New Heavens by Boris Senior Read Free Book Online

beliefs. These, too, have been my own views since childhood.
    Throughout my youth I remember we had visitors from Palestine, many of them well-known figures of Zionism and some of the stars of Hebrew theater and world-famous concert pianists and violinists. The great day for me was when Chaim Weizmann paid a visit to South Africa and came to our house to meet the notables of the community. A tall, distinguished man with a shining pate and small, cropped beard, he looked very much like Lenin. For me Weizmann was the “King of the Jews.” I was seven years old and I begged to be allowed to sit next to him at dinner; my mother agreed and I sat next to him at the long table. Toward the end of the dinner, fruit was served. I remember that after I ate a large portion of grapes my mother told me that I had eaten enough. Downcast, I sat in silence at the long table. Chaim Weizmann quietly began to help himself to grapes and surreptitiously to hand them to me one by one under the table without my mother or the other guests knowing what was going on. I have to this day a sheet of paper with his signature and written above it “To Boris Senior with best love, Chaim Weizmann.”
    There is no doubt that Weizmann’s role in modern political Zionism was seminal. I remember being brought up on the well-known story of his important breakthrough in the method of manufacturing acetone in World War I. I was told a very dramatized version of how his discovery helped win the war for Great Britain, and that as a mark of gratitude, King George V asked him what he could do for him.His somewhat impertinent answer, “Your Majesty, please help my people get back their national homeland.” A surely dramatized story that made an indelible impression on me. In Israel today, it is unusual to find even a small town that does not have a street named after Chaim Weizmann. He was a giant of the Zionist movement and was regarded with respect by the leaders of the world community in the first half of the twentieth century. Though born in what is today Belarus, he was an Anglophile, and the only criticism of him could be that he was too trusting of the British whom he so much admired. It is not surprising that Chaim Weizmann was elected the first president of the new State of Israel in 1948.
    At that time, my parents began traveling to Europe and to Palestine regularly, at first by boat. In those days foreign travel was leisurely and carefully planned. I remember going with my mother to Thomas Cook’s to arrange their journeys and being ushered into a large, gloomy office for a session to hear the plans, who would meet them at the boat train, where they would stay, and what vehicle would be there to take them to the various places. I would look with interest at my mother’s steamer trunk in her bedroom and at the clothing on wooden hangers in both sides of the trunk, which would stand on end open like a book with corners reinforced with sturdy brass fittings. The trunk probably weighed some hundreds of kilos.
    In the early 1930s, my parents began traveling by air, and we used to go early in the morning to Germiston Airport to bid them farewell. The first leg of the journey was in an Imperial Airways de Havilland Rapide twin-engine biplanewith seven passengers and two pilots. My father, dressed in khaki shorts and shirt and a pith helmet, looked like an African explorer. As each passenger boarded the aircraft it tilted a little to one side. We stood close by on the grass as the pilot ran up the engines, and the airplane and its passengers inside shook and shivered. When the pilot taxied to the beginning of the grass field and took off over our heads, we tearfully waved good-bye.
    The various legs of the flights of Imperial Airways were about three hours long and after each they landed for refueling. At the end of the day, they would retire to a nice hotel at their destination for a rest and a quiet evening. If the pilot saw some