Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21:271–280, 2011

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 online
DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2011.581107

Nostalgia

Avishai Margalit, Ph.D.

Institute for Advanced Study

This paper “Nostalgia” has two distinct parts: One, accounting for nostalgia, by pointing out a
systematic distortion in cases of nostalgic memories—idealizing the past and presenting it as a
sentimental realm of pure innocence. This distortion typifies kitsch morality, morality guided by
sentimentality that can easily turn into brutality. For attacking the innocent seems to justify any bru-
tality in return. Two, an account of what is an ethics of memory, claiming that memory as the case
of nostalgia suggests is a fertile ground for ethical discourse, which is different from the politics of
memory.

REUNION

Half a century ago I was released from the army. I needed a part-time job to carry me through
university. I found one: a social instructor in a youth village in Jerusalem. The idea was that I
would look after a group of young children, mainly in the evening, and the rest of the time I would
be free to study—the Youth Village provided me with a room with a view, pitiful lunches, and
meager salary. In no time, I discovered that I got more than I bargained for. I became responsible
for about 30 children for whom I was the sole address in the world. It was a total institution, and
a total institution calls for total commitment. My life in the coming years vacillated between the
Youth Village and the university, each demanding in its own way, the Village in an emotionally
total way.
The children were new immigrants from practically everywhere; many, however, came from
North Africa, others from Europe. Some were born after the war in desolate Displaced Persons
camps; some were left in orphanages with nothing but a name tag.
As I discovered later, parents of the DP camps kids were survivors with amazing life stories,
but then only those with amazing life stories survived.
My friend, the renowned journalist Danny Rubinstein, who worked with me in the village,
made an acute observation: Children with no one in the world were at the top of the Village
pecking order. They were considered the toughest of the tough, the coolest of the cool, much like
nomadic rugged individuals of Westerns, coming from nowhere and with no place to go.
A few weeks ago there was a reunion in the Youth Village, celebrating 60 years of its founda-
tion. Many, but not all, showed up; some made their way from abroad. I went to the reunion with

Correspondence should be addressed to Avishai Margalit, Ph.D., Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive,
Princeton, NJ 08540. E-mail: avishai@ias.edu
272 MARGALIT

a mixture of thrill and trepidation. I wasn’t sure that my memory would serve me well, hence
the trepidation. All the years since I was there—I spent 6 years in the Youth Village. I chastened
myself for not conducting a diary. In my arrogance, I thought that my story as an educator is as
good as that of Makarenko. I counted on my good memory to do the trick one day and help me
write my experience in the Village, only to discover that my memories from this period were
fading away. I wonder what the evaporation of my memory tells me, if anything at all, about the
importance of that experience in my life.
I do retain strong memories from earlier times, the times of my childhood. I had recently a
rare chance to calibrate my early childhood memories with Amos Oz’s justly celebrated haunting
memories, as told in his 2004 book A Tale of Love and Darkness. We were raised in the same
neighborhood and we went together to the same kindergarten. It kept bothering me why those
memories are so much more vivid in my mind than the memories I have from my time in the
Youth Village. Is the vividness of one’s memory an indication of the importance of what is
remembered, or is it just a fluke?
The reunion in the Youth Village was nothing like an ordinary school reunion; it was as I
said a total institution, and a total institution produces a totally absorbing meeting. Those I met
tried hard to give an honest account of their life since they the left the Village. Their accounts
were unsentimental, free from self-pity, mentioning moments of pride and moments of failure,
moments of joy and moments of despair. It occurred to me that those who came to the reunion
were not a representative sample of the children who were educated in the Youth Village. I
suspect that those who did relatively well in life were overrepresented. But when it came to
memories of their time in the Village, I was struck by how nostalgic and idealizing their memories
were. Their memories were far more detailed and vivid than mine: partly because they rehearsed
them so much more. But detailed as their memories were, they were highly idealized, not just
stylized, but idealized.
This truly puzzled me.

