My Father, His Daughter

by Yaël Dayan

  Of course, a certain minister was an idiot. Obviously a particular ambassador was a moron. Very funny to have told a policeman when caught speeding: “I have only one eye. Do you want me to look at the road or at the speedometer.”

  His judgment of character was superficial, and this went for the people he liked or respected, not to mention his taste in women, which was downright vulgar. But he taught me to be selective and discerning, and at the time, I applied it to everything and everybody, except him. He was above reproach, he could do whatever he wanted, he was the epitome of a “free man.”

  I soon learned his way could not be imitated. Not because I didn’t have his record, which led people to tolerate him, but because I didn’t have it in me. I liked his manner and style, and he didn’t mind paying a price and taking the consequences. I felt sorry for the idiots, rather than contempt, and where he was irritated, I was often amused. His lack of sophistication produced narrow-mindedness, though never on military or political issues.

  Assi and Udi reacted differently. Udi left Zahala and studied in a farm boarding school a short drive away. He refused to be driven there by Father, didn’t want the other kids to know he was Dayan’s son, and though it didn’t last long, he tried to grab small chunks of anonymity whenever he could. Like Zorik, Udi was an adventurous nature lover. Being an excellent sportsman and an able mechanic gained him the reputation of being a poor scholar. Laziness made him accept the definition, and it took him and us many years to realize that he was as capable of scholarly, even literary and artistic, achievements as the rest of us. Assi was more of an extrovert as a child, temperamental and sensitive very much like Mother, but he, too, tried to fight for an identity apart from the famous name he carried. He was easily elated and as easily depressed, and in elementary school, when filling in a questionnaire about home and family, he wrote: “My father is a plumber, my mother is a dressmaker from Rumania,” and added at the end: “I don’t want to be a guinea pig.” All our teachers told our parents that the three of us were suffering from a “Dayan complex.” The school psychologists offered us remedies or guidance, but my father, in his usual style, laughed it off as “two-cent psychology” and suggested they themselves had a “Dayan complex” and they should worry about their own children.

  Mother loved us and thought the earth of each of us and felt there was no cause for serious alarm. We were great, we were good-looking and healthy, we had talents and abilities, and she was there to protect us, which basically meant to give and spoil and permit and supply our needs. The emotional, intricate level, or whatever complexes we did develop, was ignored and suppressed in self-defense.

  All along our separate routes, Mother managed to distinguish our achievements, regard them as dream fulfillment, and exaggerate their worth, and simply treat failures and disasters as “bad luck,” to be blamed on others and later on my father, or simply ignored. I seemed to take the Dayan complex for granted, as a biological fact. I couldn’t and didn’t choose to fight it, and I didn’t waste energy trying to shake off something that couldn’t be shed and didn’t disturb me. Very often I heard, behind my back or in conversation: “She is very much like her father.” The fact that, more and more often, it was not meant as a compliment didn’t upset me. It inevitably meant being different from the others, and it pleased me to think that I ran no risk of fitting into some sordid mediocre routine of average dull people. I was “somebody,” and I didn’t have to deliver anything or work for the title.

  The last year in school was pleasant enough. We mostly worked to prepare for the matriculation exams, and discipline was lax. School authorities treated us as adults and spoiled us, especially the boys, as a way of saying: “Let them enjoy the freedom and not burden them, it’s their last year before the Army.” Often, that was meant with a touch of sadness, as if they might add: “And maybe their last year altogether …”

  This sadness was made more melodramatic in our talks among ourselves. The borders were restless, reprisal acts were becoming major operations, and there was talk of escalation, perhaps of an all-out war. My classmates were all set to volunteer for the paratroopers and other special combat units, and the list of dead from among the past graduates grew longer, adding white hair and deepening wrinkles on the teachers’ faces. They looked at us with compassion and pity, remembering a dead pupil’s liveliness or mischief or promise, and muttering: “Only yesterday …”

  The boys in my class hid their fears under a thick but transparent layer of humor. “I’d rather die on the Egyptian front; in the sand you rot slowly.” Or: “You’d better find a spare boyfriend, someone with a green thumb who can cultivate the flowers on my grave.” Or someone would suggest that next year’s class reunion should be held in the military cemetery.

  We had fun, we went to the movies and admired Lana Turner and Grace Kelly or whoever was blond and buxom and elegant; we ate corn on the cob on the beach and licked ice cream while talking about what we would do after Army service, unless there was no “after.”

  I was younger than the others. I had almost two years before I was due for military service, and I planned to study a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I was more involved than the others, and what was to them an unknown, demanding yet exciting world was almost home for me. Uniforms, weapons, drill, camp, the after-battle smell and the nervousness preceding it, the red berets and the heavy boots, the light aircraft and the topographical maps were all part of my daily life, and familiarity breeds security.

