Thieves in the Night (2012)
“He slept for most of the three hours’ journey through the orange and lemon groves of the Maritime Plain of Samaria of which the strip along the coast was in Hebrew, the next, parallel inland belt in Arab possession. Whenever Joseph, waking, looked through the window, he saw not the landscape but an unprotected flank. When they arrived in Tel Aviv, the khamsin had just reached its peak.
Each time Joseph came to Tel Aviv he was torn between his contrasting emotions of tenderness and revulsion. Te...nderness for the one and only purely Hebrew town in the world with the lyrical name of Hill of Spring and the jostling vitality of its hundred and fifty thousand citizens; revulsion from the dreadful mess they had made of it. It was a frantic, touching, maddening city which gripped the traveller by his buttonhole as soon as he entered it, tugged and dragged him round like a whirlpool, and left him after a few days faint and limp, not knowing whether he should love or hate it, laugh or scorn.
The whole adventure had started less than a generation ago, when the handful of native Jewish families in Arab Jaffa decided to build a residential suburb of their own, on what they imagined to be modern European lines.MoreLess
Each time Joseph came to Tel Aviv he was torn between his contrasting emotions of tenderness and revulsion. Te...nderness for the one and only purely Hebrew town in the world with the lyrical name of Hill of Spring and the jostling vitality of its hundred and fifty thousand citizens; revulsion from the dreadful mess they had made of it. It was a frantic, touching, maddening city which gripped the traveller by his buttonhole as soon as he entered it, tugged and dragged him round like a whirlpool, and left him after a few days faint and limp, not knowing whether he should love or hate it, laugh or scorn.
The whole adventure had started less than a generation ago, when the handful of native Jewish families in Arab Jaffa decided to build a residential suburb of their own, on what they imagined to be modern European lines.MoreLess
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