RETURNING HOME

Nostalgia is a compound of two Greek terms: nostos (returning home) and algos (pain or
yearning). It sounds Homeric, but it is not. It was coined by a Swiss doctor at the end of the
17th century. It was meant to replace the term for homesickness, mainly with reference to Swiss
mercenary soldiers (Schweizerheimweh). It was coined as a medical term, with the idea of tak-
ing “sickness” in the compound home-sickness literally. The syndrome is akin to depression, the
etiology; idealized memories of home create intense yearning to go home.
The term nostalgia is new, but the idea of yearning to return home is half as old as time.
The pain of returning home is indeed a Homeric theme. It became a major theme of modern
literature, with the stress on the idea that such returning is bound to fail; for in the meantime, the
wanderer has been changed and the home has been changed. A glaring example of such failure
is the Hebrew Noble laureate S.Y. Agnon’s story with the telling name Farenheim.
The Village was home for children, who are by now aging adults. For some it was the first
home; for others, the only home they had in life. How utterly different the children of the Village
remember the Village, from the way many kibbutz children construct their childhood in the
kibbutz. For the kibbutz children, the children house where they grew up is the opposite of home,
 NOSTALGIA 273

depicted by some as an orphanage. This is truly remarkable, given that kibbutz children led an
infinitely more privileged life than the children in the Youth Village.
I believe that nostalgia is a good meeting point between your concern with memory, a concern
with the effect of pathologies of memory on dysfunctional behavior, and my concern with the
ethics of memory. On the face of it nostalgia looks innocuous and basically like a harmless faint
emotion, and in many cases it is. But nostalgia may form distorted memory, with some serious
ethical implications.

DISTORTING NOSTALGIA

Nostalgia is not a disease, unless it turns into clinical depression. But nostalgia, like its kin emo-
tion sentimentality, may turn into moral sentiment. A moral sentiment is an emotion that affects
the fabric of moral life. Revenge and resentment are paradigmatic cases of moral sentiments. By
sentiment, I mean an emotion that hinges in an essential way on language.
Nostalgia, like its cousin sentimentally, tends to distort reality in a particular way. The dif-
ference between sentimentality and nostalgia is that nostalgia distorts the reality of time past.
Nostalgia idealizes its object—say, the Village—and locates it in a time of great purity and inno-
cence, thus the object, say the Village, is enshrined with purity and innocence. Nostalgia, in its
primary sense, is internally related to firsthand memory.
But then, nostalgia, especially collective nostalgia, may turn into vicarious memory by plug-
ging one’s memory to firsthand memories of others. Indeed, the two sides to the conflict in our
contested debatable land Israel/Palestine are saturated with vicarious nostalgia.
The Palestinians’ nostalgia for their pre-1948 life is a form of vicarious nostalgia as the num-
ber of those who have firsthand memories of life in Palestine before 1948 has dwindled into
insignificant. But nostalgia may take even more indirect forms. The nostalgia of the Jews to the
land of Israel is such an indirect case, being plugged less to firsthand memories of living people
and more to the Bible and liturgical prayers. Prayers played an important role in forming Jewish
nostalgia. When Jews in exile prayed for rain, they did not mean rain in Spain, but rather rain in
the holy land.
Literature fed Zionist nostalgia. I once asked my father, What made you come to the Eretz
Yisrael (the Land of Israel)? Mapu’s book The Love of Zion was my father’s answer. It is a
19th-century biblical-style fictional novel. My father’s answer was not unusual for his Mayflower
generation.
Both communities use the language of nosts, the language of return, returning home. Even if
the use of return is by now mostly metaphorical, it still retains tremendous evocative power in
both communities. Vicarious nostalgia is as strong as primary nostalgia.
Let me hasten with a disclaimer. I want my critique of nostalgia to be an exercise in the moral
psychology. But I am aware that such criticism may be taken as a sign of emotional snobbism.
That is an expression of derision directed toward simple emotions of common people.
The danger is there, but emotional snobbism is not what I am after, or so I hope.
Nostalgia, I maintain, may distort reality in a morally disturbing way. True, there are mild
forms of distortion by nostalgia, in the sense in which distortion in retouching a photograph by
removing the sitter’s wrinkles is a mild form of distortion. It is a harmless way of making one
look a bit younger. However, there are serious distortions of nostalgia; not removing wrinkles, but
274 MARGALIT

removing the shit from a past world. Think of the so-called Ostalgia in contemporary Germany.
It is nostalgia for the life in former East Germany, life perceived as simple and innocent in
comparison to life under the menace of commercial capitalism. In Ostalgia the shit of the Stazi
and the bullshit of the party comrades, Der Genossen, is removed and all that is left is a sense of
the purity of an intimate community, of true Gemeinschaft.

