$9.99 on Kindle, Nook, Apple Books, Kobo, Google PlayMy Father’s House by Yigal Allon (translated from the Hebrew by Reuven Ben-Yosef; 58,000 words)
In this intimate memoir, Yigal Allon shares recollections of his father, a proud pioneer-farmer in Kfar Tavor in the 1920s-30s who retired in Ginosar, the kibbutz co-founded by his son Yigal, and how his father’s personality and life in Jewish settlements in the Galilee before the establishment of the State of Israel shaped his own life.
“The father thought to name the son ‘Yigael,’ which means ‘He will be redeemed,’ but decided that was too passive a name, and chose instead ‘Yigal,’ which means ‘He will redeem.’ The Russian‐Jewish farmer’s son became a watchman, a British policeman, member of a kibbutz, a leader of the ragtag 1948 liberation war, a scholar, a major general and Israel’s deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs. This book, Yigal Allon’s act of homage to his father, shows a public man turning inward. He has no political argument to make, unless the word of his father about Mount Tabor makes a declaration of intention about the land of Israel: ‘Maybe there are others more beautiful, but none is just as beautiful.’... a memoir, both discreet and revealing, by an important public man.” — Herbert Gold, The New York Times