Israel, and Going Home
459
was now a memory that would painfully come to life again
when I sat down to write of it.
In Athens a few days later, I took a twin-engine American
plane, and after an hour over the blue AEgean, over islands
and lands famous in history and mythology, our plane circled
above a neat little seacoast town and a few minutes later
landed on a bumpy airstrip outside Alexandropolis. Though
I was home at last, I knew no one here except a distant cousin whom I had never met. And thus I returned to my birthplace, a stranger, with no one to welcome me.
ALEXANDROPOLIS ON THE AEGEAN
I WENT to the best hotel in town. The proprietor said he
hoped I would not mind the lack of heat and hot water, because coal was scarc