Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Idan Lowenhof guided his progress and served as his mentor. Together they had put together the perfect admissions essay, spinning a narrative about his groundbreaking business initiative, which changed Tel Aviv nightlife and created the first chain of gastro-bars in the country; the success story that began in tragedy — the path of the boy who lost his parents in a horrific car accident, from a simple life on the kibbutz to the commercial success story, on his own steam, with hard work and persistence. Idan continued to help Roni in New York: advised him on what courses to choose based on the topics and the lecturers, led him through the degree’s maze of politics, and hooked him up with several graduates and professors. Most important — he showed him the ropes when the cocktail season started during that first autumn.

The cocktails: dozens of financial firms hunted talent from the ranks of the leading business schools. Already within the first weeks of the first year, the companies staged cocktail receptions on school premises, and sometimes at bars around the city — up to three different cocktail receptions in an evening — and invited students to watch presentations about the firms, drink alcohol, and try to convince their representatives that they were the right fit for them. After the cocktail receptions, the students sent the representatives ingratiating e-mails, in the wake of which came one-on-one meetings, after which the candidates received invitations to formal interviews. At the end of the process came an offer of a summer internship in the break between the first and second year, and the internship generally led to a full-time job following graduation.

Roni didn’t like it, but Idan insisted he play the game and coached him ahead of the meetings and interviews. Roni embarrassed himself at the initial receptions. When the small talk turned to sport, he didn’t have a clue about the rules and names of baseball players. He tried to steer the conversation toward basketball, but didn’t do too well with that, either. He mentioned Nadav “The Dove” Henefeld and Doron Sheffer “The Iceman,” names of the most successful Israeli players in the NCAA, who Roni was sure were well known in America because that was what the Israeli newspapers claimed, but no one knew what he was talking about.

Roni worked to improve his conversation skills, and at the same time pressed Idan Lowenhof to set him up with a personal interview at Goldman Sachs. Idan promised he was working on it, but the development came unexpectedly from elsewhere. He received an e-mail one day from Dalit Nahari. Dalit was in the same year as Gabi at school, four years younger than Roni. She was a friend of Anna, Gabi’s partner, and Anna had told her that Roni was in New York. Dalit had been living in the New York area for many years, ever since the post-army trip with Anna. She invited Roni to dinner. Anna had told him in an e-mail that Dalit was married with three children, so Roni wrangled his way out of it. He saw no reason to go all the way to Plainsboro, New Jersey, to devote a precious evening to Dalit and her family at the expense of his studies. But she insisted until he consented. He recalled her as a small and pretty Yemenite girl, and in a moment of loneliness he imagined that she was bored, that her husband was away on a business trip or something, and that she was looking for an adventure with no strings attached.

The door was opened by her husband, a round-faced Indian man, potbellied and thick-lipped, with jet-black hair parted at the side. The fantasy crashed in on itself, and went on crashing when from behind his broad back appeared Dalit — small and pretty she was no more. As he walked into the huge home, he began formulating excuses to leave early. He never would have imagined that he’d be leaving the apartment after two in the morning, coming away with the most effective piece of networking he ever could have achieved.

Jujhar Rawandeep, Dalit’s husband, was a Punjabi. He was also a Muslim. And a senior executive at a hedge fund that belonged to a small investment bank, Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments. Juj, as his wife affectionately addressed him, admired kibbutzniks, particularly kibbutzniks from the Galilee, and soon became an admirer of the Galilee kibbutznik whom Dalit recalled as a talented basketball player and brave soldier, and who offered a wealth of amusing stories about childhood on a kibbutz and the nightlife in Tel Aviv. Jujhar promised at the end of the evening to look into job placements at the investment bank, and the following day Roni received an e-mail invitation to a Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments recruitment cocktail reception.

One of the bank’s headhunters at the cocktail reception was Alon Pilpeli, a hook-nosed and green-eyed Israeli. Biting down on small shrimp sandwiches and sipping cava at a trendy bar downtown, he and Roni Kupper got on, as the Americans say, like long-lost friends: Roni could tell that Pilpeli was less staid, was wilder and more of a go-getter than people like Idan Lowenhof, and Pilpeli was enamored of Roni, because, so he claimed, he chilled at Bar-BaraBush whenever he visited the Holy Land. The formal process of submitting an online application was completed a week later and then came personal interviews that the well-prepared Roni passed with flying colors. Shortly afterward Roni was offered a summer internship.

Mickey arrived on a cold and clear day, sounded a brief wail of shock, and went quiet. While a nurse helped his mother wash herself in the adjacent shower, Gabi held him on his knees, bundled up in a sheet, looked at his tiny, moist chin, and said, “You’re twelve minutes old,” and then “You’re nineteen minutes old,” and then “Twenty-three minutes.” Those were the first things he told his son, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Gabi was Mickey’s nanny. He very quickly found his footing. He continued to tell his son his age, it became a habit. He’d say, “Mickey, today you’re three months and two days old, and we’re going to the park.” Anna took a short maternity leave, and when she first returned to school she kept shorter days, especially when she was still breast-feeding, but she slowly began spending long hours on campus again, like before the birth. Gabi and Mickey continued to count the days and learn how to move arms and smile and roll over and crawl and sprout teeth and swing on swings and go for walks in the park and hear remarks about the Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish kid, which to begin with annoyed Gabi a little but slowly turned into a source of pride for him — as if the compliments about the beauty and distinctiveness of the baby mirrored a compliment about his own beauty and distinctiveness; as if the attention were intended for him, and the jokes (“Specially imported?” “Where can I buy one like that?” “Diplomat parents?”) were designed to impress and amuse him, and not the ones who made them. They shopped at the minimarket and greengrocer on the way home for the afternoon sleep, and while Mickey napped his two hours, Gabi prepared dinner like in the good old days before his studies.

He didn’t have any free time, but he did have time to think. Was he missing the criminology degree? A little, but it certainly wasn’t a burning passion. He planned to read the material from the first year that he hadn’t gotten to, but the heap of papers didn’t budge from the bedside table during the first year of his son’s life. What he did read, while paging through a magazine one day in a pediatrician’s waiting room, was an article about Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recounted that he went to university because it was expected of him, and decided after a year to leave because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life and couldn’t understand how studying would help him find the answer. In retrospect, Jobs said in the article, it was the smartest decision of his life. Gabi liked the article — Jobs even grew up with adoptive parents.