Free All I Love and Know by Judith Frank Page A

marble-sized space for all the information he’d ever learned, and a wrinkly hunk of that matter devoted to the lyrics of Israeli songs. Everybody knew them and who had written them; many of them were poems by the great Israeli poets set to music. They were about beloved places and landscapes—sea, mountain, field—about army life, yearning for peace, clinging to love in the face of craziness. His critique of them became increasingly harsh over the years: he found them baldly nationalistic, staking out biblical and emotional claims to various lands, the songs about longing for peace completely empty and hypocritical. Now when Daniel listened to the playfully simple songs about shoelaces, or thunder, or galoshes, sung by men in childishly flattened nasal voices, he heard them trying to show that they were just boys after all, not part of a highly trained occupying force. But his critique of the songs couldn’t prevent them from stirring his heart.
    When Daniel came out the following year, back at Oberlin, after he got involved with his first boyfriend, Jonathan, Joel was clumsy and defensive; he wrote Daniel a stiff letter from Princeton in which he said that, while he had some gay friends, he didn’t believe any of them were very happy people. Daniel and Jonathan had been scathing about it, imagining him to be threatened by his own sexuality.
    Over the ensuing years, though, as he and Joel had moved into their adult lives and inhabited different continents, those conflicts had been forgiven, if not entirely forgotten. Then, last September, Joel had joyfully, and twinfully, stepped toward him. He’d sent him excited emails weeks before Daniel’s trip about the things they’d do together if Daniel had time, he’d proudly introduced him to the writers and producers at Israel Today , he’d plopped his baby boy in Daniel’s arms and marveled at how much Noam and Daniel looked alike. When he took Daniel to the airport to fly back to the States, and the security agent at the entrance to the check-in line asked Daniel how he and Joel were related, Joel grabbed Daniel around the neck and pulled his face close to his, and said, “How do you think we’re related?!”
    It was as though, Daniel thought, they could now finally rest in their twinship, and love and admire each other. It was during that visit that Joel and Ilana told him they were making out their wills, and that they wanted to designate him the guardian of their children if they should die. It was in the morning, on Joel’s day off, and Gal was at gan ; he and Joel were on their third cups of coffee, sitting around the kitchen table, the sink piled with dishes, and Ilana was running a finger across Noam’s cheek to keep him from falling asleep at her breast.
    â€œAre you sure?” Daniel asked. Pleasure and surprise and pride had flared up in him, along with a little panic. “We couldn’t raise them here, it’d mean taking them to Northampton with us.”
    Ilana looked down at the sated baby on her lap—his head thrown back, his eyes rolling back in his head, milk dribbling from the side of his mouth—and laughed. She took her giant breast in her two hands and packed it back into her bra, pulled down her shirt. “Look,” she said, her face, which was usually tuned toward the comic, becoming brooding. “I grew up in a very, very sad house. I don’t want my children to grow up in a house like that. If we will die, take them away from here. Enough is enough.” She flicked her wrist, her hand flying out in a gesture of dismissal.
    Daniel looked at Joel, who was sitting back in his chair, a hand resting on the table. He switched to English. “And the whole being-raised-by-homos thing? You don’t worry that Noam will turn into a big sissy?”
    They shook their heads. “In fact,” Joel said, his face lighting up with a bright idea, “you’re welcome