For a couple of years it had been good. Ayala was more at home in the secular world of their new neighborhood across town, and she basked in the happiness of her mother and the good man she had found. Ayala’s memories of this time had been the soil into which she would eventually plant the seed of her relationship with Barrett, the only fertile part of a life otherwise bereft of affection.

But it had not lasted. Her stepfather was an alien here, he had taken work with a construction company as a younger man, but growing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors made it ever harder to find work. In 1967, the six-day war marked the start of renewed open aggression in the Middle East, and the outward expansion of Israeli borders as far as the Suez Canal. Though the war was officially started by Egypt and Jordan, the Israelis were prepared, and it was during this brief but lopsided conflict that they took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hostilities would continue to flair until the last major Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973, when the armies of Egypt and Syria, backed by a host of other nations, would invade Israel once more. That war would, ironically, lead to Egypt becoming the first Arab nation to recognize Israel as a state, but by then Ayala’s life, and that of her small family, had been changed forever. Without work, or hope for support from Ayala’s family, they had left Israel and gone to her stepfather’s home nation: Saudi Arabia.

As an Israeli, Ayala’s mother was a leper in the community, and stayed indoors for most of the day. Meanwhile, Ayala was forced to survive by becoming her surroundings. The first fights and struggles of her days at school made her extraordinarily tough. She discovered inside her an innate ability to fit in, and two years and two different schools later, she walked and talked like all of her new Arab friends. Her mother went slowly insane, grief at her fate and her daughter’s denial of her roots wrenching at her in her long days behind closed doors and drawn curtains.

By the time Ayala was eighteen, there was nothing left of the mother she had once loved; fear, grief, and paranoia driving her to fits of rage.

But Ayala’s mother was wrong about the young Ayala. She had not forgotten her roots in Tel Aviv, either in HaKirya or even in Kerem HaTeimanim. She had not forgotten who she was. She had done what was necessary to survive. To this day she still thought of it as her first mission, and her most complete success. Her ability to fool even her own mother into believing she was something she was not giving her the confidence she would later need to walk into a den of hornets, look them in the eye, and say, “I am one of you.”