  We had heated political arguments, and most of my friends leaned to the left. They thought of life on a kibbutz, of total equality, and oversimplified pure socialism. I was for the moshav system. Ben-Gurion’s policies were socialistic enough for me, and I was satisfied with the equality of opportunities. We were free of materialistic desires, and none of us thought then in terms of future income, the size of apartments, the make of cars, or even of our own clothes. Simplicity, a modest appearance, basics were “in.” Girls didn’t use makeup; the boys wore shorts and sandals and a clean, rolled-up-sleeve white shirt on festive occasions.

  My father was satisfied that I’d pass the final exams without difficulty and was trying to convince me to study agronomy at the university, “or something else that is useful.” He knew I wanted to write; he liked my short articles that appeared occasionally in the evening paper. He didn’t think I lacked talent, but he thought I could do all this on the side, and study something “real,” have a profession and support myself. Agronomy, archaeology, zoology were worthwhile studying. The subjects I chose like international relations and political science were a “waste of time and money.” In the very long run, he proved right, and I shall always harbor a frustration at not having studied medicine or biology. Many years later, I worked doubly hard to complete some courses in science and genetics as some small compensation. At fifteen, I didn’t believe I had the stamina or even the gift for math or science and chose the easier way. It was not his money, or his time, so, without a major confrontation, Father let me have my way and I enrolled for the following university year when all my girlfriends were preparing themselves for military service.

  My girlfriends had boyfriends their own age or older. Some talked about marriage; a few had made love; and I watched with envy as, at the end of a Scout meeting, couples drifted off holding hands, sharing sweet secrets, leaning on one another, drawing strength from intimate friendships. I consoled myself with the fact that I was popular, even courted and “loved” by a couple of boys, but I waited for the “real thing.” I was mature, I looked older than my years, I was attractive, but I was not interested in flirting. I longed to fall in love; I waited for an explosion, for a rainbow to break through, and wasn’t settling for less. What I witnessed around me was pure and beautiful, and somewhere along my teens I missed the age of innocence. My two closest friends were boys, and we mostly studied together, often in my house. My father asked whether they were clever, which they were, and studious, which they were, and
occasionally exchanged a few words with them, showing us a piece of ancient pottery or inquiring about their future plans. He didn’t ask me whether I dated; he didn’t suspect that girls my age made love, and definitely didn’t want to know more than he did. I wouldn’t lie to him and he knew it. He wasn’t after excessive information, and for the time being there was nothing to hide. My mother was fully involved with a major project, the fruit of a few years of work: Maskit. Maskit’s purpose was to trace and develop handicrafts and other local artisanal activity, improve design or preserve the traditional and original, and create a proper outlet for it commercially, thus supplying a source of income for the artisans and craftsmen. At the same time, Mother’s priority was still my father, and she made sure nothing was changed in his routine. He showed sufficient interest in her work and encouraged her, and she was soon flourishing under heaps of rugs and carpets, samples of handwoven materials and embroidered dresses, boxes of Yemenite jewelry and lace collars. Between my father’s accumulated potsherds and handles and stones and Mother’s beads and sweaters and ceramic creations, I entertained dreams of an empty house, bare walls, and uncrowded space and developed a certain antipathy to any sort of “collection.” She was busy and I found comfort in it. If I had a young woman’s dream of love, or coveted an engulfing huge emotion, it was not something I cared to share. Both my parents, even if they felt guilty momentarily for not being more inquisitive about my emotional life, didn’t really want to tackle anything that might prove complex. It suited me fine. We called it independence, trust, respect of privacy, whatever. My father said often: “You do what you want; it’s your life, and I trust your judgment. Most important, don’t do anything you don’t want. But if you need me, you should know I’m always there, with all my love, and not such a bad brain …”

  There was something deterring in his offer of a “shoulder to lean on.” He meant it fully, but in my mind I could complete the sentence, adding: “As I love you and trust you so much, I’m sure you’ll never get into trouble serious enough to use this shoulder. The knowledge of its being there should suffice.” Only after his death did I count the many times I was on the verge of appealing to him and didn’t, the times I wanted to lean and didn’t dare test the validity of his offer. Many years later, and he kept repeating this key sentence, my image as independent and self-sufficient was so strong that preserving it was my minor contribution to his well-being.

  Mother watched me grow up and away, make progress and fall and stand on my feet again, as if through a barrier that I myself created. A barrier she was afraid to cross and I didn’t care to abolish; we were both remiss. “She is like her father, she doesn’t need people,” she would say, and left it at that.

  Travel is second best to being in love, or so I discovered when my maternal grandmother offered me a graduation present—a trip to Europe. My first trip abroad, something that during those years of austerity we could never afford on our own family income. School was over, the youth-movement experience was over, the university and Army service had not yet begun, and it was time to collect a dividend on the fact that I could read and write at the age of four. I gained a year and I was set to discover the world beyond Carmel and the Old City walls, beyond the Mediterranean. With my parents’ blessing, a few new outfits, loads of practical advice, and my grandmother’s car, we left the port of Haifa for Marseilles. As the lights of Haifa disappeared in the dark, I sat on the deck hypnotized by the trail of white foam in the water. The stars were the same, most of the passengers were Israeli, and the language was the same, but the strange sensation of being carried away from home, by a large hand, to be deposited on a distant shore, excited me. The nightly emergency phone calls for my father, the morning news, the headlines, the permanent, almost obsessive preoccupation with what was happening all around, the microcosms of retaliations, declarations, borders, curfews, my mother’s Yemenites and Moroccans, my father’s brave young commanders, all faded into the steady sound of the waves, and I felt guilty. This feeling that was strongest then, as I went abroad for the first time, has never left me during years of extensive travel. As if I ran away from a besieged and surrounded island, as if I was a deserter. A few days passed before I could pull out of this mood and begin to look around and take new things in.