NOSTALGIA AS KITSCH

There was a great deal of shit and bullshit in the Youth Village, but it was all removed by the
alchemy of the former children’s memory. They transformed the Village into a world of inno-
cence and purity. My memory was not as good as theirs, but in my memory there was still room
for shit-memories and enough traces of the old bullshit.
Nostalgia, like sentimentality, is the fuel of kitsch. I learned the concept of kitsch in the
Village. My room in the Village was neighboring a flat of a formidable Central European dame.
She was the Village mother superior.
Once, I received a gift, a popular album of photographs called The Family of Man. I didn’t care
much for the album, but I cared about the one who gave it to me. I showed it to my no-nonsense
neighbor. She leafed through the pictures of the smiling humanity, along with very sweet pictures
of humanity shedding pearl tears in time of sorrow, and came with a brisk verdict: this is kitsch;
real humans are not like that.
She herself was a survivor, with a tattooed number on her hand; sentimental kitsch was not
for her.
The concept of kitsch remained with me since, not so much as a term for aesthetic appreciation
(incidentally, Edward Steichen of The Family of Man was a very able photographer), or rather
the lack of it, but as a manifestation of moral failure. Nostalgic kitsch can easily be put in service
of brutality. Jung was right in viewing sentimentality as the superstructure of brutality. When an
innocent place of the past, say the German pastoral Heimat, is perceived as threatening, those
who are threatening such purity can be nothing but demonic forces of impurity. In countering
such demonic forces everything goes, namely, every brutal thing.
I believe that both sides to the conflict in our promise/punished land here make nostalgia and
brutality work extra hours. I don’t claim that brutality necessarily needs nostalgia, but it helps.
There are of course other forms of pernicious nostalgia in our promised/punished land. On
one hand, some people of my generation and upbringing nourish Ashkenazi nostalgia for the
pristine society of the Yishuv (the pre-state Hebrew community in Palestine) and to the early
days of Israel, before the invasion of immigrants from Islamic countries. On the other hand, there
is the counternostalgia of some immigrants from Islamic countries, saying, we lived happily in
our innocent and pure communities in Marrakesh, and Bagdad, based on respect for parents and
elders, till you soulless Ashkenazi transposed us to your state and ruined, beyond repair, our
innocence and beautiful form of life.
What was so refreshingly new to me in the nostalgia of the Youth Village veterans is the fact
that it was free from victims’ nostalgia. Theirs was pure longing for the home they believed
they had found in the Village. Encountering their nostalgia made me think that we should
treat nostalgia the way we treat cholesterol, by distinguishing between good nostalgia and bad
nostalgia.
 NOSTALGIA 275

I use nostalgia, as a memory-bound sentiment, for a meeting point between your concerns
and mine. If your concern is the therapeutic role of memory, my concern is the ethics of memory.
Nostalgia is for me a case for the ethics of memory. But then I should say a bit more about what
my concern with the ethics of memory amounts to.

FIVE CONCERNS WITH MEMORY

There are five related concerns with memory that should be disentangled, before they can be
weaved together. First there is a concern with politics of memory, namely, the means and the
ways in which memory—especially collective memory—is shaped and manipulated by political
agencies, for political gains. The politics of memory is also the politics of forgetting; creating and
maintaining social amnesia by political agencies. Memory, like any other form of knowledge, is
power. Whoever controls memory and forgetting gains in power.
Then, there is the concern that goes under the heading: history and memory, namely, how
critical historians should treat the memories of those who participated in an historical event. How
much trust should a critical historian put in oral history? What kind of experiential information
may be lost by ignoring personal memories?
The two concerns I mentioned so far—politics and memory and history and memory—are
very much at the center of recent intense interest in collective remembrance. So intense is the
interest in memory that memory became a buzzword, and memory industry keeps producing
unbearably tedious clichés.
A third concern with memory, and I guess the main concern of the people sitting here,
is the therapeutic concern. A dramatic case of the therapeutic concern is the concern with
trauma and its manifestations in memory. The idea is that gross dysfunctional overreaction
to event in the present is due to unconscious invocation of memory of a violent event from
the past. Healing the psyche involves various ways of dealing with traumatic memory such
as filling dissociative gaps, recovering the repressed, and other means that you know about
better than I do. The point, however, is that curing a suffering psyche goes through healing
the memory. I wonder if the renewed interest in memory, among the practitioners, is due to
renewed interest in trauma, or that the renewed interest in trauma is due to the renewed interest
in memory.
Be it as it may, the concern with memory is part and parcel of the concern with the healthy
mind and the concern with the pathologies of memory is the flip coin of that concern.
Like in medicine we more readily understand what is unhealthy, then with what constitutes
health: clinical psychology, like theology is best served, by via negativa, by concentrating on
the negative unhealthy before being occupied with positive health. This is all true enough,
and yet Freud had something important to say about mental health, normalcy, that is. He said
it to Erik Erickson—he said it, he didn’t write it: To be normal is to be able to love and
to work.
Love, unlike infatuation, is internally related to memory. Love is a thick relation. Shared
memoires give it depth. As a thick relationship love can serve as paradigmatic relation to anchor
the concern with ethics and memory. The idea is that memory and forgetfulness are subjects of
ethical assessments and ethical obligations with respect to thick relations of which I say more in
what follows.
276 MARGALIT

