by Yaël Dayan
My boyfriend visited me at home. My grandfather cross-examined him briefly and was satisfied to learn that he was the son of a respectable Sephardic family, that he was a good student and generally a pleasant young man. It was my good luck that my grandparents were liberal and not too inquisitive, and I had no desire to share my early romantic indulgences. Not with a girlfriend, not with a diary, and least of all with my parents. Permissiveness was an unknown word then, and my father was prudish and old-fashioned even by the innocent standards of the early fifties. Words like “sex,” “homosexual,” “prostitute” were never heard at home, not to mention four-letter words. There were no references to intercourse or even lovemaking. Not in front of the children. When my father was angry, his vocabulary did not exceed words like “idiot,” “a bastard,” or “hell,” and language at home had to be kept clean.
The course in Devizes ended, and my father underwent another unsuccessful operation in Paris on his eye, and was soon on his way home. Mother went to the States, the first of many trips on behalf of the United Jewish Appeal. The fact that Father returned alone was well compensated by suitcases full of gifts he brought us. I would have liked, then, to be dramatic and say: My father had left a little girl and returned to find a woman; but this wasn’t the case. His return threw me back in time into more relevant proportions. I was what he expected me to be, and as intimate as we were, there was no way I could talk to him about a boyfriend, let alone kissing or necking. He attended a parents’ meeting at school, was happy with the reports, and didn’t notice any changes in me.
He wrote to Mother daily, sometimes twice a day. One four-page letter was mostly devoted to the small radio he brought me. He bought it after she’d left, and he described in detail his inability to choose between battery-operated and other models, the color, the size, and the price—£14, which was a great deal of money. He bought Assi bicycles and Udi an air gun. He wrote: “Yaël has everything, a watch, a fountain pen, binoculars of her own and now a radio. If she wants a revolver I’ll give her one from my collection.” He was mirroring his own childhood, for he had no reason to think I wanted a revolver …
Another letter, five pages long, recommended another shopping list, a tea set for the kibbutz friends, some games for the kibbutz school, a hot-water boiler for Nahalal, and winter shoes for all of us. He wrote suggesting she should buy herself some clothes for the next season and announced that the sandals she sent me were too small. “Yaël’s feet are enormous, and I’ll draw the boys’ feet on paper and send it to you for size.”
What seems trivial now must have preoccupied him, and between the shopping lists and news of Assi losing his first tooth, and taking me to the beach on Saturday, with the boys, and Assi not being able to swim because he had a cough, he mentioned that he would probably be getting the Northern Command, which would be ideal since we could all return to Nahalal.
It was at that time that my father was touched by a passion that would consume him more and more as the years went by: the passion for archaeology. Not in museums or shops or private collections, but the personal, possessive, physical sense of himself doing the excavating. He went pigeon shooting with Udi one Saturday morning, and while walking among the ruins in Tel el-Safi, he noticed a row of jars sticking out of the mud wall of the wadi. The jars were exposed by heavy rains a few days earlier and they looked new and whole. He took one home, had it examined by a friend, and discovered that it dated back to the ninth century B.C., the period of the Hebrew kings. The following Saturday he returned to Tel el-Safi, better equipped for digging, and exposed a few more jars, some oil lamps, and handles of larger jars. There is a whole world down there, he exclaimed to us. As tangible and real as ours. Beneath the fields and the roads and the houses, in the walls and caves of wadis. A world of our own ancestors, their tools and vessels and weapons, their houses and their graves, a silent world which comes alive with these potsherds and sooty handles. Within a few years, this hobby became a consuming preoccupation, at times an obsession. I think the philosophy behind it, the spiritual justification—like the learning in depth about the subject—was secondary. At first, it was the physical pleasure of digging, the almost childish joy of discovery, and the wonderfully primitive creation of a bond between himself and his own history. Skipping the Ukraine, jumping over the shtetl mentality of his Zhashkov grandparents, not touching the Yiddish-speaking Diaspora, flying over generations of devastated communities, bypassing Inquisitions and exiles.
