Rooster Called

The authors of The Rooster Called trace the life of their father, Yisrael Kornfeld, who was born in a village in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He joined the movement that envisaged a socially just society for a new Jewish state and immigrated to Palestine. He participated, literally, in building Israel, as one of the craftsmen who built the Port of Tel Aviv. Kornfeld married and had a family, worked daily, honestly, and skillfully. Yet, he did not enjoy the gains of many of his contemporaries. The sadness of his last years, as he endured the devastation of Parkinson's Disease, made the authors wonder about the progression of his life, and engendered a wish to create a memorial to a man who came to the country with so much promise and left it, and his family, in painful loneliness.

This book joins the authors' memories with historical and social research about the cultural effects on Jews of living in the Austro- Hungarian Empire, and the political, economic and social developments in Israel through the years. This combination of individual and family histories, combined with historical research, sets The Rooster Called apart from other family memoires.