But before I dwell on what goes under the heading “the ethics of memory,” let me mention
one more concern. It is the concern with memory and cognition, and especially in its recent guise
as a concern about brain and memory.
Memory, from the time of Plato on, is in a grip of the idea that memory must leave traces.
The metaphors for traces changed in time with the change of modeling the mind with the most
advanced instrument at the time. Modeling the mind on the 19th-century huffing and puffing
steam engine suggested a very natural question: Where does the energy of the mind come from,
how is it channeled, and how is it stored? Freud was definitely under the sway of such machines.
His concern with mental energy and his hydraulic picture of the mind was a clear manifestation
of the hold such machines had on his construction of the mind. But once computers started
modeling the mind, the question about energy lost its grip and almost disappeared; energy is not
a natural question to ask about computers. With computer modeling the mind, the question of
how the memory is organized is a far more natural question to ask. Brain research, and with it
the effort to correlate mental activities with areas in the brain, may bring back questions about
energy in a rather new guise.
As it happened, memory became in recent years a placeholder for bustling academic activity
of various kinds.
One kind of interest in memory is still new and it is still in its incipient stage; it is the concern
with the ethics and memory.

ETHICS AND MEMORY

The ethics of memory is the claim that we have obligations to remember on ethical grounds.
Ethics of memory is also concerned with the question, Are there ethical obligations to forget: the
idea being that to forgive, really to forgive, is to forget and forgiveness is clearly an ethical notion.
Obligations to remember are an old idea. There are quite a few things that the children of Israel
are commanded to remember in the Hebrew bible. For one thing they are required to remember
the exodus from Egypt: “And Moses said: Remember this day, in which ye came out of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage; for by the strength of hand the Lord brought you out of this place”
(Exodus 13:3).
The command to remember the exodus from Egypt is germane to our concern with the ethics
of memory, but let me first spell out how peculiar, at least on the face of it, obligations to
remember are.
“Ought implies can” is a philosophical maxim of great repute. Namely, if you are morally
obligated to do something, it is presupposed that you can do it. So one should not be commanded
on what is not in one’s control. Our memory seems not to be in our control. To be ordered to
remember such and such may be as annoying as being told “forget it,” or being told don’t think
of pink elephants, which readily brings pink elephants to mind. The point of all these is to say
that memory and forgetfulness seem to be not in our control and hence not a proper subject for
ethical obligations. You, in your profession, are in much better position, than I am, to assess the
claim about the involuntary nature of memory. After all, it is part of your business to sort out the
unconscious mechanism by which painful memories are sometimes blocked.
Whatever force the argument that memory is not in one’s control has, it is clear that its plau-
sibility is confined to personal memory, and it does not apply to collective memory. Collective
 NOSTALGIA 277