There was Abraham, a wandering Bedouin, and his wives and his cattle, and his overwhelming discovery of monotheism. There was Moses and Joshua, and the Judges and Kings who drank from the dishes my father unearthed and touched the clay cups we were touching. Then there was Deganya and Nahalal and Lydda and Jerusalem and Alterman and Ben-Gurion. The spiritual dimension followed but it was not the central motivation. In the early fifties—I was not fourteen yet—digging was not an escape but the occasion for a happy expedition where family was welcome, and we enjoyed it as we did picking flowers in the spring or stealing fruit in the summer.
The Northern Command brought us back to home ground. We lived for a while in Tivon, near Haifa, and when the house in Nahalal was ready, we moved back. Only I didn’t. My father’s HQ was in Nazareth; Udi and Assi went to the Nahalal elementary school; and I was enrolled in the Reali high school in Haifa, as other high schools in the area were not considered good enough. My parents never completed their formal high-school education and naturally wanted to make sure we all graduated properly. I was in the ninth grade, and in subjects like mathematics, chemistry, physics, or even geography, I had more knowledge than they had. Not that it mattered to me. I treated and thought of both of them as superior even if they couldn’t help me with my homework in algebra.
I lived during the week with an uncle and aunt of my mother’s. They were a gentle, simple couple, and again, I found myself using a bed in someone’s living room. Meals were bland and conversation banal, and I looked forward to Fridays when I went home to Nahalal for a short weekend. I was not enthusiastic about our return to Nahalal, as it was obvious to all of us that we would not stay long. The Northern Command was to be another step in Father’s career, and if he became Chief of Staff, we would move again.
I did miss Jerusalem, that city which I had grown to love and enjoy. My boyfriend wrote me long letters for a while and then stopped. I didn’t like the regimented attitude of the new school, hated the khaki school uniform, and fancied a boy who never so much as looked at me. I was still an excellent student, but my happiest hours were spent with books. Ezer Weizman’s parents lived two blocks from the Reali school, and their library was at my disposal. Flaubert, Proust, Romain Rolland, and all the Russian classics were all waiting for me, uniformly bound, badly translated, but magical.
There were still a few trips with my father, visits to Arab villages rather than to Bedouin tents, and to the Syrian and Lebanese borders. Lush-green Galilee, with its abundance of water and thick vegetation, did not appeal to my sense of adventure, or his (as the Negev did), and we both missed the freedom and mystery of the desert, where survival was a challenge rather than nature’s offering.
The following winter, in December 1952, we were packing again to move to Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. My father had been appointed head of the Operation Branch of the General Staff, and we lived temporarily in a small apartment not far from HQ. A place without character or grace or even space. Udi and Assi found it difficult to adjust; they didn’t like their new school, and two growing moshav boys on the third floor of a suburban apartment building meant trouble. I was given a room on the ground floor. My own place, my own key, total privacy for the first time. It was a good beginning to a disastrous year.
From the open fields, from provincial Haifa, from friendly area-command atmosphere, I was tossed into a whole new scene. My father was now engaged in raising the standards of the Army combat units, setting new criteria for officers in which top priority was given to those element
s meant to engage in actual battle. Since the War of Independence, organization and routine threatened to dull the sharp edges of the commando spirit, and he felt obliged to re-instill it. It wasn’t that he was away more often, but as his sphere of action and interest changed, I felt he was drifting away from me—from us. Being part of the General Staff meant more salutes, more discipline, more channels to go through to reach him, and he seemed to be climbing toward a place where I would not be included. The freedom I should have appreciated was interpreted by me as neglect; the trust that was put in me I read as a brush-off. I was fourteen, well developed, and smart. I wasn’t beautiful, but I was attractive, and what earlier had been considered precocity was now taken for flirtatiousness.
