Every House Needs a Balcony by Rina Frank

Author:Rina Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Our National Pride Day

I stood on the balcony watching Ya’akov being beaten by his father with a belt and feeling terribly sorry for him. Someone must have snitched to his father that he was stealing from the grocer’s. My sister came out to the balcony with a glass of milk and told me that I ought to drink milk, too.

I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I must, or I would never grow.

“So what,” I said and continued to feel sorry for Ya’akov, whose father was beating the life out of him. My sister told me that if I didn’t drink my milk, she’d pour hers all over my head.

“I dare you,” I replied, and she poured a whole glassful of milk all over me.

That evening I ran a high temperature, and my mother told my sister that it was because she poured milk over me, but on the way to the doctor’s the next morning Mom explained that it was probably because I had caught tonsillitis again, and she hadn’t meant it when she told my sister that it was because of her, but she was cross with her for wasting a glass of milk.

There was a long queue in the doctor’s office, and we got number eighteen even though we’d arrived there first thing in the morning. Mom tried to fib by saying that she was number nine in line, but someone else was number nine and people started shouting at Mom that she was a liar. I was terribly ashamed.

When we left, we saw a policeman, and he asked me why I was crying. I told him I was sick, and that I was afraid I wouldn’t get well before Independence Day.

He said of course I’d get well, because there’s a whole week to go until Independence Day.

Because I was sick, Dad bought me a blackboard and colored chalks and my sister immediately called Sima, Rocha, and Yaffa down from the floor above us and said that she was the teacher and she was going to teach us how to write our names in English.

English is an easy language to write. All you do is scribble up and down; here and there you draw in a circle, and you have to take special care to join the letters together and leave a reasonable space between them so the words are separated and there you have it, English. Easy peasy. Not like Hebrew, which is a hard language to handle.

My sister wrote down her name and said that from now on she would be known as Josephine, because she had decided that her name should be the same as that of the heroine in Little Women. After all, she explained to us, the name Josephine is the equivalent of Yosefa, which she shortened to Sefi, except that people who call their daughters Josephine are not Jews, and we are. She even started showing off how she could enunciate the J in Josephine the way they do in American movies, and forced us to do the same.

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