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her hand.
    “Just—look at the front page of any newspaper,” she said nervously. It was harder to speak with a whole class staring at you. “Look at the words—for what people do:
attack, assault, molest, devastate, infiltrate.”
    He raised one eyebrow.
    Liyana continued, “And that’s just one page!”
    When he invited her to write an essay aboutJerusalem for extra credit and read it to the class, she gulped. “It’s a pretty big story.” Crazy words came into her mind.
Yakkity boondocks. Flippery fidgets.
    “Interview your father…make some informal notes,” Mr. Hathaway said. “Just use your own information—no encyclopedias for this! It may be your last chance for extra credit, you know.”
    JERUSALEM: A BIT OF THE STORY
    When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem—that’s the ancient part of town inside the stone wall—he and the kids on his street liked to trade desserts after dinner.
    My father would take his square of Arabic hareesa, a delicious cream-of-wheat cake with an almond balanced in the center, outside on a plate. His Jewish friend Avi from next door brought slices of date rolls. And a Greek girl named Anna would bring a plate of honey puffs or butter cookies. Everybody liked everyone else’s dessert better than their own. So they’d trade back and forth. Sometimes they traded two ways at once.
    Everybody was mixed together. My father says nobody talked or thought much about being Arabs or Jews or anything, they just ate, slept, studied, got in trouble at school, wore shoes with holes in the bottoms, hiked to Bethlehem on the weekends, and “heard thedonkeys’ feet grow fewer in the stone streets as the world filled up with cars.” That’s a direct quote.
    But then, my father says, “the pot on the stove boiled over.” That’s a direct quote, too. After the British weren’t in control anymore, the Jews wanted control and the Arabs wanted control. Everybody said Jerusalem and Palestine was theirs. Too many other countries, especially the United States, got involved with money, guns, and bossing around. Life became terrible for the regular people. A Jewish politician named Golda Meir said the Palestinian people never existed even though there were hundreds of thousands of them living all around her.
    My father used to wish the politicians making big decisions would trade desserts. It might have helped. He would stand on his flat roof staring off to the horizon, thinking things must be better somewhere else. Even when he was younger, he asked himself, “Isn’t it dumb to want only to be next to people who are just like you?”
    Rifles blasted. Stone houses were blown up. They were old houses, too, the kind you think should stand forever. My father’s best Arab friend of his whole childhood was killed next to him on a bench when they were both just sitting there. He won’t talk about it. My mother told me. My father remembers church bells ringing before that moment. Because of this, church bells have always made him nervous.
    Everyone in my father’s family prayed for the
troubles to be solved. Probably the Jewish and Greek families were doing exactly the same thing. They held candlelight vigils in the streets. They carried large pictures of loved ones who had died. Everybody prayed that Jerusalem would have peace.
    One night, when gunfire exploded near their house, Sitti, my grandmother, cried out to my father and his brothers, “Help! What should we do?”
    My father said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m covering my head.”
    And he did.
    He says he just wasn’t interested infighting. He was applying for scholarships so he could get out of that mess. Sometimes he still feels guilty, like he ran away when there was trouble, but other times he’s glad he left when he did. He always hoped to go back someday.
    During those bad troubles, my father’s family traveled north to a small village to stay with relatives. Sitti was too scared to stay home.