Free Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks Page A

frontier” than my father erupted from his armchair.
    “It isn’t, you know! What about the human brain! We’re only using one percent of the brain’s capacity—that’s the finalbloody frontier! Hell’s bells, who writes this garbage?” His voice, his wonderfully trained singer’s voice that could fill an auditorium, boomed like a cannon in our living room. “Stop yelling,” my mother said. “I’M NOT YELLING!” he yelled. On he went, and on, about the intellectual deficiencies of Hollywood script writers, the narrowness of the cultural debate, our inferior moral fiber for supporting such drivel by watching it.
    There was no way to short-circuit one of these diatribes. To interrupt was simply to refocus his anger on oneself. By the day after, he would have forgotten everything he’d said. The positive side to his amnesia was that it taught us not to take his abuse to heart. The negative side was that the whole argument could be rerun dozens of times, often word for word. That was how it was with the “Star Trek” introduction. If my father had been drinking, the words “The final frontier” would be like the bell to Pavlov’s dog. He would thunder, “It isn’t, you know!” And off he would go again on his tirade. Eventually, we made a joke out of it, competing to see who could be quickest to get out the words “It isn’t, you know.” My father would look at us with a puzzled expression, murmur, “Too bloody right,” and wander off to find a mis-hung tea towel to complain about.
    These alcohol-induced tempers were the unscourable residue of my father’s earlier self, a small untidy corner in what had become an otherwise orderly life. One or two of them were the blight on each otherwise tranquil week.
    But for six days in June 1967, the belligerent stranger didn’t appear at the door at all. Instead, my father arrived home early every night, anxious to catch the headlines on the six o’clock news. Afterward, he spread the evening papers on his bed and pored over the maps inside. Tiny Israel was at war, and he cared passionately.
    That meant I cared too. Unlike my mother, who could entera child’s world with ease and spend comfortable hours there, my father could only deal with us as miniature adults. His strange, sad childhood had left him with no detailed pattern of fatherhood to follow. I learned that if I wanted to talk to him it was easier to follow his adult interests wherever they might lead. Sometimes it was the shade of a sprawling fig tree by the cricket pitch where he managed the local under-sixteen team. Gritting my teeth to keep from yawning through the interminable games, I learned to mark the score card and toss off phrases like “caught at deep fine leg” and “bowled a maiden over.”
    Those odd, colorful expressions were all I really liked about the game. I hated sports. Being sick for so long had left me unathletic and poorly coordinated. All through primary school I was the second slowest runner in every race, able to beat only the little girl in my class who had Down syndrome.
    So, when my father’s attention wandered from the crease at the cricket ground to a volcanic plateau called the Golan Heights, I was only too happy to follow him there.
    He was a convert to the Zionist dream. Serving in Palestine in World War II, the socialist in him had fallen in love with the idea of the kibbutz. His California family, transplanted East Coast WASPs named Ithamar and Winthrop, with roots going back to the American Revolutionary War, had been garden-variety anti-Semites. His own experience in Hollywood had exposed him to all the conspiracy theories of Jews controlling press, pictures, radio and finance. But the unexamined prejudices with which he grew up couldn’t long survive his encounters with the swamp-draining, poverty-embracing Jewish pioneers. These Jews were underdogs, and my father naturally gravitated to their cause.
    “What did we see in Palestine?” he wrote in a