My Father, His Daughter

by Yaël Dayan

  The layout of Nahalal was a large circle, the communal buildings in its midst and the individual farm plots its larger perimeter. The reclaimed land was plowed and the wheat and barley crops had to be protected from the herds of the neighboring Bedouin tribe. The tent was replaced by a wooden shack, where my father was given a tiny room of his own when his sister Aviva was born. Shmuel was active in public life, traveling, lecturing, organizing, and the burden of the farm fell on the thin shoulders of my grandmother, never a healthy woman, and my father, who often had to take charge of the farm work while attending primary school.

  School existed thanks to an extraordinary teacher who assembled the children, ignoring the variety of age, outdoors or in a small cabin, infecting them with curiosity and a zeal for knowledge. Dvorah introduced Russian literature to my father’s life, and more often than this poor family could afford, he was lost in the intricate romances of Dostoevsky’s characters rather than in farm chores.

  The British Mandate replaced the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the dream of a sovereign national life was not only a subject for discussions in Zionist congresses but a military challenge as well. At fourteen, my father joined the Haganah, the national underground, and was allowed to learn to use his father’s old carbine. Self-defense consisted of protecting the fields from Bedouin raids, attacks which probably had no political meaning and did not damage the pattern of friendship that existed between my father and the Bedouin youngsters.

  In 1934, my mother arrived in Nahalal to attend the agriculture school. Her parents lived in Jerusalem: Zvi, a well-established lawyer, and my grandmother, Rachel Shwarz, active in education. Both were university graduates, spoke several languages, and were part of the Jerusalem social elite, which was politically socialist. They did not prevent and indeed rather encouraged my mother’s joining the Labor youth movement and planning her future as a member of a commune.

  The Dayan dwelling was small, my father’s room tiny, but my mother, Ruth, soon moved in and became part of the family, helping on the farm, helping my father with his English, and, a short while later, getting married under the nut tree in the back yard. The village rabbi presided at the ceremony, the Mazarib Bedouins danced, the guests from Jerusalem enjoyed the grapes and corn my father picked that morning, and even Shmuel overcame his suspicions of the bourgeoisie introduced to his family. My mother went to milk the cows after the ceremony, and at the age of twenty my father was an enthusiastic, loving husband with no immediate plans but with a growing involvement with Haganah duties as the tensions mounted toward the outbreak of acts of terror in 1936.

  The Arab violence interrupted my parents’ honeymoon in England, and had more effect than Shmuel’s letters complaining about the easy, good time the young couple chose to have rather than till the land. They returned home to join a group of Nahalal young people who attempted to establish a kibbutz of their own, on the Shimron Hill.

  My parents were the only married couple in Shimron and were allotted a dwelling of their own, but obviously my father was not cut out for kibbutz life. He was unable to form his life according to committee regulations; he sought individual challenges and did not find comfort or security in the fact that decisions were shared and tasks performed in unison. He found a suitable escape, in joining a British local police-training course, from which he graduated a sergeant. My mother wanted to have six children but soon found that my father was less than enthusiastic. He loved her, he loved being married, he couldn’t see his life without sharing a home with her, but home should be mobile, and children, he thought then, “would tie him up to the family tap.” Running water was still a novelty, and the source of running water also meant the end of nomadic life roaming from well to well.

  My mother’s backaches brought her to a specialist, who suggested pregnancy as a remedy. My father accepted the verdict, though it wasn’t for two more years that he was actually faced with the screaming being that claimed his fatherhood. Events were moving fast, and so were my parents’ plans. They wanted to leave Shimron, to settle in Nahalal, or perhaps to study abroad, or go to sea, or even join a kibbutz in the north, where the challenges were greater. Meanwhile, my father participated in several Haganah training courses, from which he wrote my mother: “I miss you so much and I am miserable and I do so much want a home of our own and for you to be happy. I don’t believe in groups or communes, and at this point I almost think we should go back to Nahalal. Even though it’s awful there, and the farm is bad, and it’s bad to be with my father and mother and the work is terribly hard for you—I can’t think of anything better. I feel strongly that I must have my own house and I must take care of you. All I want is quiet, and all there is is terror which we must fight, what will be the end?” And with his usual humorous twist at the end, referring to the boxer bitch they had then: “And we will love Laba too. It’s not her fault that she is so fat …” Laba vomited when taken on buses, and my mother rode her bicycle for hours with the dog across its rear to visit my father in camp.

