““In Jewish memory it is as though Osea had written just yesterday. A worried father is a worried father. He can’t help letting the boy know how he feels, right away, at the top of the letter: ‘Well-being and strength I send you but from the day you went on your way, my heart, it’s not so good.’ And then, the inevitable clincher, the three words Shelomam must have known were coming, even without Osea having to write them, the phrase all Jewish boys hear at some point; the phrase from which history unfolds: ‘Likewise your mother.””
