“Where are we?” Ilan said.
My mom, my brother Ilan and I were trying to find our way to a party. We were in Israel visiting my cousin who’s in the IDF and other cousins. We didn’t have a map to lead us to the house we were visiting because the other part of our family, my dad and my older brother, Ari, took it with them when they went to shul.
I saw cars zooming by and smelled the gasoline. One of the houses that I saw had a pointy roof. After about 15 minutes of walking, my younger brother started to whine. “I’m getting tired! Why can’t we stop?”
“We can stop when we find a bench,” said my mom.
We kept on walking for about an hour. It was a little windy and cold but I was comfortable in short sleeves. Finally I said, “Can we ask someone where to go?” My mom agreed. We asked a bald, middle-aged man who was smoking and wearing a green short-sleeved shirt and jeans where to go. The air around him smelled like cigarette smoke. He gave us directions and we followed them. We kept walking for about 15 minutes, but all we found was a different street that wasn’t the right street at all. We went back to ask the man again, but he wasn’t there.
I was feeling tired and achy and my feet were starting to hurt! We finally saw a bench so we stopped and my mom started to rub my feet. After she was done massaging my feet, I saw a funny looking house. It looked like there were three houses poking out of one big house! I asked my mom and she told me it was a windmill. My mom said, “Baruch Hashem.”
As we were walking we saw a lot of stray cats. They were orange, white and black. Some of them had curly fur and some had straight fur. We found the stairs and we walked down. We looked at the door numbers and we found it! We were really happy that we found the right door.
The host of the party opened the door and said “Come on in.” We were so relieved that we got to sit down that we let out a huge sigh. Dad kissed my mom and said, “Hi boys! How do you feel?”
I saw the candy in his hands and said, “Can I have some?” He came over with special
candies that were shaped like fruit. They tasted like all real fruits!
Even though it was hard to get there it was so great to see my cousins and everyone there.
Eitan Novikov is a third grade student at the Maimonides School in Brookline, Mass. He is thrilled that his “magnum opus” is being published in the paper. He is a proud first cousin of Hannah Kratz.
