Is there no end, she thinks, flopping again from her back to her stomach while Remy breathes heavily at her side, is there really no end to the uses and abuses of the Holocaust they will come up with? Here they are, riffing off a deep emotional chord in the country’s history, playing on the moving stories her mother’s generation grew up with, which happened far too infrequently but were so often told, of fathers and husbands, wives and sisters, lost during the war and presumed dead, only to be miraculously dredged up by the Red Cross and reunited with their loved ones. Rescued from the lost and the dead in some hellish DP camp, packed onto a boat to Haifa, and in a moving ceremony of the impossible becoming possible, the unreal becoming real, which after all was to be the hallmark, the specialty, of that about-to-be-born country, delivered into the arms of the one who lost them, who presumably never took them for granted again. And now here was Social Services, or Special Services, or whatever they called themselves, claiming even now, seventy years on, to be turning up, in the form of little old men in shapeless hats, all the love that was lost? And, so that no opportunity for hypocrisy should be missed, at the very same moment when they were sending their agents out with a plan to thrust these unclaimed old Jews into other people’s homes and hands, they were sending out the police to round up the Sudanese in Florentine for deportation, and to pluck out of their homes Filipino children who had been born in Israel, whose first language was Hebrew and grew up singing “Ha’Tikva,” to throw them into jail before kicking them out of the country they’d grown up in for good. What kind of fools did they think they were dealing with?

She leaps out of bed and pulls on her robe, the puffy chenille one the kids got for her birthday a few years back, as comfortable as it is unflattering, yanks her phone from the plug, and marches into the kitchen. If Shlomi isn’t prepared to do anything about this, if he is happy to just sit by and let their mother be conned by this character and the agency acting in support of his audacity, then she will have to see to it on her own.

She calls her mother. It’s already eight thirty in the morning in Israel, and either she will be getting ready to go to the pool or preparing for her class. And yet when her mother answers after four or five rings, there is the sound of roaring and children shouting, and, after a moment, a booming voice warning someone of the rip current on the other side of the ropes.

Hold on, I can’t hear you! her mother shouts.