“What could I do?” my father shrugged his shoulders thirty–five years later, an old man speaking to his middle–aged son, man to man, in a Jerusalem park.

“I needed a woman.”

My parents, in their mid– and late eighties, were sitting at the table at my sister Lena's birthday. There were about a dozen more relatives and guests present. By way of wishing her daughter a happy birthday, my mother gave a lengthy and abstruse cabbalistic discourse, which was only tenuously connected with the event. She was obviously showing off, especially in front of her former husband, a man who'd left her for another woman. In spite of all that, I couldn't but feel proud of her: a half–educated woman who'd only done four years of elementary school, she'd mastered Hebrew to perfection when already in her early sixties, and had since been studying religious philosophy and Jewish mysticism with great zeal and success. Then my father spoke. “My dearest daughter,” he said, “I love you very much.” That was all he had to say.

Mother burst into derisive laughter. “Do we really have to repeat the same cliché on every occasion? Can't we come up with something less trite, for a change?”

Father didn't say a word; he only slumped slightly and put his hand up to his chest, on the left; he had a weak heart. I felt an enormous respect for him then, for showing quiet and dignified restraint, for not giving as good as he got.

Sister Milla: Father had always loved Mother very much. She did everything to destroy that love. He wrote her beautiful romantic letters from the front lines. And do you know that he even tried to drown himself after they'd quarreled? Our granny—his mother—told me about it. It happened quite soon after their wedding, in Gomel. She said: “It's dangerous, you don't know my son, he can do anything to himself.” Now, you may say it shows weakness of character, but it surely shows a great love! All right, so he had mistresses, but who didn't during the war? And I wouldn't rush to credit those words she likes to quote about everybody womanizing but his depravity being worse than anybody else's.