  My father was now training with Captain Orde Wingate, the odd, idealistic British officer who developed the special night squads. In him, he found someone to admire, and Wingate rewarded my father with encouragement and respect. Rather than dull training based on textbooks or on old-fashioned rules, Wingate’s was unconventional, his military thinking based on an amazing knowledge of the Bible, of the terrain of Palestine, and of the enemy. The combination of cool professional approach and the unexpected and unorthodox attracted my father and encouraged his own originality. Individuality and inventiveness were not necessarily disadvantages, not even when one faced challenges that required teamwork.

  The Shimron commune dissolved, and at the same time my mother found that she was pregnant. This put an end to my father’s strong opposition to the communal way of raising children. Some of the Shimron members established a new kibbutz near the Lebanese border, Hanita, and my parents joined them as helping guests, my mother in her pregnancy developing a craving for olives and pickles which was easily satisfied in the commune’s kitchen.

  A small cabin was available for rent in Nahalal, and compared to what they had had before, it offered my parents the great luxury of two rooms, a small kitchen, washing facilities in the back yard, and a vegetable garden. There was room for Laba, and room enough for the baby. My mother was famous for her lack of self-confidence, for what were mostly trivial reasons. She hadn’t finished high school, or the Nahalal agriculture school. The Shimron experience was finally a failure, and so her kibbutz experiment had come to nothing. My grandparents in Nahalal criticized her and only much later grew loving and dependent on her. At the time, in February 1939, though nine months pregnant, she didn’t manage to develop an impressive child-bearing size and was sure this small frame could not really produce a living baby.

  She was standing on a ladder scrubbing the walls of the new cabin with soap and water when the first labor pains came, but she ignored them, as there was too much work still undone. There were sheets to launder and hang to dry, and two more wooden walls to wash, and even Dvorah, who naturally knew everything and better, assured her it wasn’t yet time to go to the hospital. The local doctor thought otherwise, and in his small car drove my mother, frightened and in pain, to the Afula Hospital on the Hill of Moreh. The obstetrician gave her a short, angry look and told her she could go home. “You must be five months pregnant,” he said. She insisted, was examined and accepted. Labor was on, and for the next two days she endured pain and misery, was certain she was dying and would never have a baby.

  At six in the morning, on her third day in the hospital, a rainy February 12, I was born—healthy, small but normal-size, kicking and screaming, jaundiced and hungry, to my mother’s sheer amazement at her own success, and my father’s wonderment and delight. Not having prepared themselves for the birth of a real child, they hardly cared whether it was a boy or a girl, and my father took the trouble to examine the other babies in the ward to reassure my mother that
I was by far the prettiest, best-formed, and, of course, the cleverest-looking of the lot.

  My Grandmother Rachel arrived from Jerusalem (she had her own car, a rarity at the time, and was one of the first lady drivers in the country) and helped my father prepare the room I was to occupy. Nothing was too good for me, and the little room in the wooden cabin was turned into a palatial nursery. No child in Nahalal, to Shmuel’s dismay, had luxuries like that, and if one could ignore the knee-deep mud that surrounded the cabin, and the absence of a washroom in the house, it looked like a fairy-tale picture, the huge ginger cat on the shelf above my bed not excluded.

