Free A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

Hebrew sign, lacking as it did any vowels. Father laughed and said this was yet more proof that it was high time to modernize Hebrew writing by introducing separate letters for vowels, which, he said, are the traffic police of reading.
    To our left a series of roads led downhill toward the Arab quarter of Abu Tor, while to our right were the charming lanes of the German Colony, a tranquil Bavarian village full of singing birds, barking dogs, and crowing cocks, with dovecotes and red-tiled roofs dotted here and there among cypresses and pine trees, and little stone-walled gardens shaded by leafy trees. Every house here was built with a cellar and an attic, words the very sound of which afforded sentimental pangs to a child like me, born in a place where no one had a dark cellar under his feet or a dimly lit attic above his head, or a larder or a hamper or a chest of drawers or a grandfather clock or a well in his garden fitted with a hoist.
    As we continued down Hebron Road, we passed the pink stone mansions of wealthy effendis and Christian Arab professionals and senior civil servants in the British mandatory administration and members of the Arab Higher Committee, Mardam Bey al-Matnawi, Haj Rashed al-Afifi, Dr. Emile Adwan al-Boustani, the lawyer Henry Tawil Tutakh, and the other wealthy residents of the suburb of Bakaa. All the shops here were open, and sounds of laughter and music came from the coffeehouses, as if we had left the Sabbath itself behind us, held back behind an imaginary wall that blocked its way somewhere between Yemin Moshe and the Scottish Hospice.
    On the wide pavement, in the shade of two ancient pine trees in front of a coffeehouse, three or four gentlemen of mature years sat on wicker stools around a low wooden table, all wearing brown suits and each sporting a gold chain that emerged from his buttonhole, looped across his belly, and disappeared into a pocket. They drank tea from glasses or sipped coffee from little decorated cups, and rolled dice onto the backgammon boards in front of them. Father greeted them cheerily in Arabic that came out of his mouth sounding more like Russian. The gentlemen stopped talking for a moment, eyed him with mild surprise, and one of them muttered something indistinct, perhaps a single word, or perhaps a reply to our greeting.
    At half past three we passed the barbed wire fence around Allenby Barracks, the British military base in south Jerusalem. I had often stormed into this camp, conquered, subdued, and purged it, and raised the
Hebrew flag over it in my games on the rush mat. From here I would press on toward the heart of the foreign occupier, sending groups of commandos to the walls of the High Commissioner's residence on the Hill of Evil Counsel, which was captured again and again by my Hebrew troops in a spectacular pincer movement, one armored column breaking into the residence from the west from the barracks, while the other arm of the pincers closed in with complete surprise from the east, from the barren eastern slopes that descended toward the Judaean desert.
    When I was a little more than eight, in the last year of the British Mandate, a couple of fellow conspirators and I built an awesome rocket in the backyard of our house. Our plan was to aim it at Buckingham Palace (I had discovered a large-scale map of central London in my father's collection).
    I typed out on my father's typewriter a polite letter of ultimatum addressed to His Majesty King George VI of England of the House of Windsor (I wrote in Hebrew—he must have someone there who can translate for him): If you do not get out of our country in six months at the latest, our Day of Atonement will be Great Britain's Day of Reckoning. But our project never came to fruition, because we were unable to develop the sophisticated guiding device (we planned to hit Buckingham Palace but not innocent English passersby) and because we had some problems devising a fuel that would take our rocket from the corner