Aliya — Marianne Cantro Segal

They met in Israel: Meri, a cool, lovely blonde from Philadelphia's Maine Line, and Arik, a brash, young Israeli commando with tanned skin, tawny hair, and dazzling blue-green eyes. She had money, prestige, the best of everything; he cared only for her beauty, her surprising innocence, and her miraculous openness to experience. Arik was a sabra, a native Israeli; even for Meri he could not abandon his country. But Meri had not come on aliya--to make her home in Israel; she was there to report on an archaeological dig sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum, and then she would go back, to her New York apartment, her elegant comforts, her married lover. Except there was Arik, teaching her to love with a new intensity, new abandon and there was Israel itself, with its sunlight, its anceint cities, its warm, corageous, and stubborn people. Perhaps she would stay after all... But it was too harsh, too strange, too dangerous. Terrorists ripped their world apart and Meri ran away; she resolved to forget about Isreal, until New Year's Eve when she met Arik again in New York.