  The trip was all I dreamed of and expected, and more. A constant revelation of layers unfolding and presenting themselves to me, to touch, to look at, to taste, and to experience. Pages of everything I’d learned and read and imagined came to life intensively and nothing was familiar or remotely resembling what I knew at home. We drove to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Stockholm and Oslo, and crossed the North Sea to Newcastle, arriving in London a few weeks later. We stayed in youth hostels, as my grandmother was in charge of youth hostels in Israel and was attending an international congress in Oslo; we bought local foods and ate in forests and near rivers and lakes. It wasn’t a luxury trip, but the abundance of luxurious offerings made me feel like a princess. I wasn’t feeling guilty any longer, but I was jealous. Envious to the point of crying. The green huge forests, the streams and lakes and springs I compared with the pathetic flow of the Jordan, and our dry wadis and yellow desert. The small villages with their pebble-paved alleys and their church towers, the monuments of Paris, the art of Amsterdam, the cherries and the raspberries, the politeness and the cleanliness, the calm of people, and their complacency, the aesthetic quality of everything from shop windows to public parks. It was all too much for me to absorb. Villages in Israel were hurriedly thrown together in the fifties, and scarcity of water and lack of expertise gave it all an appearance of something provisionary. From the perspective of a Danish village, my own country seemed a huge transit camp of refugees slightly hysterical in behavior and hopelessly pathetic in their efforts. One room of the Louvre, one corridor in the Rijksmuseum, one lake outside Stockholm, seemed to equal what we have nationally in art and resources. And people were not nervous, or so it seemed. I suddenly discovered there were people, intelligent and cultured, who didn’t switch on the radio every hour on the hour, who didn’t read three newspapers a day, who didn’t hurry or raise their voice or perspire or push their way to the top of a line, or even bargain. I was so bewildered by comparisons that much of the actual experience would have been wasted, had it not been for my grandmother. I could have choked on pure oxygen and mineral water, if she hadn’t forced me to look a little deeper and stop comparing. She showed me slums; she pointed out miserable beggars and primitive dwellings. She distinguished for me between calm and boredom, complacency and purposefulness, striving and taking for granted, age-old achievements for which a very high price was paid and results reached in a short time against all odds. I learned to enjoy things without the need to possess them. None of it was mine, or would be mine, and it was all very beautiful, and I was able to take in and enjoy and appreciate. What was mine was not degraded by being different.

  For the first time, I felt Jewish. What was inherent in being an Israeli suddenly acquired its own reality. I was an Israeli; I had a blue passport, and I was born in Nahalal. In the forms I filled whenever we crossed a border I wrote: Nationality, Israeli. When I visited a synagogue in Amsterdam or Paris, when I heard Yiddish spoken, when I said I was from Israel and a stranger added, “You mean you are Jewish,” when I saw the sign KOSHER over butcher shops in London’s East End, it was as if something from inside me was extracted and exposed as a second skin. I didn’t believe in God, never had a Jewish education in the orthodox religious sense, never was observant. Being Israeli, speaking Hebrew, studying the Bible as my national history book, as geography and poetry and philosophy, touching my father’s oil lamps and having Tzippi for a sister, were all components in my being, and there was no need to dissect or analyze them. When we were in Stockholm, someone said: “Oh, but you don’t take bacon with your eggs.” I’m sorry, I had to give it a thought and an answer. I do eat non-kosher food, I do drive on Saturdays, no, I don’t speak Yiddish, yes, Jerusalem is my capital,
yes, the Jews dressed in black praying in the small synagogue are my brothers, yes, the Nazis did kill my people, yes, there are Israelis who are not Jews … leave me alone. I don’t know. No, it’s not a religion—I’m not religious. It’s not a race; we are not biologically homogeneous; we are a people. We are custodians of a great culture. We are a civilization. Some of our people have a state; the others are minorities in other countries. I found out, never having all the answers, that I was not defensive about it. The “others” thought of me as Jewish and applied their terminology regardless of my identification with it. Only in London did I begin to sense what it meant to belong to a minority, what kind of insecurity it produced, and in turn what Israel meant to the Jewish people. That’s when I seriously missed home and felt saturated with the formal, confining, slightly hypocritical “European civilization.” I absorbed to capacity and was on the verge of giving up, but just as I was ready to go home, I found a part-time job and decided to stay for another couple of months. So when Grandmother crossed the Channel to drive south alone, I had to force myself not to run after her like a baby. Staying was a self-imposed test which I didn’t enjoy and yet didn’t regret.