Hilda had already given birth to a male child, to be called Gerald, in a Cairo hospital, where he developed an infection and died soon after birth. As a radical alternative to another hospital disaster, my parents traveled to Jerusalem during the summer, and on the first of November, I was delivered at home by a Jewish midwife, Madame Baer. She regularly visited us to see me as I was growing up: she was a big, bluff woman of German provenance who spoke no English but rather a heavily accented, comically incorrect Arabic. When she came there were lots of hugs and hearty pinches and slaps, but I remember little else of her. Until 1947 our off-and-on sojourns in Palestine were entirely familial in character—that is, we did nothing as a family alone but always with other members of the extended clan. In Egypt, it was exactly the opposite; there, because we were by ourselves in a setting to which we had no real connection, we developed a far greater sense of internal cohesion. My early memories of Palestine itself are casual and, considering my profound later immersion in Palestinian affairs, curiously unremarkable.