  The idyll ended as soon as I was brought home. For three whole months I cried ceaselessly, turning the family, helpful neighbors, the local doctor, and everyone else into helpless nervous wrecks. The rule was to let a crying baby cry, and a way of keeping me warm and dry in diapers was not found. Finally, with the help of a private pediatrician in Haifa and at my father’s initiative, peace was achieved. I was given a bottle—my mother had to admit another minor failure, as her production of milk was insufficient; my father picked me up whenever I cried, against everybody’s better judgment; and he also devised a way to diaper me, strong and tight, and often enough. The ginger cat—in spite of horror tales about babies strangled in their sleep by the cat’s weight—was allowed to cuddle in my bed and keep me warm, and my mother could relax and regain her good health. She devoted her free hours to knitting, sewing, and embroidering a layette that gained me the deserved title of the Princess of Nahalal.

  I realize as I write these lines that, had world affairs been different, this could have been an opening chapter to a quiet healthy “Little House in the Valley” saga, where the big events have to do with the bitch having puppies, the raising of the first turkeys and rabbits in the village, and occasional visits from the outside world. But this was 1939, and only a few months after we had settled into our new home and I had been given the name Yaël—carefully selected by my father from an assortment of biblical symbolic names—my father was detained by the British and sentenced to a long jail term for illegal military activities. The Second World War started almost simultaneously. It was these two earth-shattering events, both in my first year of life, which affected us as a family, village, people, and nation, and tilted us to great heights and greater tragedies. On Sunday, September 3, my father was away instructing a Haganah course. He had a car now, and tried to come home as often as he could. My mother had some guests for lunch—two officers from the British Royal Dragoons, a tank unit stationed nearby. Lieutenant Makins was playing with me on the floor when the radio was switched on and the familiar voice of Neville Chamberlain announced that a state of war existed between Germany and Great Britain as of eleven that morning. Our guests left in a hurry, as if this were a private war they were expected to win that afternoon.

  The three years before the war had been turbulent, and it didn’t take a formal declaration of war for people to oil their guns, dig trenches in their back yards, or shudder as Hitler was mentioned. The inevitability of the coming Israeli-Arab struggle was evident; if anything, the world war only postponed it. The war against the Germans was top priority, though at the outbreak we were still ignorant of the scope of the Jewish tragedy or of Hitler’s crimes. Certainly, it took the British far too long to realize who their allies were in Palestine, and for a long while they invested effort and material means into curbing and limiting Haganah military activities. Rather than train, equip, and use our budding fighting force against a mutual enemy that didn’t hide its intentions to take over the Middle East, they sought out, to bring to trial, members of our underground. That is how, and why, my father—an excellent potential fighter for the British—spent the first two years of the Second World War in their prison at Acre.

  October 5 was the eve of the Simchas Torah holiday. Mother received word that my father would come home for the holiday, and she didn’t need more encouragement to bake half a dozen cakes, put chicken to roast, and cut fresh vegetables for his favorite salad. A vase of flowers was placed on a newly embroidered tablecloth, the cabin was scrubbed clean and myself dressed in my best smocked dress. She was too impatient to wait at home, put me in a pram, and pushing it, walked the long dirt track to the main Haifa–Nazareth road. Every passing bus, truck, and car made her pulse quicken, but as it grew darker, the traffic subsided. It was chilly and not too safe, and in frustration and anger she started pushing the pram back toward the distant village lights. She put me to bed and cried herself to sleep. The next morning, I was playing with a visiting child and Mother was taking pictures of us under a tangerine tree. My grandparents had joined us, when the picture-taking session was interrupted. Our dog—the one who was with my father at the course—trotted into the picture frame, followed by a man from another village. The man gave Mother a piece of paper which had been fastened to the dog’s collar. It read: “Ruth, we have been arrested and taken to Acre on a seemingly minor charge. I hope it will end well. Kisses to you and Yaël. See you soon—your Moshe.”

  Forty-three young men, the entire Haganah officers’ training course, most of them armed, had been picked up by the local police, loaded on trucks, and taken to the Acre fortress. The Acre prison was built by the Turks, on the foundation of a Crusaders’ castle overlooking the bay, and the British used the massive stone-wall citadel as their central prison. The convicts ranged from common criminals to underground activists, and some, in both categories, met their death in the execution chamber. This was the threat used on my father when he was taken to be interrogated on the first night. “Your daughter will be orphaned and will grow up knowing her father has been hanged as a common criminal,” they told him.

