Diana just returned from a medical conference in Europe. She said there were a lot of physicians from various Arab countries - including a female physician from Saudi Arabia who was single, in her forties and chaperoned by her father.

We talked about her experiences there after the massive Rosh Hashana dinner she hosted at her place. Her 74 year-old widowed mother's boyfriend, who looks the way I imagine a member of the Soprano family's Bucharest branch would look, if there were one, is a chef at a Romanian restaurant in Jaffa. Diana can't stand him. She can't understand why her cultured, multilingual mother, who is also a physician, lives with a man who once worked as a waiter in Bucharest and pulls his thin gray hair into a little pig's tail at the back of his head. But the boyfriend does have one redeeming quality - a skill which Diana utterly lacks: he can cook. I would repeat the menu here, but I still have indigestion and just thinking about the enormous amounts of food that were practically stuffed down my throat makes me feel nauseated.

I had a lovely time, though. The guests were old friends of the family, ethnic Hungarians from Romania who had immigrated to Israel during the mid-1980s. With the exception of the dreaded boyfriend, they were all highly educated, cultured people who spoke Romanian, Hungarian and German pretty much interchangeably. Oh yes, and also broken Hebrew. Listening to the polyglot conversations, I felt as though I were caught in some Franz-Josef time warp.

The man sitting next to me was a 70 year-old who had a double PhD - in agronomy and accounting. He couldn't find work in his field when he came to Israel in his 50s, so he ended up working as a security guard at a high-tech company. He told me, in a mixture of Hebrew and German, that he was disappointed in Israel because there were Jewish children who were hungry in the Jewish homeland. This is Zionism? he asked rhethorically. After awhile he told me that he and his wife receive a combined national insurance pension of 1,800 shekels (less than $500) per month.

Okay, I said, I know you can't live on that. I'll bite: how do you manage?

Aha! he answered with an ironic gleam in his eyes. This is the sad answer: because I was in a German Lager (work camp) during the war, I receive monthly compensation payments from Germany. In other words, the German government makes it possible for me to live a decent life in the Jewish homeland, because I am a Holocaust survivor.

I reached for my wine glass and asked Diana if she needed help in the kitchen.

After the guests had departed and Diana's husband had rolled his belly to bed, Diana and I turned the lights down and sat down to chat. We've always spoken English, because neither of us knew Hebrew when we first met, 21 years ago. So we didn't mind that her twin girls were within earshot - they still haven't learned English, which they have come to regard as the language in which secrets are told.

So, I said, what happened at this medical conference that has you all roiled up?

It turned out that Diana was appalled by how ignorant the Arab doctors were about Israel. They don't know the first thing about our lives, she said. They think that we're all running around killing Arabs, that the whole country is a war zone. They don't know that we're just living normal, middle class lives. They think that the violent extremists they see on television represent the majority.

Uh huh, I said. Remember how mad you were with me when I suggested that perhaps most people in Gaza just want to live normal lives and don't support the Hamas terrorists?