All around him, as if every minute were precious, settlers were digging into the flat, sandy strip of coast flanked by rocky mountains. Heavy equipment moved huge mounds of earth so that concrete foundations could be laid. Hilltops were being leveled every morning. Fields of weeds were being cleared, virgin brush-land plowed, roads paved from village to village. Metals were being melted down to be cast in foundries. And all this while hordes of people were buying and selling, changing addresses and fortunes, scouting the lay of the land, searching for new opportunities. Apartments passed from hand to hand. Crafty maxims were rife. Strike while the iron is hot. Live by your wits. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

The people on the bus were reading newspapers in many languages besides Hebrew. Even the bus driver struck Yolek as being a recent immigrant, from Iraq probably, who had already managed to get ahead in life. All these desperate refugees, he thought. We gathered them here from thè four corners of the earth. It’s up to us to impart our dream to them and make it sing in their bones. Let not the warm but weary heart grow chill in these good times that we dreamed of through all those harsh years. Eshkol was right to have chosen last night to talk about the Ta’anach region. In this urban sprawl along the coast, building plots are selling like hotcakes. When the whole state of Israel seems on the verge of overflowing, why not the weary heart too? We still haven’t said our last word. And that’s how I’ll begin today at the meeting. Without denying the dangers, without overlooking all that’s wrong, I’ll tell the party to open its eyes, to take a good look all about it, and rejoice. We’ve had enough gloom and doom.

Yet on these winter nights winds sometimes swept up the wadis and through the crevices of the mountains until you heard them break into a desperate howl right outside your window, as if they had been driven all the way from the snowy steppes of the Ukraine and still had found no peace. And right before dawn a formation of jets would sometimes shoot with savage furor across the low canopy of sky like a pack of hounds in heat.

In the central bus station of Tel Aviv, Yolek was witness to one of those perennial Jewish scenes that still persist and still wreak havoc. A man with a Hungarian accent who, so it seemed, had been caught in an act of petty theft, began to bellow like an ox being dragged to an altar when he saw a policeman approach.

“Gevalt!” he cried out in Yiddish. “Jews, have pity! Gevalt!”