After losing a grocery business during the first intifada and cowering in a basement at the height of second, she says now theworst thing is "the feeling that I am in prison" because of the barrier and Israeli travel restrictions.
My mother who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't because of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary after finishing high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during theworst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household was thirty-six.