1. Uncle Baruch's only son died at age 26 in one of the unknown battles of the War of Independence, the battle for the Gilboa. The son's name was Nahum Nisht, and he was an introverted, serious, dedicated person - so I learned from reading about him and so I am certain he was, to judge by family character traits. A picture of Nahum in his beret lay pressed under the glass top of my grandmother's dresser in her room on the kibbutz. Uncle Baruch came to visit once. My grandmother gave him her bed and he slept there on raised pillows, breathing loudly behind a blind fashioned from plastic concertina wire. As if acting out their own Book of Genesis, this was their contact-free version of the mitzvah of levirate marriage.

2. Uncle Baruch was a mysterious and very nice man, with ears big as sails and a belt that circled his belly like an iron hoop around a barrel. I knew he was my father's uncle, but still there were times when I thought of him as his father. For my father visited his Uncle Baruch in his one-and-a-half-room apartment on Dizengoff Street for many years and loved him and tended to him until his final days at the Mishan old age home in Givatayim.

3. Nahum, my father's cousin, was named for Uncle Baruch's son. When I was a little girl, I saw the young Nahum playing basketball and watched him sink an unbelievable three-pointer from half-court.