? Only that he, and he alone, was the demiurge behind the ill wind! Let that be as it may, though. I won’t pick another quarrel now. I know that you still refuse to agree with me on this, and insist that we are pygmies compared to him, etc. As you wish. When I wrote in my last pamphlet (Facing the Future, 1959) that Ben-Gurion had left an indelible stamp upon our lives “for better and for worse,” you even reprimanded me in public. “You should get down on your knees before him, Yolek,” you said. But I won’t pursue the matter any further. In the meantime you’ve felt his sting too, which made me both grieve for you and—why bother to deny it?—experience sweet feelings of malicious joy. Let’s not argue any more about Ben-Gurion. Deep in your heart and in your gut, you old buzzard, you know as well as I do that I’m right.

Let me tell you about a curious incident. Several weeks ago a bizarre young man—a bit of a sensitive plant, and a musician and philosopher to boot—turned up at our kibbutz and asked to be allowed to stay. I had my doubts about him. Another eccentric was not exactly what we needed at the moment. On second thought, though, I decided to risk it and take him on. He is the kind of human material one doesn’t see any more, a genuine dreamer and intellectual, if rather confused. In a word, he might have been one of us had he not been born in the wrong generation. “The forest’s too deep for small boys and sheep,” he tells me, quotes copiously from Spinoza, and suddenly stops to opine that Ben-Gurion is out of his mind. I hardly need tell you that I gave him a good dressing-down, but to myself I said, using a favorite phrase of yours, “Nu, nu!”