memory can be put under our control by the use of mnemonic division of labor, and by use of
such devices as memorial days, monuments.
You may say that personal memories can also be equipped with mnemonic devices. After all,
you may remind yourself to remember our meeting by having a knot in your handkerchief, but
then you have to remember what the knot is a reminder of. Left to your own devices you may
discover that you need a little help from your friends, much as in the case of collective memory.
Yes, you can, but with the help of others. And if you can, you should. You have no justification
or excuse to forget our meeting.
The question about control of our memory must be viewed as part of a wider context, which
gives it a richer human texture with some historical depth.
Memory, namely, personal episodic memory, provides each one of us with knowledge and
beliefs about the past. As such the ethics of memory is just a subsection of the ethics of belief.
The Abrahamic religions require people to believe various things and were ready to treat harshly
the nonbelievers. The question with regard to belief is, like the question about memory, Is belief
a proper subject for obligation? So the wider context for the control of memory to which I am
alluding is the context of beliefs.
I do, for example, believe now that I am standing in front of you giving a lecture on the ethics
of memory. But is it up to me not to believe it? Can I bring myself to believe, like Lewis Carroll’s
White Queen, six impossible things before breakfast? The plea for religious toleration counted
on the argument that beliefs are not in one’s control; therefore, there should be an end to the
persecution of heretics. They cannot help but believing what they believe.
I mention the analogy between the ethics of belief and the ethics of memory so as to stress
that there is nothing obvious in the assumption that memory and beliefs should be subjected to
moral obligations.

WHY SHOULD WE REMEMBER?

Let me turn to a more substantive issue, namely, the question, Why should we, morally or ethi-
cally, remember? Let me offer one possible, though problematic, answer, much in the spirit of the
commandment to remember the exodus from Egypt. The verse in Exodus obligates the children
of Israel. Not just to remember the exodus but, more important, to remember that it was the Lord
who brought Israel out of the house of bondage.
As a result the obligation to remember the exodus from Egypt is an obligation to be eternally
grateful to God the redeemer. In general we should be grateful for good done to us and we
should be eternally grateful for vital good done to us, namely, good that secured our existence.
The biblical idea is that humanity at large should be eternally grateful to God for His creation;
Jews should in addition especially grateful for being delivered from the house of bondage. In the
Bible being grateful is the basis of morality. The basis of gratefulness is memory; the memory of
good done to us. Accordingly, the relation between memory and gratefulness is intrinsic. There
is no way for you to be grateful without actively remembering the good done to you. Many
moral actions depend in some sense on memory. Noted among them are promises. Keeping
one’s promises is crucial to the moral fabric of our life. For keeping one’s promises one has to
remember one’s promises. But as intimate as the relation between promise and memory is, it is
still an extrinsic relation.
278 MARGALIT

One can keep one’s promises by fulfilling them even without remembering them, say by
sheer luck or by being kept reminded of them. One cannot be grateful without remembering.
Remembering is constitutive to being grateful.
The biblical injunction to remember the exodus from Egypt suggests one important answer
to the question, Why should we be morally obligated to remember? The answer in short is:
gratefulness. But what is so morally great about being grateful? The answer, at least one answer,
is that to be ungrateful, to take the good done to you for granted, that is, to be exploitative.
Exploitation is very bad.
Remembering the good done to you is the minimal requisite of being grateful, thereby
nonexploitative.
We should qualify the claim that gratefulness is an important reason for the obligation to
remember by adding the hedge “justified” gratefulness. For gratefulness can be easily turned
from a noble idea into an oppressive idea, and eternal gratefulness can be oppressive eternally.
Feudal lords and mafia dons appeal to the need of the protected to be grateful to their mobsters’
protectors. In the case of feudal system the protected must be eternally grateful, for true or imag-
inary vital good; the good of being protected. Mafia dons, much as the extortionist biblical David
(later the king), demand that the victim be grateful for their forced protection. (See the story of
David and Nabel, 1 Samuel 25.).
The truth of course is that one should not be grateful to gangsters’ protection, because they
create the problem for which they claim to be the solution.

BETWEEN ETHICS AND MORALITY

There are various starting points for dealing with ethics. One such starting point is theory of
action. Ethics provides special sort of reasons for action. Another starting point is based on the
idea that ethics is a particular way of forming human character, instilling in it some excellent
traits—virtues—such as generosity and honesty, sense of fairness, and the like. Ethics is, thus,
an account of human virtues. Still another starting point, to which I alluded already, is to start
with moral sentiments; this was the line I pursued in dealing with nostalgia—asking whether it
is a moral sentiment. But this is not my best starting point. I believe that the best starting point
for dealing with morality is human relations. Ethics is about our relations to others.
There are, however, two important types of human relations: one is relations to humans just
in virtue of being humans; two is relations to humans in virtue of a great deal more, for example,
being family or friends. I call morality the endeavor to order our relations based on our being
humans, as the sole relevant trait. This includes natural stages in being human such as being old,
or being a woman.
Morality deals with the first type of relations, thin relations, which are based solely on being
human. Ethics deals with our thick relations, the special relations we have with others, the
paradigm of which is family and friends.
The use of the terms “morality” and “ethics” to designate different kinds of relations does not
match its use in English. In the actual use of these terms in English there is no such distinction;
the difference is merely historical—morality derived form Latin, ethics from Greek.
Memory is essential to thick ethical relations. In contrast, memory does not play constitutive
part in establishing moral thin relations. Hence, memory is predominantly a matter of ethics,
 NOSTALGIA 279

