The film was “Translating,” by the Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv, a series of in-depth monologues by translators from Hebrew into other languages, and the occasion the annual conference of the Israel Translators Association in Jerusalem. The audience, whose linguistic gaps were filled by Hebrew subtitles, could identify with the speakers’ singular strain of obsession, their solitude, and their implicit surprise at being for once in the spotlight instead of the shadows wherein they normally lurk. The symphony of the dozen or so languages in which these unsung laborers told their stories, all referring to the one language they shared and revered, was mesmerizing.

In Barcelona, Manuel Forcano, a lapsed Catholic, told in Catalan how translating poet Yehuda Amichai, a once-orthodox Jew, helped him come to terms with his faithlessness. The Lithuanian-born Sivan Beskin, in Tel Aviv, recalled in Russian how she began translating children’s stories by Lithuanian-born Israeli poet Leah Goldberg from Hebrew back into the poet’s native Russian, so that her immigrant parents could read those stories to her children. Near Paris, Itshok Niborski spoke in a Spanish-accented Yiddish of compiling a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary of idioms.

At minute 1:03:00 of the film appeared the Israeli author Ala Hlehel, of Acre, introduced himself and explained that his native tongue, which he was speaking, was colloquial Arabic. He learned literary Arabic in school, and then Hebrew, which was “not a neutral language for me, it was charged.” He had only just begun to elaborate – “it is the language of occupation, but also of culture” – when the system crashed, those last words frozen on the screen, and a technician rushed over.

Hlehel must not have been on screen for more than 30 seconds when the film stopped, and one had barely begun to take in this new character and absorb his words. But no sooner had the audience realized there was a problem, when a young female voice in my row said out loud: “I’m glad it got stuck. I don’t like what he’s saying.” Then she added: “I don’t like his terminology. It’s not like he’s from the occupied territories, he’s from Israel.”

Trying to understand what there was not to like – the speaker had barely opened his mouth, what “terminology”? – I looked back at the screen, and there it was, the “O” word, hanging in the air, stuck right in front of our faces, with nothing to do about it and nowhere to go. I felt stung by my colleague’s rudeness. Whereas my engrossment in the film had transported me to that perfect place where we all listen to each other with full attention and respect, the women’s outburst reminded me I was still in Israel. The mixture of sheer discourtesy, intolerance and even incuriosity made me cringe.

How dare she hope Hlehel shut up before he even had the chance to say anything? I, for one, was extremely eager to hear what Hlehel had to say. I had first heard of the 38-year-old author two years ago, when he won a literary award in Beirut but was forbidden by Israel to travel to the ceremony – an administrative injunction he challenged in the Supreme Court and succeeded to overturn. Then, some months ago, a Facebook friend had shared a witty column Hlehel had written about the Arabs “wanting back” all the words Hebrew had “stolen” from them, often mispronouncing and distorting their meanings in the process.

Now here he was, about to share some of his thoughts on the profession that had brought us here today, our shared self-appointed mission of ferrying our insular cultural treasures safely into the bigger world. And after hearing how this was being done by an assortment of people who ranged from strangers to friends, we were now about to hear it from a more challenging perspective, that of our estranged cousins, our intimate nemeses, the Arab minority of Israel. For me it was a peak moment in the film. Yet, my colleague over there in the darkness had already heard enough.

While I waited for the organizers to fix the problem, I fumed. I felt the speaker was in the middle of a very personal confession about who he was and how he had become that person, and this heckler was denying him nothing less than his right of self-determination. I tried to analyze what he had said: Hlehel had referred to Hebrew as “the language of the occupation” and the disembodied voice had said that was not acceptable coming from him as he was not occupied. It took me a moment to locate the problem, but when I did, I was actually impressed at how instantly my colleague had processed the whole situation: in her reasoning, I realized, Hlehel was declaring that his native Galilee, part of Israel since it was founded in 1948, was occupied, which meant he did not recognize Israel, and therefore she, an Israeli, did not recognize him. The linguist in me kicked in: but that’s not what he said, I thought. He said Hebrew was the language of occupation, but didn’t specifically count himself as one of the people under it. He may or may not consider himself occupied but still call it the language of occupation. But even if he was implying he did not recognize Israel, do we Israelis have to be so terrified that we would rather end the conversation right there? I would like to think we have enough confidence to hear dissenting voices, not just ones that make us feel good, and contend with them.

