ABSTRACT
Sa’adia is a 60-year-old Yemenite Jew who lives in a rural settlement in central Israel. He is married and the father of five children. He has not worked since his forced retirement four years previously, when his body was ripped by a stroke. Since then he comes to my clinic, situated 400 meters up-hill from his house, regularly. He enters limping and breathing heavily. He comes only once a month for his chronic drug prescriptions, but I feel that I have a secret pleasure in seeing him: he is a happy person! He also puzzles me. He is always smiling, good looking, well dressed and always ready for a chat. When the waiting room is full of patients, some quarreling and competing for five minutes of my attention, he is the one always ready to give up his appointment for a crying child or for the sad suffering face of old grandmother Zohara. He talks to everyone in the waiting room, with his heavy, sometimes unintelligible, speech.
