After the death of her husband after more than 50 years of marriage, Esther Rafaeli closed up the Jerusalem apartment where they had raised four children. It was only then that she stopped to consider the brief vignettes of family life that she had committed to paper, seeing in them a record of the family's history. Her memories, collected in this book, both narrate one family's domestic joys and challenges and serve as a record of life in the early years of the State of Israel and other centers of Jewish life in the 20th century.