The Rooster Called

The authors of The Rooster Calledtrace the life of their father, Joseph Kornfeld, who was born in a village in the Austro-Hungarian empire. After immigration to Palestine, Kornfeld became part of the movement that envisaged a socially just society for a new Jewish state. He participated, literally in building Israel, as one of the craftsmen who participated in the construction of the Port of Tel Aviv. Kornfeld married and had a family. Although he volunteered to the "Mishmar Ezrachi," and worked daily, honestly, and skillfully, 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 Calledapart from other family memoires.