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Muir traces hidden past of a father and a nation BOWLING GREEN, O.—In a just-published memoir, “The Telling: Tracing the Secret of My Father’s Lives,” Dr. Sharona Muir tells
how a remark by a young man she had just met—that their fathers had served together in Hemmed, Israel’s secret Science Corps—led
to the excavation of her father’s life before and during Israel’s war of independence.
It was a chance encounter with a fellow graduate student at Stanford University that gave Muir the first glimpse into her
father’s hidden life and psyche. The associate professor of creative writing and English at Bowling Green State University
is the daughter of Itzhak Bentov: Slovakian immigrant, narrow escapee of the Holocaust, successful medical inventor, popular
New Age author and—she was to discover—the creator of Israel’s first rocket. Investigation into her father’s past also brought
to light an unexplored chapter in Israel’s history.
While the official Hemmed files remain classified, she met with and attended a reunion of the group in 1999. Though the members
asked to remain anonymous, they shared memories of the exhilarating but terrifying time when Israel felt it was fighting for
its very right to life.
A past obscured
Until 1985, six years after her father’s death, Muir knew none of Hemmed’s history. Born in Massachusetts following Bentov’s
immigration to the United States, Muir grew up seeing him mostly on Saturday afternoons after her parents divorced. “He would
take me to the park or on other outings, and he would talk to me about science,” she said.
Working in his small basement laboratory, he made such inventions as a heart catheter, versions of which are still being used
today, Muir writes. In his heavy Slovakian accent, he would joke, “I’m just a Yankee tinkerer,” while describing to her the
advances that were being made with lasers and holograms.
“He never, ever talked to me about his family,” she said. Then in 1979, when Muir was 22, he died in a plane crash, and the
door to her father’s past seemed closed. Later, she was to learn that his silence on personal and other matters was very common
to those of his generation who had undergone the experiences of the war and the Holocaust.
Muir says she felt that, for herself and for the world, now is the time to recount the story. “I don’t want to make a glorified
history, but I want to convey what it felt like to them then.” And to explain how a generation’s experiences can affect even
a father’s relationship with his only child.
Researching the book, meeting her father’s former colleagues and seeing firsthand where he had lived “helped me understand
who he was as a father,” she said. “It opened a lot of doors in my heart.”
Rising to the defense
What she was able to piece together was how a group of young scientists and engineers, many like her father with little training,
was able to design the weapons that eventually assisted Israel’s defeat of the Arabs following the British withdrawal from
what had been called Palestine.
After traveling with a Zionist youth movement group to Israel from Slovakia after the Nazi invasion in 1940, Bentov lived
on a remote kibbutz in the Negev. The area was then under British rule and encompassed Jews and Arabs in an uneasy living
arrangement. Following a United Nations Security Council decision that the land should be divided into two states, side by
side, the British announced they would leave in May 1948. But the previous November, civil unrest reached a boiling point
and riots broke out among the Palestinian community.
Seeing the civil war coming, the group that was to become Hemmed began meeting clandestinely in Tel Aviv apartments and storefronts
to design weapons for the Jews—in defiance of the strict British ban on Jews or Arabs owning weapons, Muir writes. Hearing
rumors of the group’s existence, the young Bentov came to Tel Aviv, wishing to contribute his natural scientific talents to
the effort.
It is important to understand the context in which they were working, Muir notes. Following the Holocaust and then Britain’s
seeming favoritism toward the Arabs, the scientists and really all Jews truly felt their survival was at stake.
When the British left in May 1948 and David Ben-Gurion officially declared the state of Israel and created the army, he also
funded the Science Corps with the then-astounding sum of $3,000. Hemmed’s first official headquarters was in a shed on the
roof of a Tel Aviv apartment building.
The surrounding Arab nations soon decided to invade Palestine, and the Palestinians bombarded the Jews, Muir said. The Egyptians
bombed Tel Aviv, and an atmosphere of dread reigned.
The band of scientists now worked feverishly to design weapons, using whatever materials they could find, Muir learned. With
virtually no metal and no natural resources in the country, they cobbled together whatever they could scavenge, toiling around
the clock.
“Their natural resource had to be their brains,” Muir said.
The first six weeks of the war were devastating and felt like an “abyss,” Muir says. The war’s total casualties amounted to
1 percent of the population, and a quarter of those were sustained in that period. The total loss would be equivalent to about
2.5 million people dying in the United States today, she said, and “it left a permanent mark on the Israeli psyche.”’
Finally, on June 11, the U.N. declared a truce. Afterward, despite an arms embargo, Ben-Gurion managed to illegally smuggle
in enough heavy weaponry to fight a war. At the same time, Bentov and his Hemmed colleagues were working on developing a prototype
rocket. As the scientist who worked with him told Muir, “When it flew, we knew we had a future.”
With instant feedback from the battlefield, Hemmed was able to refine its designs fairly quickly, and, by the end of the war
a year and a half later, “they were a solid working ‘R and D’ team and had produced some very interesting technology,” Muir
learned.
That team went on to become Israel’s national leadership. “They were a very idealistic group,” Muir recounted. “They believed
in the importance of using technology to help people,” just as her father turned his scientific talent to creating the technology
to save lives. After the war, Hemmed became Israel’s civilian defense department.
“The most important thing to me about these people is that they felt they were on an island surrounded by fire, and that they
had complete faith in the work they were doing, and they were at the same time very forward-looking,” Muir said. But that
re-found history could easily be lost again, Muir fears, unless it is retold for future generations.
Muir is also the author of a collection of poems, “During Ceasefire,” and a scholarly study of science fiction. She has won
many awards for both her poetry and her prose, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work has appeared
in Partisan Review, The Jerusalem Report and The Paris Review, among other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in modern thought
and literature from Stanford.
More information about the book, published by Schocken Books, an imprint of Random House, is available at http://www.thebookoftelling.com.
(Posted July 21, 2005 )
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