Unfortunately, in today’s Israel, any voice that falls outside of the political mainstream is silenced with outrageous ease. How naïve of me to be surprised that happened here, at an international translators’ conference. It must have also been naïve of me to think anyone with a complicated enough identity to qualify for this line of work was as curious as I was about other people’s complicated identities. Here was one of our esteemed colleagues laying himself bare, exposing the clashes of his battling loyalties, ultimately leading to his amazing choice to dedicate much of his human capital to bringing his people the culture of their adversaries. It was surely the most painful of all the stories we had heard. But apparently it left some people cold.

Thankfully, our competent technician got the film running again and we got to hear Hlehel’s account of pillaging Israeli literature and making it available to the Palestinian people, perhaps getting even with us for all those stolen words. He overcame his initial resistance when he discovered the iconoclastic Hebrew playwright Hanoch Levin and couldn’t resist translating his work, beginning with “The Suitcase Packers,” about a group of people who all want to leave the country, but, instead, die.

The camera panned Acre’s jumble of cinderblock tenements with solar water heaters on their rooftops, with a glimpse of a strip of blue sea on the horizon, as seen from the window of the translator’s study. The translator reverted to his shadows and his silence.

Today I had a small taste of confronting the Israeli occupation from the Palestinian side, and I confess that even my brief exposure was traumatic.

Heeding the invitation of my friend Gershon Baskin for Israelis to join him at the weekly non-violent protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, in the hope of mitigating the brutal force the Israeli army exerts against the protesters, I set out early Friday morning with most of the things on the list Gershon sent me – food, water, sunscreen, a towel against tear gas – in my backpack, and a sense of foreboding in my heart.

When I said I was afraid of being hurt, Gershon replied “you’re right. It can be dangerous.” He had no words of comfort, except for repeating that he was going to call the army command before the demonstration started and tell them that dozens of Israeli supporters were going to march with the Palestinians, and ask them to take that into consideration.

As planned, we arrived at 8 a.m. for the 1 p.m. event, hoping to get into the village before the army sealed it off. But it was too late: soldiers blocked the entrance and waved us off. They had also put up a sign declaring the village “Area A” – under control of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, which Israeli law forbids Israelis to enter. The village is really Area C, which Israelis are allowed into. The sign was a lie. We parked a ways up the road and then the dozen or so activists who had arrived hiked into the village through the fields for twenty minutes. On the way, Gershon advised us to speak quietly and silence our phones. The village had been declared a “closed military area,” and we were violating the law.

We soon found out that two activists who tried to enter the main way were arrested and charged with “attempting to break through an army barricade.”

After gathering in the village square, we were invited to the home of one of the village leaders, a friend of Gershon’s, with whom he had coordinated our solidarity visit. Over coffee in his spacious salon our host briefed us about the village’s struggle to reclaim its land on which the settlement of Halamish was built. He said the Israeli High Court ruled in their favor but they never got their land back or were allowed access to their fields abetting it. Settlers took over Nabi Saleh’s spring and for the past two years the villagers had tried to march to it every Friday but had been held back by the army.

Gershon told us that at first a lot of Israelis had signed up for this action, but as the week went on they started cancelling out of fear. He said he didn’t blame them. I didn’t either: after being the first one to sign up, as Gershon told me, out of a sense of outrage at the army’s brutality and my wish to join the campaign to challenge it, my fear took over. As the day neared I slept worse every night, and the last night I hardly slept at all.

While we waited for the march, there was less talk of principles of non-violent resistance than of practicalities: what to do against tear gas and how to behave if arrested. My friends and I agreed we were here to make a point by our presence but our cowardice would keep us at the back of the crowd where we would be less exposed. I kept thinking of my family worrying about me at home and couldn’t wait for it to be over, even before it started. An Israeli journalist who was with us felt that we were insufficiently welcomed by the villagers, that they could have been more appreciative of the effort and gesture we made in coming out. An activist answered her that it wasn’t for us to tell the Palestinians how to behave. I admit I had also expected a little more visible appreciation for what in my society is an extraordinary show of solidarity with those most Israelis see as enemies. But when I considered how badly they had been treated by Israelis for so long – and where were we then? – I understood their complex feelings. Besides, they did welcome us into their homes and tell us they would do everything they could to protect us.

