Dr. Sharona Muir, author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secret of My Father’s Lives. Photo by Tom Muir.

Muir book traces hidden past of a father and a country

It was a chance encounter with a fellow graduate student at Stanford University that gave Dr. Sharona Muir the first glimpse into her father’s hidden life and psyche.

Muir, creative writing and English, 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.

In her memoir, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secret of My Father’s Lives, to be published in June by Schocken Books (an imprint of Random House), Muir relates how a remark by a young man she had just met—that their fathers had served together in Israel’s secret Science Corps—led to the excavation of her father’s life before and during Israel’s war of independence. Her investigations also brought to light a chapter in that country’s history that has not been previously explored.

Muir's father, Itzhak Bentov (front row center), with his colleagues.

“I chose to call the book a memoir instead of a history because I think of history as the skin: It has to stand up to the harsh winds of fact. But a memoir is like the dermis. It lies underneath the skin, deeper and closer to our memories, our personal life, our emotions and our imagination,” Muir says.

However, for the straight history portion of the story—that of the Science Corps, or Hemmed, and the Israeli war—she was careful to adhere strictly to fact, based on her interviews with her father’s former colleagues and others during a summer in Israel while researching the book, as well as her reading of current histories.

The war for independence is the subject of much debate now in Israel, she says, and its history is being revised and re-examined as more information comes out and the context in which the war was fought becomes better understood. “I had to be absolutely accurate about that,” Muir said.

While the official Hemmed files remain classified, she was able to meet with and even attend a reunion of the group in 1999, to mutual amazement—her existence was as much a surprise to them as theirs was to her. Though the members asked to remain anonymous in her memoir, they shared their 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. Never one to discuss mundane matters or make small talk, Bentov seemed driven by a passion for discovery.

Working in his small basement laboratory, he made such inventions as a heart catheter, versions of which are still being used to save lives 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, and, being a sensitive only child, she understood that she should not question him. 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.

“We were a generation that did not talk,” one former Hemmed scientist told her.

But, as is acted out in the traditional Passover seder meal, Muir says, there is a time when it is important to tell one’s history, and she felt that, for herself and for the world, now is the time to recount the story of that time. “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 the places 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 finally 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—Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and, to some extent, Saudi Arabia—soon decided to invade Palestine, and the Palestinians, though not possessing sophisticated weapons, were armed with a good supply of small arms and 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 had to cobble together whatever elements they could scavenge, toiling around the clock. “Their natural resource had to be their brains,” Muir said. They gave their new weapons odd names such as the “Automatic Dog” and the “Loretta.” Her father’s first invention was a recoilless rifle made from steel wool and a water pipe.

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.

Future leaders
That team went on to become Israel’s national leadership. As Muir recounts in the book’s foreword, she once met Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and asked him what he thought of Hemmed. “He said they were ‘an extraordinary, brilliant group. And without a doubt, their work is at the foundation of Israel’s industrial and defense technology.’ They gave Israel her national water system, her state institute of defense research, her most visionary tycoon, her Atomic Energy Commission . . .”

“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. Many of its members went on to join the Weizmann Institute of Science, today one of the top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions in the world.

“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. Because, as one of her father’s colleagues told her, every generation is the one that forgets, “unless,” she writes, “we invent memory anew.”

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 and related material will soon be available at www.thebookoftelling.com.