In the early 1970s, when I was a young immigrant in Jerusalem, I found myself the head of my building's co-op committee. The job's main responsibility was collecting co-op fees (for heating oil, stair and entrance cleaning, etc.) from twenty-four immigrant. Our mortgages had been heavily subsidized by the government. We came from all over the world. (One Iraqi family actually brought a lamb into the elevator at Passover, which never came down.)

On the whole, it was a pleasant job. The problems started with my "Russian" neighbors, from the not-yet-former Soviet Union. I would knock on their door and invariably get a hug and a sweet and a coffee. What I wouldn't get was the 50 pounds they owed to the building. "We refuse," they would tell me, "we hate socialism."

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