In one of the homes we visited, our host told us his 19-year-old daughter had been beaten up by Israeli border police last month and put in the hospital. In an unusual turn of events, the police were put on trial and she was summoned to testify against them. When the same young woman admired my new wide-brimmed straw hat, I gave it to her in exchange for her showing me how to wrap my scarf around my head Palestinian-style. An activist offered me jasmine perfume to spray on the front of my scarf as an antidote to the anticipated tear gas. Another advised us to buddy up and a third said the most important thing about tear gas was not to panic.

As the event drew near, Gershon made his phone calls to the army but was not successful: at the two offices he reached – the local and regional commands – he was unable to speak to the officers in charge and left messages with unreliable-sounding young soldiers. It looked like the central plank of his initiative – informing the army of our presence and asking them to be gentle – was falling apart.

At 1:15 people started streaming out of the mosque and amassed for the march. A young man with a megaphone said a few words and I translated for my fellow activists: “Today we are marching for the martyrs who died on Israel’s borders with Syria,” referring to a protest earlier in the week. We looked at each other in confusion. Weren’t we marching for an end to the occupation and allowing the villagers to access their spring?

We didn’t have long to ponder this because within 100 meters and 60 seconds the first tear gas canister was fired from far off at the entrance of the village into its center. Immediately everyone started running back, away from the soldiers, but, as it happened, towards the tear gas: it had landed behind the group, and the only way to get away from it was to run right through it. I found myself with two of my buddies, one particularly affected and, sure enough, panicky. Although I too was gagging and tearing, this put me in the position of being the abler one and my attention was on helping my friend. The three of us found our way to the home we had been invited to use for shelter, and there we were cared for until we felt better. Our hosts had much experience with gas, as it was used in the village in large quantities every week and often fired at or into homes. When this happened, the effect lingered for days. Sometimes, furniture caught fire.

As we left to rejoin our comrades, our host said “please remember us and come back not only in situations like this, but to visit us.” I promised to remember but doubt I will visit.

Outside we could hear the repeated pounding of canisters being fired at a distance, but we stayed in the village center while the confrontation was elsewhere. I informed my friends that I had had enough, I really couldn’t take it anymore, and was ready to go home. They were too, but it was not at all clear there was a safe way out of the village: the army was likely to spread gas everywhere, even in the fields. I felt trapped and hunted. There was nowhere safe to go. It was also clear that there was nothing I could do or say, and it didn’t matter who I was: the military machine was proceeding apace, and its orders were to act relentlessly to contain and especially deter the Palestinian resistance. Activists observed that not only did the presence of Israelis not make things better, it had apparently made things worse. Huge amounts of tear gas were fired for hours and several activists and villagers were evacuated by ambulance.

We were told the village was sealed and there was indeed no safe way to leave. But my friend and I got lucky and got a lift out with a BBC van that had managed to enter the village with its press privileges.

The terror of being exposed to physical harm did not leave me for hours. I know I am not brave in that way. Besides a relatively mild whiff of tear gas I was not even hurt. But worse was the feeling of being trapped and threatened. The activists who have been experiencing this regularly for years can laugh, and the Palestinians who have no choice can scoff at my delicacy. After all, I can decide that I did my bit for the struggle, this is not for me, and go on to entertain my friends with stories of my little adventure. But if I multiply my brush with fear a million times over, I think I got a glimpse of what it feels like to be under military occupation, having no voice and living under the constant threat of violence day in and day out.

In the comfort of my home in Jerusalem, I wonder if the jasmine is blooming outside, or if that scent rising up from my neck is just lingering in my imagination.

It was even more crowded. Some of the population had changed while some of the same ladies were still working on their hair and nails, but now there was a new common cause. It started innocently: “She’s been in there for a long time, hasn’t she. What’s going on there?” one woman asked nobody in particular. “I know. She’s been showering for 20 minutes or something. We would never take a shower for more than three or four minutes.” There was collective agreement. “We” would never do such a thing. “She must be a foreigner,” said another. “If she were one of us she would know better.” A discussion began over which water-rich country this water guzzler was from; surely if she were “one of us” she would know Israel is suffering from a water shortage and not wasting water is one of the highest forms of patriotism.

The tone of conversation was rising to an angry panic, until someone couldn’t stand it anymore and went to the shower stall and called through the curtain: “What kind of long shower is that? Enough already.” The stunned addressee called back sheepishly, “Oh, is somebody waiting?” And was answered with a curt: “No, nobody’s waiting, but you can’t take such a long shower. You’re wasting water.”