rather than morality. Adducing memory to ethics rather than to morality is more than mere exer-
cise in mental administration. It is memory that makes thick relations tick, for memory is thicker
than blood.

COMMUNITY OF MEMORY

Moral political philosophy is conducted with systematic ambiguities. One important ambiguity
is the ambiguity in the use of the term “individual.” In one use it is posited as a bare entity
that moral liberal philosophy is about. In another sense, “individual” is the highest attainment.
Becoming a full-fledged human being is the highest goal in life. The term “human being” has the
same systematic ambiguity, a term vacillating between being posited as a bare subject matter, on
one hand, and a term of highest achievement, on the other hand.
Ethics on my account is about thick relations. Memory is essential for constituting thick rela-
tions. If so, it sounds a bit strange to advocate ethical obligations to remember if thick relations,
the substance of ethics, are defined by memory. To command to remember in ethics rings absurd
like the orders of Saint Exupery’s King in The Little Prince, who commands his subjects to do
what they do anyway.
I disagree. There is nothing absurd in imposing obligations to remember, if we heed to
the systematic ambiguity between posit and achievement: Memory in ethics is both posit and
achievement; we start with memory as something assumed with the aim to get memory as
something achieved.
Ethics of memory is concerned with memory as an essential element of thick human relations,
the kind of relations we, usually, care most about and the one we usually find the most important
in our life. The ethics of memory is a normative effort to make meaningful thick relations flourish.
Thick relations are not confined to face-to-face relations, as it is the case with friends and
family. Thick relations may be the cement of imagined communities, namely, communities that
are not based on face-to-face relations. Genuine imagined communities, the ones we care about,
are not arbitrarily imagined communities but communities of memory. True, imagination may
mix shared memories with myth and thus create inextricable fusion of myth and reality. But myth
without shared collective memories or with a very tiny bit of it is a bad recipe for thick relations.
It is like the delusional relations of Don Quichotte to Dulcinea. Meaningful thick relation cannot
be based only on the pleasure principle lest it be delusional. Myth needs some doses of reality in
a form of true memory to serve for true thick relations.
In the current liberal mind, nations and ethnic groups are suspects; they seem to be based on
delusional ideas about a common past. But the liberal mind misses something very important;
thickly related imagined communities provide their members not just with myth but also with
some veridical memories, good enough to establish meaningful thick relations.
Communities of memory meet a very important human need.
Most humans dread the idea of leaving without a trace, as if one’s life amounts to nothing.
Some split their hopes of being remembered between the remembering God and their religious
community; others put their hopes only in mundane agencies of remembrance, agencies based
on thick relations anchored in communities of memory. The force of nationalism is in offering
in a nonbelieving world a community of memory that can substitute the religious community of
memory, hence its stronghold.
280 MARGALIT

It is time for me to return to nostalgia. Memory, morally good memory, should take the rough
with the smooth. The rough patches in one’s individual life or in ones’ collective life should be
accounted not only as part of responsibility for the past but as an essential part of what thick rela-
tions should consist of. Nostalgia takes a free ride on memory. It removes disturbing thoughts
about the past and retains only the good ones. This can turn ugly when the illusion of stolen inno-
cence can be an invitation to brutality. This was the point I was making with regard to nostalgia
as the bad cholesterol. But nostalgia of turning a longing into belonging to a place and people,
which creates a sense of home, is what the Youth Village children sensed and remembered. I
found their partially distorted memory, though not in whole good, at least an endearing one, for
it expressed a strong sense of being grateful.

CONTRIBUTOR

Avishai Margalit, Ph.D., is the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, NJ, USA. He is Professor Emeritus at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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