Rebellious Daughters by Maria Katsonis And Lee Kofman

teeth. They would play Pink Floyd really loud. My neighbours would stare at me and my entourage with wonder, as if we had just landed from Mars in our incompetent purple spaceship. Knowing my mother was also watching us from the window, I would bend over to give Ron a throat-deep kiss before getting into the car. It didn’t take long until the local boys began spreading rumours about my supposed sexual sophistication.
    The irony was that neither the boys nor my mother were right. Despite my Lolita outfits, the considerablenumber of boyfriends I collected along the filthy path of my adolescence, and now Ron, whom I flaunted as boldly as I did my bare abdomen, I was embarrassingly chaste – at least by the standards of my friends, many of whom had begun having sex way before I scored my first kiss. I held onto my virginity with the force of a Rottweiler’s bite, refusing to let the ultimate filth enter my life (metaphorically and physically), even when my flesh scorched with desire.
    In Ron’s case, though, I didn’t find it that hard to resist sex (and for his part, being a romantic, he didn’t pressure me much, assuming we had before us an unlimited future together). I didn’t like the thinness of him, the somewhat feminine handsomeness of his melancholy face, his penchant for oversized buttoned shirts. Our heavy petting left me feeling queasy. But he was the perfect antidote to my life at home. The version of Ron I loved was the one I saw on stage when he performed with his band. And he carried the aura of someone who had really lived in Tel Aviv, the cultural Mecca of our country, at the time when I was making my first, tentative advances towards that city (my magazine’s offices were based there). Ironically, it was Ron’s Tel Aviv-ness that eventually led to my – and then our – demise.
    A budding writer, I took my work as a reporter superseriously (at the expense of attending school). My output was high and my name became familiar to themagazine’s readers. But what I was really yearning for was intellectual respect for my provincially based, migrant, insecure self from our chief editor, a well-known young adult fiction author and the only ‘famous writer’ I knew in person. He never invited me in for conversations in his office or sent me on special assignments like he did with his favourites. The only time I was summoned to the coveted office was when this editor proposed interviewing my family. He wanted to write an article about our past as dissidents in the Soviet Union. I was overwhelmed by his sudden interest, which I saw as my only opportunity to win his more sustained attention and, by extension, to make my claim in the circle of real writers. I begged my timid parents to say ‘yes’.
    Not long before the scheduled interview, Ron took me to his Tel Aviv, which was the city of other semiemployed musicians performing in semi-attended bars for semi-attentive audiences. We listened to his friends jamming in a wood-laden pub on King George Street. Absorbed in the music, we missed the last bus to Ashdod.
    I knew my mother’s wrath, if I stayed out all night with Ron, would be mighty. This was something I was strictly forbidden from doing with any boyfriend, let alone an older and disreputable one like Ron. But we couldn’t afford a taxi and so crashed the night on the couch of Ron’s drummer friend.
    If I had held onto my virginity in the privacy of Ron’s mother’s basement, there was little chance I would lose it now, in this crowded shared apartment. But for my mother, that night I didn’t come home stood for a mythical straw that broke the poor camel’s back. Besides, she – who thought my writerly aspirations an annoyance, an interference with school, a misstep on my way to some solid career in social work or perhaps education – finally had a way to exact revenge on her rebellious daughter. There would be no