When I was growing up, in Israel, there was a short-lived show on television called “Hahaverim Shel Yael” (“Yael’s Friends”), which featured a peppy girl who introduced short clips acted out by puppets. The actress who played Yael was probably in her twenties, but she was dressed up to look like a child, in flowery dresses and pigtails. I loved that program, in which the puppets occasionally crossed into real life and made a mess of Yael’s studio. Right before the opening music came on, Yael would look into the camera and fake-whisper to the viewers, “Tell your mother to turn up the volume!” Once, as my twin sister and I were settling down on the sofa to watch, my mother overheard this opening bit. “And what about those who don’t have a mother?” she asked.
A woman and her baby.
Photograph Courtesy Ruth Margalit

I must have been seven or eight at the time. I was irritated with her for asking that question, forever ruining the show for me. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It summed up, I now realize, her parenting philosophy. The way she didn’t baby us, but treated us like thoughtful people, capable of empathy. The way she was always fully there—registering, questioning. But mostly, I think, it showed her unyielding belief in fairness, which, years later, I would hear her define as justice played out in the private sphere. (She was a philosophy professor, preoccupied with definitions.) It was a particular kind of fairness, one that centered on a child’s sensibility. Once, when I asked her whom she loved more, my sister or me, she answered, simply, “You.” Incredulous, my sister posed the same question. “Who do you love more, Ima? Ruth or me?” “You,” my mother said. We tried again. Each time, my mother invariably told whoever asked that she loved her more. “This doesn’t make any sense,” we finally said. She smiled and told us, “Sure it does. Don’t you see? I love you more and I love you more.” This was her sense of fairness: no kid wants to hear that she is loved the same as her sister.