David Gruen loved Shmuel Fuchs.
He loved him intensely, painfully, in that shape adolescent friendships often take. They were teenagers, they were Jews, and they lived deep in Poland, in the miserable town of Płońsk, in the west of the Russian Empire.
“I so miss you, so very much desire and crave to see you, my beloved friend,” the David who would become Ben-Gurion wrote to the boy he so adored. “O, if I only had shaken your hand before you left, if I could only embrace you and bestow kisses on you.”
But they were not lovers. Theirs was a romantic friendship. “It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning,” was how Evelyn Waugh chose to describe it. “In England, it comes when you are almost men.”
But they were not English. Their world was dark, muddy, almost medieval.
Real the full article in The American Interest