by Ruth Gruber
In the evening, a long black limousine pulled up in front of the house. Soon everyone on Bet Hakerem Street knew that the president of Israel, Ephraim Katzir, and his wife, Nina, had come to pay their respects to Raquela and Moshe.
It was President Katzir who had served with Jacob in the Haganah, whose reminiscences brought the first healing laughter to the house. Walking to the French doors opening on to Papa’s garden, he turned to his wife. “Over there”—he pointed beyond the garden—“is Bialik Street. Nina, do you remember when you and Jacob were students together at the Yellin Seminar and you lived in a room there on Bialik Street?”
Nina smiled. “How could I forget?”
“And you remember how I used to come evenings to visit you?”
Mama interrupted. “And do you remember, Ephraim”—her eyes were sparkling mischievously—“how you used to jump out of Nina’s window at night?”
President Katzir’s round face broke into a smile. “I didn’t want to disturb the landlady.”
The period of mourning came to an end. Raquela arose, dressed carefully, arranged her hair and returned to work.
Once again she spent half the week in Jerusalem in the mother-and-child-care clinics, and the other half in Beersheba, in the hospital, visiting the Bedouin Arabs in their tents and houses and the new immigrants in their modest homes.
She plunged into work. Work was the road to recovery. Her projects multiplied—projects to keep newborn babies alive.
In Beersheba, she created a new study—to find the causes and a cure for the dangerous hepatitis rampant among newborn babies from Arab lands.
Her days were crowded; friends and family came each evening, surrounding her with warmth and compassion. She was coping. Again she was the gracious hostess, pouring coffee, serving the cakes and pies she had baked. She knew herself; she knew her own feelings, and all day she could control them, though hardly a moment passed that she did not think of Rafi.
It was only at night that the loneliness, the loss, the pain and grief, refused to be controlled.
In bed, with Moshe holding her tightly, she wept.
“How much longer, Moshe? How many more sons must die before peace comes? What can we do, Moshe?”
“We go on living,” he said.
* * *
*Major General Mandler was killed in action on the Canal on the eighth day of the war.
*A solemn day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
AFTERWORD
Raquela enjoyed the celebrity she won after the book appeared. Letters reached her from admirers around the world. People stopped her on the streets of Jerusalem to congratulate her. She had become a heroine in her own land during her lifetime.
In September 1978, she and her husband, Dr. Moshe Prywes, came to the United States. They were in America barely a week when Doctor Prywes suffered a heart attack. Open heart surgery left him paralyzed, and for seven months Raquela nursed him in the hospital. Exhausted, she then suffered a heart attack. Immediately following surgery she contracted hepatitis from the blood transfusion.
El Al turned one of its aircraft into a hospital plane and flew them on stretchers to Israel. Moshe was taken to Hadassah’s Rehabilitation Center on Mount Scopus, where he learned to walk again. Raquela was treated in Hadassah’s hospital in Ein Kerem. But the hepatitis destroyed her liver.
She lived until March 1985. During those last months, at 60, she kept herself alive to hold her first granddaughter, little Noa, in her arms.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Sholom Aleichem Family Partnership: Excerpts from Adventures of Mottel: The Cantor’s Son by Sholom Aleichem, translated by Tamara Kahana. Copyright © 1953 by the children of Sholom Aleichem and Henry Schuman, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Sholom Aleichem Family Partnership.
copyright © 1978, 2000 by Ruth Gruber
cover design by Milan Bozic
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0610-2
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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