  My father had to think fast. What went through his mind was not his infant daughter orphaned and shamed, or the prospect of being hanged. One man was interrogated before him, and they could hear, in the heavy silence of the night, the man’s groans and cries. There was no point in putting them all through the routine of kicking and beating. He decided to tell what he was sure they knew anyway, rather than act the hero. As often before, cool logic and pragmatism won over false or external gestures for appearance’s sake. He gave his name, his age—twenty-four—admitted he and his comrades were members of the Haganah, mentioning the fact that they often cooperated with British troops, and calmly refused to disclose their source of arms or name names of people not being detained. Attack was a good defense, and he blamed them for the atrocious conditions and behavior at a time when they were all partners in the fight against Hitler. He was taken back to the large cell, and the interrogations that followed the next day were conducted in a civilized manner.

  Those who were freed, Haganah commanders, lawyers, Jewish Agency officials, all assured my mother and grandparents that there was no cause for alarm. It was, they said, a matter of a few days before the military trial would take place, and the prisoners should be released soon after. The prisoners—or rather, detainees—were allowed one visit a week, and a few censored official letters until the trial. My father wrote in his first letter: “My Ruthie, I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring Yaël here, though I miss her very much. Every night I wake up with a start and think of you two, my poor darlings … Pre-trial rights are good, the food sufficient and we are outdoors most of the day. Please bring me an undershirt, shaving cream and a sweater. You can send me two short letters a week, they must be in English …”

  The first Saturday visit was a disaster. Each visit was limited to three to five minutes. My mother dressed me in a bright, festive dress, and held me over her head so he could see me. The conversation was conducted in shouts across the high barbed wire and consisted mostly of “How are you.” The one-legged Captain Grant was famous for being severe if not outright cruel, and he ordered me quickly back when I tried to crawl toward my father, ignoring the barbed wire.

  In a letter received after the visit, my father wrote: “My Ruth, if sometimes during the visit it seemed to you that
I’m not enough of a family man … if only I could pass on to you one thousandth of the love I feel for you both every night, if only you could know what you and Yaël are to me … Also, if I told you not to bring the little darling here, it is only because of the filth and because I’m not sure I wouldn’t start to cry if I saw her over the barbed wire. I have the strength to endure it all, I know you do too, and the day will come, and very soon, we’ll be sitting having tea, you’ll be knitting, I’ll be reading and the darling will be crawling on the rug …” Soon it wasn’t, and I stopped crawling and started walking and talking long before they could have tea together, or read or knit.

  The trial began on October 25 and lasted five days. My Grandfather Zvi was one of the lawyers for the defense. On the morning of the thirtieth, the verdict was announced. Each name was called and each of the detainees stood up. Finally the judge declared: “You are hereby sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at hard labor.” Only the buzz of flies could be heard on this hot October day in the stifling courtroom. Fists clenched; tears appeared in brave eyes; and the shocked forty-three, now officially prisoners, were shoved out of the room.

  Two incongruous images went through my mother’s mind—she told me later—me at the age of ten, and Gone with the Wind. My father and his comrades soon noticed the change in their status. They were dressed in prison uniform, brown and shapeless; their heads were shaved; and they were placed in a new, dark cell with narrow barred windows. The family regarded the verdict as a major tragedy, whereas my father thought of it as an episode one had to put up with. “A spell in prison was just that, nothing more. When it’s over, I’ll go out, have a good wash and start life anew. Acre is no rest home but it isn’t a medieval dungeon either, nor Siberia. This is part of the struggle for a state, and I’m sorry we are in jail as a result of a luckless error and not of some special operation with a significant impact. What is particularly burdensome for all of us is being cooped up and helpless while a war in which we all desperately wish to take part is being waged.”