liked.'
Once again those around the table looked at one another. It was the banker who had broken the silence. 'You may not always feel that way,' he said quietly. 'There will be times when you're not wanted, not liked, and it will confuse you, certainly hurt you.'
'That's hard to believe, Grandfather,' said an ebullient young girl Khalehla only vaguely remembered.
The Californian had briefly looked at his son-in-law, his eyes pained. 'As I think back, it's hard for me to believe it, too. Don't ever forget, young lady, if problems arise or if things become difficult, pick up the phone and I'll be on the next plane.'
'Oh, Grandfather, I can't imagine doing that.'
And she hadn't, although there were times when she came close, only pride and what strength she could summon stopping her. Shvartzeh Arviyah!… 'Nigger-Arab!' was her first introduction to one-on-one hatred. Not the blind, irrational hatred of mobs running amok in the streets, brandishing placards and crudely made signs, cursing an unseen enemy far away across distant borders, but of young people like herself, in a pluralistic community of learning, sharing classrooms and cafeterias, where the worth of the individual was paramount, from entrance through constant evaluation to graduation. Each contributed to the whole, but as himself or herself, not as an institutional robot except perhaps on the playing fields, and even there individual performance was recognized, often more so in defeat, touchingly more so. ' Yet for so long she had not been an individual; she had lost herself. That had been eradicated, transferred to an abstract, insidious racial collective called Arab. Dirty Arab, devious Arab, murderous Arab—Arab, Arab, Arab—until she couldn't stand it any longer! She stayed by herself in her room, turning down offers from dormitory acquaintances to visit the collegiate drinking halls; twice had been enough.
The first should have been enough. She had gone to the ladies' room only to find it blocked by two male students; they were Jewish students, to be sure, but they were also American students.
'Thought you Arabs didn't drink!' shouted the drunken young man on her left.
'It's a choice one makes,' she had replied.
'I'm told you Arviyah piss on the floor of your tents!' cried the other, leering.
'You were misinformed. We're quite fastidious. May I please go inside—'
'Not here, Arab. We don't know what you'd leave on the toilet seat and we have a couple of yehudiyah with us. Got the message, Arab?
The breaking point, however, came at the end of her second term. She had done well in a course taught by a renowned Jewish professor, well enough to have been singled out by the sought-after teacher as the student he deemed to have achieved the most. The prize, an annual event in his class, was a personally inscribed copy of one of his works. Many of her classmates, Jews and non-Jews alike, had come around to congratulate her, but when she left the building three others in stocking masks had stopped her on a wooded path back to her dormitory.
'What did you do?' one asked. 'Threaten to blow his house up?'
'Maybe knife his kids with a sharp Arab dagger?'
'Hell, no! She'd call in Arafat!'
'We're going to teach you a lesson, Shvartzeh Arviyah't'
'If the book means so much to you, take it!'
'No, Arab, you take it.'
She had been raped. 'This is for Munich!' 'This is for the children in the Golan kibbutz!' 'This is for my cousin on the beaches of Ashdod where you bastards killed him!' There had been no sexual gratification for the attackers, only the fury of inflicting punishment on the Arab.
She had half crawled, half stumbled back towards her dormitory when a very important person came into her life. One Roberta Aldridge, the inestimable Bobbie Aldridge, the iconoclastic daughter of the New England Aldridges.
'Scum!'' she had screamed into the trees of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
