Her son introduces his mother''s life story which she has written as a fictional narrative as she relives traumatic experiences while writing about them. She traces her life from a sheltered childhood and girlhood in her disfunctional Italo-American Catholic family to her meeting a handsome young Israeli hero of his country's War of Independence, who is studying in the United States now that there is hope of peace in his country.. . They are both romantics- she, a vulnerable young music student, he a sensitive ,idealistic artist whose dream is to do something memorable for his young country. They fall deeply in love and marry secretly. He calls his delicate child bride "Givol", the Hebrew word for the stem of a flower. Insensed, her father has thim deported to Israel where they are supremely happy until tragedy changes their lives for ever...
" My mother was very beautiful. and she was a dreamer. "When I grow too old to dream," she once confided to me, "How sad life will be." I see again the childlike half smile, the soft, trusting brown eyes, her little puppy, her constant companion, nestled in her arms After her final visit to Israel where she died, in her well-worn suitcase, I found a leather bound copy of the Biblical Story of Ruth. In the center of its cover was a copper image of Ruth in The Promised Land made by the famous Israeli artist ,Reuven Rubin, who had been my father's teacher so long ago. Pressed between its pages were a faded corsage of Freesia and a crumpled single white rose. Under some silk scarves I discovered a pile of neatly typed papers,"These fragments I have shor'd against my ruins."; she had written in school girl's block letters across the top of the first sheet. She had been an English teacher and loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The faint, familiar perfume lingering on her scarves wafted onto the pages as her ghosts began once again to inhabit the dimly lit stages of her life".