I was equipped for many things. I could walk up to Massada and reach the peak first, I could read a 1:100,000 map and navigate, I could identify wild herbs and build a good fire. I knew how to be polite with UN generals and ambassadors and how to respond to the greetings of an Arab sheikh. I knew my Bible and history and could recite most of Alterman and Shlonsky, but I was totally immature and spoiled when it came to real life. To coping with my equals, asserting myself within the framework of normal daily activities, finding my place in a high-school society, and enjoying the simple offerings of an ordinary existence. I was excellent as General Dayan’s offspring; I was praised for courage and sturdiness; I was complimented on my quick absorption, good memory, and brightness; but something was missing. My father chose to ignore the fact that I was growing up. My mother developed a strange inability to communicate with me. And the façade of resembling my father attracted grownups to me and definitely deterred my peers. I was alone again, and still needed and liked to be alone, but I was suddenly lonely, the loneliness that exists between two worlds, the childhood we are afraid to relinquish and the adult world, attractive but frightening.
My new school was extremely liberal—no uniform, open student-teacher relationships, very little discipline, and many lectures on free society, socialism, and individualism. I joined the Tel Aviv Scouts and was welcome, but remained slightly on the outside. The two-year difference between me and my classmates suddenly mattered enormously. All the girls had steady boyfriends; they had grown up together and shared common backgrounds and interests. My father’s status in the Army didn’t seem to interest any of them, and I had to work to fit in. In Tel Aviv, I encountered for the first time the differences between the haves and the have-nots. Not a class society in the usual sense, but a way of appreciating people by the size of their apartments and the make of their cars. The Scout group I belonged to in the north of Tel Aviv was typically bourgeois in values and possessions, and the competitiveness among the youngsters was based on family income and the ability to afford luxuries rather than on personal merit. There I didn’t want to compete; I didn’t care for brand names and clung to my own criteria. I had no jealousies, but I did cry into my pillow on many nights.
But something about middle-class Tel Aviv family life also attracted me, as unexciting and almost revolting as it seemed a few short years later. Life was set for them. They didn’t build an army, they didn’t steal fruit, they didn’t hoist a flag every morning in the name of Zionism, they didn’t absorb immigrants, and their treasured memories didn’t have to do with shaky jeep rides in the Grand Crater. They had radios and record players; they had shiny bicycles and tried on their mothers’ lipsticks and makeup. The girls had delicate hands and many played the piano or studied ballet, and I seemed clumsy and pathetic, trying to share their interests. This was perhaps the one year in my life when I wanted to be like the others, to fit into a line, and the line declared me different. So I took a sharp turn. If different, then different to an extreme. If among other teenagers, egotistical and self-centered as they were, I was not too welcome, I would try my luck with the adult world, which was tolerant and curious and not afraid of competition. I began to keep a diary, write short stories and bad poems, and I even found a certain relief in writing a few essays. I wrote long letters to nonexisting friends, and the drawers of my desk were full of pages in which the imaginary was mixed with reality. I frequented an artists’ café in Dizengoff Street and was made welcome there. Among the writers and poets and journalists I sat with my school bag or in my Scout uniform, drinking tea and taking in their anecdotes and stories, feeling very comfortable. I was well read, offered an opinion when asked, and was not treated as an oddity. I was young, true, but it made them feel closer to youth, and their interest and care were genuine. My father’s name was obviously my entry ticket, but once in, I was accepted and liked in a pleasant, patronizing, nonchalant way. I was offered a part-time job on a children’s magazine, and this gave me an alibi for my strange choice of “friends” as far as my family was concerned.
Among the many journalists I met in the café was the editor of a weekly magazine which was widely read and as widely resented. It was considered a scandalous yellow sheet and probably was, which didn’t curtail its large circulation among those who supposedly “wouldn’t touch it.” The man was fun, interesting, and gentle, and if he paid attention to me in order to obtain information about my father, he disguised it well, as he seldom mentioned him and we talked mostly about Camus or Sartre, about general political trends and some gossip. I volunteered some information occasionally, but in an innocent and rather ignorant fashion. I was too busy with myself in those days to bother with the goings-on in the General Staff. I had no access to papers, and my father didn’t bring home classified material. At the most, I was in possession of minor facts concerning his own whereabouts or lively quotations of social-gossip value only. I learned later that this man was considered a “dangerous type” and that I was soon put under surveillance—unaware as I was of several highly sensitive topics my father was concerned with at the time.
