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as well as a schemer. She thought it was a mistake for mothers to be soft on their daughters, and she raised her daughter to be tough, drilling it into her that giving in wasn’t an option, no matter what.
    When the Rhodesian police came to the Greenholtz family home and informed the mother that the body of her husband, Aaron Greenholtz, had been found headless on the roadside, she did not collapse or start screaming, but carried on resourcefully. This resourcefulness she tried to pass on to her daughter Mandy, who tried to pass it on to her daughter Lirit, with diminishing success from generation to generation.
    When Audrey died in 1989, and Mandy took charge, she put up a dummy tombstone to her father, Aaron Greenholtz, in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery, according to whose inscription his memory would never fade. But the truth was that his memory didn’t exist. Mandy had forgotten him completely.
    In the middle of the nineties, Mandy thought of adding another line to her father’s tombstone, something along the lines of “Murdered in race riots in Rhodesia, 19—” but she didn’t do it.
    AUDREY COULDN’T STAND Israel and she never stopped telling her daughter and the few friends she had here that it was only Aaron’s death that had forced her to come to the Levant, and that nothing but terrible distress would have brought her to a place of no distinction, full of men with weak characters. She was enraged against Israeli men, who gave her the cold shoulder because she already had a daughter from a marriage that had ended in death, and who regarded her as irrelevant.
    During her first days in Israel, Audrey acted out of character—and collapsed. She barely brought herself to acquire a three-roomed apartment in Arlozorov Street in Tel Aviv. She was told that this was classic North Tel Aviv, and that it would always remain classic.
    But six months after arriving in Israel, Audrey got out of bed and she never fell again. She called in renovators, who turned right into left and ceiling into floor. During the period of the renovations the two of them stayed in the old Sheraton Hotel, which no longer exists and today there is a big hole where it used to be. Every morning she set out from the hotel to take three or four buses to Netanya, to the factory she set up there in the industrial zone.
    Audrey herself invented the name Nighty-Night. Her knowledge of the Hebrew language was nothing to write home about, and she thought the name was clear enough for people in the Levant. She acquired a few classic Singer sewing machines, and insisted on handwork even when technology made faster and more efficient machines available.
    Only in this way can the connection of the material with the thread be felt, while the movement of the foot accelerates the blood circulation and improves the concentration of the workers, Audrey explained her conservatism.
    There was also the factory outlet that was opened before the holidays, and then—what a flood! Religious women bought pajamas in bulk and paid in cash, and the child Mandy got a kick outof being in charge of the cash register of the outlet, which also, of course, sold second-class goods for those who could not afford to buy first-class pajamas.
    The adolescent Mandy was very happy when the government changed the currency and varied her life behind the cash register. She liked counting the change out loud, sometimes also in Yiddish, for the women in the wigs, and seeing the notes piling up in the compartments of the cash register made her feel really good, because she saw how happy it made her mother.
    “Come and see,” she called her, and her mother would call back from the distance: “Nice work!”
    IN THE BEGINNING there were about a dozen seamstresses working in the factory, but today, still on Singer machines but new electric ones, there are sixty, most of them ultra-Orthodox, and others from different sectors of religious and secular Judaism. After the death of her mother, Mandy