Then the vanguard came back and reported: “She’s a foreigner. She looks Japanese.” I knew this meant “she has Asian features but I have no idea what ethnic group she’s from,” but in today’s isolated, xenophobic Israel you can still sound like you are in the U.S. in the 1960’s, before cultural sensitivity and political correctness. It is also completely acceptable to make racial slurs openly in a crowd of people, without anyone pointing out that as a descendant of Jews who suffered for generations because of their minority status you should know better.

A woman getting dressed next to me tried to enlist me: “You can tell she’s a foreigner. One of us would never take such a long shower and waste Israel’s water.” Undoubtedly, there is a plot underway by foreigners to use up our country’s water, she implied, waiting for my approval. I couldn’t help noticing that these high-minded environmentalists, so concerned about our natural resources, are the same people who in the summer insist the windows of the gym stay open while the air conditioner runs even when it’s 40 degrees centigrade outside, “so it won’t be stuffy.” While toweling myself off I tried to de-escalate. “If she’s a foreigner she might not know about our local rules and problems,” I tried, “but I’m sure she’ll learn.” My neighbor gave me a dirty look and turned away, but I saw another young woman flash me a smile of support. I was definitely “new.”

It was still a few minutes until the “Japanese” lady got out of the shower, during which the women could talk about nothing else but her impertinent wastefulness. Out of nowhere sprung a consensus that she be reported to the management and barred from using the pool. When she did emerge, the woman was showered with scorn. I wanted to go up to her and offer some compassion, but was relieved to see someone else talking to her gently in the corner, explaining what the uproar was about. I wasn’t sure if those were tears in her eyes or just redness from the pool. But I felt deeply disturbed by the ease at which a random group of people who happened to show up at the swimming pool at the same time turned into a lynch mob. All the rules of “in” and “out” group psychology kicked in instantly, from the presumed superiority of the in group to the shared hostility towards anyone outside of it.

On my way out I passed two of the defenders of the pool and Israel’s honor, complaining to the receptionist about the foreigner who was trying to use up Israel’s water. In that context it didn’t matter that the receptionist was an Arab; as an employee of the pool he was still “one of ours.” As long as he doesn’t try to rent an apartment in our neighborhood or date one of our daughters.

After my previous guest post Beware: Adult Content generated a high volume of traffic to Michael’s blog, he invited me back, and I will be contributing occasionally (even though we both know what really drove the traffic surge were the key words “adult content”). As I end my visit to Leipzig I offer you a piece I wrote during a previous visit two years ago. It is long.

My German Manicure

By Shoshana London Sappir

I am ushered to a downstairs room in the beauty salon. The manicurist, walking a step behind me, says something in German about “links.” My mind flashes straight to Dr. Mengele on the platform. Links – left –means life. Rechts – right – means death. She wants me to take the seat on the left, I realize. I sit down.

“English?” I ask. She struggles with the words “only a little,” giggles and shrugs. I answer with a big smile, trying to convey: “Don’t worry, we’ll be just fine.”

The woman, in her mid-forties with dark-framed glasses, brown hair tied back in a pony tail and a white smock, places a folded white towel on each of my knees.  Then she places a deep bowl of soapy water in front of me, signaling me to dip my fingers in the holes. While we wait, she asks me in German where I live. I figure it out from the word “haus.”

“Israel!” I answer, gleeful with comprehension. “Mein kind lives hier,” I explain, mixing English with scraps of Yiddish that float up from my childhood. She understands and asks me if he is a student at the “uni.” I don’t know how to say “sort of,” or that he is starting next fall, so I say “ja,” and add proudly, albeit half in Russian, that he speaks German.

Our conversation is going very well. She asks me to take off my rings and tells me that she has a daughter who is living in London and speaks English. We laugh at the symmetry. We are both mothers of grown-up children who live away from home and speak each other’s respective languages. I ask if her daughter is a student and she says no, “arbeit.” “Arbeit macht frei!” a bell rings in my mind. I know that word!

I am treating myself to some pampering while I wait for my son to get off work at his new job in Leipzig, Germany. He is 19 years old and has lived here for nine months.