I was paid for my work on the children’s magazine, and I didn’t think much of accepting a small payment for a couple of items which appeared in the social-gossip column of the magazine. In an effort to widen my circle of acquaintances, I put a letter in the pen-pal section of the paper, and two dozen or so replies followed, which pleased me no end, though I pursued none.
I was restless. Layers of new worlds were unfolding before me, and I wanted to have access to them all simultaneously. There was school (I never lost interest in the act of learning); there was the youth movement, which by now I regarded with slight superiority, and there was my new circle of acquaintances, which supplied polar stimulants, from Alterman to crazy, homeless painters. Surely I belonged to none of these worlds. They mattered to me, but I held no position in them, and the entanglement was time-consuming and exhausting, a wild chase for something I couldn’t define and a running away from something I didn’t care to evaluate.
In the summer, I went to a kibbutz camp with the Scouts and the physical work did me good. I was healthy, I looked well, I enjoyed rising at dawn and picking apples, and I didn’t think twice when one of the popular boys in the group suggested we date. “Dating” meant walking along the Jordan River holding hands during the day and mostly necking after sunset. On the second evening, he took me to a eucalyptus forest not far from our huts and we sat talking for a while. When he asked me to take off my blouse, I hesitated, and did so reluctantly, as he said the magic words “But we are a couple, a steady one.” Just as I finished unbuttoning the blouse, three flashlights flooded over me, throwing yellow beams at me, through me, scorching me shamelessly as the boy produced an ugly smile of victory. This should teach you a lesson, he said, standing up. You shouldn’t give in so easily, and we have heard you do, to men who are your father’s age! Behind the flashlights, three boys appeared, giggling, and the four walked away, proud and aloof. I was more angry than ashamed, and my tears were tears of protest. What a fool I was! Humiliated and degraded as I felt, I didn’t feel guilty or even ashamed. I had been taken advantage of, and what I lost that evening was not my innocence but my trust, not my self-confidence but my confidence in others. I was stu
pid enough to convey the incident, adding some fictional melodrama, to my diary. The next day, I looked them all straight in the face. I worked harder, associated with some kibbutz young people, and proceeded to act, for the rest of the summer, as if nothing had happened.
Back home, I was again the little girl, studious and curious and presentable, and a new school year began. In November, my father participated in the Israeli mission to the UN as an advisor to Abba Eban. The UN Security Council was discussing a very serious complaint by Jordan concerning a reprisal operation against the village of Kibya. Ariel Sharon, an outstanding paratroop commander at the time, was in command of the attack, leading his legendary Commando Unit 101 and other paratroopers. The planned assault was in answer to an attack on an Israeli settlement in which a mother and her two small children were killed. Sharon and his people, believing that the civilians in the village had been evacuated, blew up fifty of Kibya’s houses, and the tragic result was the death of many innocent villagers, including about thirty women and children. Father was extremely upset but not apologetic. Strict orders were issued for future cases, whereby Israeli soldiers, even at a risk to their own lives, had to verify that there were no women and children before launching an attack on a house which harbored terrorists. Meanwhile, Father backed the special unit involved and faced an unpleasant Security Council session on the subject.
In the meantime, a series of articles appeared, published by the editor who had befriended me. The authorities were very upset, and when Father was in New York, all hell broke loose. Some clues concerning a security leak had led the Intelligence Service to me. They searched my room, read my diary, and went through my school copybooks. They cross-examined my mother, and she was dumbfounded. There was no way she could face me, and hectic cables were sent to my father to return home. He was reluctant to do so, and as the whole affair was highly classified, he wasn’t even sure what it was all about. He wrote letters twice a day, to my mother and to me, and I claimed partial innocence. Yes, we were friends. Yes, I occasionally told him about a party or a social gathering, and no, nothing more. What’s more, I didn’t care or know details about any of the subjects I was asked about. “Asked about” in a roundabout manner. A friend of my parents was given the unhappy mission of questioning me, an assignment later undertaken by my Uncle Ezer. The questioning was pathetically naïve and obvious, an attempt to drive me to tell things that didn’t happen. I was rebellious, I was different, I was treading on dangerous ground without knowing it, perhaps I was taken advantage of by smarter people, but I did not say or write or give away anything that was damaging or secret.