As the years passed, it became increasingly clear to me that there is a chasm between my own consciousness of the Holocaust and the Israeli one
"Do you know what 'Shoah' is?" my desk-mate in ninth grade at Haifa's Ironi Gimel High School asked me in broken Russian, on my first Holocaust Memorial day in Israel 36 years ago. He was the son of a veteran "Russian" family that had made aliyah in the 1970s. The question made me laugh and made me happy at the same time. It amused me almost as much as the question, "Are there traffic lights in Russia?" which I had been asked a few days earlier.