I never really saw Michael as an adult before this visit. Last time I saw him, I reminded him to take a sweater and asked him if he had enough money. Now I am his guest, and it is he who is taking care of me: he made me my hotel reservation; he speaks for me when we order from a menu and he even coaches me in manners. He claims I talk too loud when we walk in the street or sit at a restaurant. Funny, in Israel I always thought of myself as the quiet one.

The manicurist takes my right hand in her left and starts on it with an oversized glass nail file. All evidence to the contrary, she makes another attempt to find out if we have any language in common: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” she tries. “English,” I start counting off on my fingers, “Hebraisch,” she shakes her head apologetically, “Russische” – here I lilt my voice hopefully – it is the former East Germany after all, and if she had paid any attention in school we would have something to work with – but no, she is sorry to indicate; “Spanische,” I continue, and she is by now feeling pretty bad about herself. I sum it up with a shrug and then I remember what I majored in at university. “Arabische!” This just makes her file a little harder.

And it makes me think about the irony of speaking so many languages but being so utterly unequipped to deal with the present moment. I love studying languages and until now I thought I had mastered more than enough of them to serve the needs of one lifetime. Yet here I am, literally speechless. I have definitely been studying the wrong languages. I could just as soon have known German by now. But how could I have known my son would end up in Germany? Conversation has come to a halt; I am staring into space while the manicurist focuses on my hands.

But the dialogue goes on in my head. How did you come to be from Israel and have a son living here? I imagine her asking me. Well, it’s a long story, I say. Actually, his grandmother on his father’s side was a German Jew, but she had to leave because of the war. Oh, that’s too bad, her imaginary voice in my head says, and her glib tone of voice surprises me. She does not sound sufficiently embarrassed, horrified or guilty and I get the feeling she does not know that much about the war. I remember that I read somewhere that the generation of this woman’s parents didn’t speak much about the war, and the post-war generation grew up with a kind of void regarding the past; some of the more eloquent members of that generation – my generation, in fact – tell of a feeling of sitting on a huge secret, knowing there are things you don’t ask about and don’t talk about, and if you are sensitive and conscientious you might find that eerie, creepy and crazy-making; moreover, from what I have heard, the Soviet-satellite East of Germany, of which Leipzig once was a part, did not commit to the same process of self-examination as the West. And as I have already figured out, if she had been a good student she would know some Russian and we would be having this conversation out loud and I could ask her.

But, in the imaginary ignorance I silently attribute to her, she apparently does not share my outrage at her people – maybe even her father, grandfather, uncles, the grownups who raised her, the people who came to her childhood birthday parties – who went all the way to Kaunas, Lithuania, to round up and kill my great grandparents, and my mother’s 11 uncles and aunts, including little Dvosha – my grandmother’s baby sister born in the old country long after she herself left for America – Dvosha, who a surviving cousin told me read Hebrew at four, recited entire Psalms by heart at five and died sometime between the ages of six and nine.

Because the woman filing my nails has only vaguely ever heard of any of these atrocities, I imagine, my resentment growing, they do not weigh down on her conscience, and therefore being a German cosmetician who is doing the nails of a Jew from Israel whose son is a would-be student in Leipzig is not a terribly charged experience for her, and the story I find myself telling her in response to her imaginary question about how my son ended up here comes out different from the one I usually tell myself or people who ask me about it in Israel.

In this simplified version of the story, Michael’s paternal grandmother had to leave Germany “because of the war” – more specifically, directly from Bergen Belsen, but that’s just another place she never heard of, so I won’t complicate things by mentioning it – and he decided, well, to come back. And I think for today we can leave out the part about how in the interval his grandmother was part of founding the State of Israel, how my family moved there from America to be part of the miracle of the return to our Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile, and that at one time we believed that now that we had our own state we and our children would never want to live anywhere else. All of that may be implied when another Jew asks me what Michael is doing here, here in the land of the killers, of all places outside of our Holy Land, but in this little room in a beauty salon populated by a work-weary woman who is massaging my hands with cream, I will keep it simple, one mother to another, proud of our young-adult children venturing out into the world to seek their futures. Why ruin a perfectly sunny day in May with all those dark memories, unfathomable ironies and unanswerable questions when we just came here to have a little fun?

“Everything okay?” she asks, looking up from my left hand, which she is holding in both of hers and rubbing.

“Everything’s fine,” I smile back at her.

My husband’s Uncle Meir, who unlike his parents and siblings fled Germany before the war, is emphatic about not visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons: “This generation had nothing to do with that,” he told me. So I look at this kind lady and tell myself: “It is not her fault she was born to a bunch of murderers.” Nor was Michael responsible for the dreams of his fathers. He rebelled against the idea that just because he was born a Jew in Israel he had to be religious or Zionist. He is neither.

It pained me when Michael announced that in Germany he felt at home. This is not something I expected to hear from my Israeli-born son. But I suspect the grandmother he never met passed on certain subtle aspects of German culture to his father, who passed them on to him, giving things in this country a familiar, comfortable feel. Before Michael I had almost never heard a Jew say anything positive about Germany: I heard a lot of people say they would not set foot there – including my husband, until he changed his mind – and that they “couldn’t stand the sound of the German language.” Even though Israel has maintained relations with Germany for more than 40 years now, most of the people I know can not resist making a snide comment at the mention of that country. Few met the news of Michael’s moving there with equanimity. For a long time I couldn’t say the name of the country out loud. I would say “my son went to Europe.” One day I took the bus home from my Russian class with a classmate, and she told me she had a daughter who was living “in Europe.” To which I said “I have a son in Germany too!”

Yet, Michael states plainly that Germany’s public civility and cleanliness make him feel comfortable and welcome here, just as much as Israel’s noise and chaos always bothered him.

So you see, I wrap up my closing argument in my imaginary answer to the cosmetician’s question about how my son ended up here, I thought my son would stay in Israel, with us, but he decided to move away and live here, just like young people do all the time, just like your daughter in London, I tell my new friend, although still silently, in my head, as she massages some cream into the backs of my hands.

I am so engrossed in thought that it takes me a while to notice something is amiss. I don’t see any bottles of nail polish in the room. This is not like any of the manicures I have ever had, surrounded by hundreds of colorful little bottles forcing me to make a deliciously agonizing choice. For half an hour my hands have been massaged, peeled and rubbed with cream, my cuticles have been poked and my nails have been filed, but where is this going? When I try to broach the issue, I am so anxious I can’t think of any pseudo-German word for “color” or even “red,” so I try faking it with an accent, coming out with something like “ruhd,” gesturing and lapsing into English: “Where are the colors?”

The manicurist points to a shelf behind me, on which there are six bottles of polish, all nearly indistinguishable shades of bright pink. I ask, in English, if that’s all. Yes, it is. I choose the darkest one, hoping it is redder than it looks, but when she paints my pinky nail it comes out electric pink, and I scream: “No, no, no, forget about it!” This cuts right through the language barrier.

She wipes it off and continues her program of cream, peeling, mask and massage as I try to get over my shock. I try to put a positive spin on my disappointment. I have been having hand pains for some time because I type so much, and maybe, I comfort myself, I am getting just the treatment I need even though I didn’t ask for it. But still, it said “manicure” on their sign and that is what I asked for. Is it possible that the only word in German I had no doubt about, that I thought I really knew, that I didn’t try to cobble together out of fragments of two thousand years of globe-spanning Jewish linguistic history, could the word “manicure” have more than one meaning? Could they take it literally to mean “hand treatment,” without nail polish? Apparently they could and they did and they charged me 25 euros.

I go out into the street staring at my boring, colorless nails in disbelief. I could have filed my nails and put cream on my hands myself. What did I just pay 25 euros for? What is wrong with this country?  When I meet Michael at my hotel I am indignant.

“I can’t believe what just happened,” I begin my rant.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I went for a manicure, at that place we saw the other day, and look, look!” I shove the backs of my hands into his face.

“Yeah, what?”

Boys, I sigh. My daughter would have gasped. “No color! No nail polish!” I spell it out to him. “What’s the point of getting a manicure if you don’t get your nails polished?”

“What a bummer.”

“And it cost me twice as much as it does in Israel!”

“No kidding.”

“What is wrong with these people?” I scream. “You tell me. What kind of people are they?”

“Mom?”

“What?!”

“Come with me,” he says.

And I look at my son, mein kind, this six-foot man with a blond pony tail who makes waitresses blush, this citizen of the world who knows his way around town and speaks the language, and I feel safe and cared for and I follow.

He leads me across the street, holding a hand to my elbow, gently reminding me to watch out for the trams. He takes me to the drug store and for another 10 euros I get my favorite shade of braun.