The “Cripple”
Ruth was hoping that the birth of their first child in 1939 would keep her man around the hut more, and the name they gave their daughter must have put a wide smile on Wingate’s face: “Yael” is the fearless woman in the Bible who dispatched her pagan foe with a tent peg.
But Ruth saw Moshe even less because Mandate authorities, while shooting and bombing Arabs into submission and chasing the mufti out of Jerusalem, had at last admitted that the policy of creating a Jewish homeland against the will of the majority of the population was a lot more trouble than it was worth, especially with war on its way in Europe. The new policy, introduced in 1939 and known as the White Paper, throttled Jewish immigration, severely limited land purchasing, and foresaw a transitional period of ten years during which the British would maintain control, followed by elections for an independent national parliament. The math was obvious: free elections meant Arab domination and the end of the Zionist dream. Habib and his friends clinked glasses of brandy, toasting diplomatic victory.
Ben-Gurion, vowing to fight the White Paper, ordered the Haganah to set up clandestine arms factories and accelerate the pace of illegal immigration of Jews fleeing Nazism. The operation was so clandestine that all Ruth knew was that her rail-thin twenty-four-year-old prince was never around to help change the diapers.
She was jealous of the other women her age who were rushing around in jeeps and learning how to fight. “When you are on a moshav, the birth of a new calf seems the center of the world.” Sick of all the neglect, she toyed with the idea of taking the baby and fleeing back to her parent’s home in Jerusalem. She changed her mind in October 1939, when Buggy, their boxer bitch, showed up at the shack with a note from Moshe tied to its collar: “Ruth, we have been arrested and taken to Acre . . . I hope it will end well. Kisses to you and Yael.”
A month after the Nazi invasion of Poland, British police caught Moshe and a group of others with illegal arms. They were sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the old Ottoman fortress in Acre, a prison populated by rapists, killers, pimps, and highwaymen.
Ruth’s indefatigable and selfless devotion was on full display. She turned over every stone to get her man out of prison, including putting on her old cotton wedding dress and trooping over to the British command headquarters at the King David Hotel and pleading his case before the commanding office, a “very nice old gentleman” fated to die in a terror attack by the Jewish group the Irgun. She went as far as writing to King George VI, inspired by childhood storybooks where the hero always has to prostrate himself before his Majesty. Nothing helped.
Over the coming eighteen months Ruth took Yael and traveled from the farm to visit Moshe, his head shaven and wearing a chain-gang uniform without buttons. The English prison warden, a mean-spirited, one-legged man named Captain Grant, wouldn’t let them get close enough to touch. There was a long coil of barbed wire, and she held Yael over her head so Moshe could see them. A guard once threatened to shoot at Yael when she tried to crawl through the wire.
Moshe only got to touch Yael once during his time in prison. Ruth’s old flame Zvi drove her and Yael to Acre in a 1938 Ford convertible with a heart-shaped grille and fender catwalks. A Sudanese policeman, a physical giant of a man, took pity and lifted up the daughter over to him. For the first time in Ruth’s life she noticed tears in Moshe’s eyes—he still had both.
Ruth’s letters to Moshe are lost; his replies, smuggled out by Jewish workers, survive. “My Ruth,” one letter goes, “if only I could pass on to you one thousandth of the love I feel for you both every night . . .” In another, he mused that if freed he could be a truck driver, a security guard, a construction worker, or return to the farm so long as he could have a quiet life with her and Yael. “The day will come and, very soon, you’ll be knitting, and I’ll be reading and the darling will be crawling on the rug.”
After four months in the fortress, Moshe and his fellow Haganah men were moved to a camp and allowed to work in the fields to grow their own food. Conditions improved, as did Ruth’s access to Moshe. She was able to bring him things from the farm, including O. Henry’s “The Cop and the Anthem” about a hobo in New York by the name of Soapy. The two even managed to see one another alone, in the middle of a field sitting on a pile of crunching and crackling eucalyptus leaves. Mosquitos swarmed where they kissed for the first time in months.
Ruth took a first-aid course in Haifa, and was volunteering in Tel Aviv when Hitler’s ally Mussolini ordered his airforce to bomb the city’s seaport in July 1940. “Bodies were smashed to a pulp,” she wrote to Moshe in one of the letters Zvi airdropped from his Piper Cub plane. “I realized what it is to see small children like Yael without legs or hands or faces.” A bombing raid pulverized the house next door to where Ruth and Yael were staying, and Yael was missing. She turned up hours later with torn clothes and shrapnel wounds on her leg.
Dayan’s letters to her, written on toilet paper and smuggled from the fortress, continued giving her a glimpse into his life. There is still the occasional confession of longing and love, but politics and the national struggle are dominant. One letter tells her about his wishes of becoming a leader of a determined group of fighters who, within a decade, would emerge as the underdog victors over both the British Empire and the Arabs. “You cannot imagine how much people here love and respect me. Nothing like this has ever happened to me in any company I have been in.”
In February 1941, Rommel’s armies were threatening Egypt and Palestine, and the British gave Dayan an early release from prison. Ruth thought the family would live happily ever after; with Moshe’s days in the underground over, he could now read to little Yael on the rug.2 At first Moshe acted as if he were home for good. He ate ample helpings of Ruth’s good cooking, the two made love, they talked about spring planting, they laughed. What Ruth didn’t know was that the British released him because they badly needed manpower. Rommel’s advances in North Africa and the presence of Vichy forces across the border in Lebanon made a new separation inevitable.
Zvi and members of the Haganah’s striking force turned up once again at the front door of the Dayan shack with a new assignment for Moshe: it was to take part in a secret operation in Vichy-held territory in Lebanon. Zvi explained to Moshe that the Jewish forces were to join a group of Australians in seizing roads and bridges. The operation began in the northern Galilee. Ruth drove with Moshe to the Lebanese border, and from there the men packed their ammo and headed into French territory. All went as planned until Moshe, in what would become his signature daredevilry, rushed a police post, tossed a hand grenade to take out a machine gunner, and went to survey the landscape for enemy troops. A bullet, fired by a Senegalese sniper, pierced the lens of his binoculars, scattered glass and metal into his right eye cavity, and tore out the side of his face.
It took many hours to evacuate the half-dead Moshe back across the border and drive him to a hospital in Haifa. He never uttered a whimper; he clenched his teeth and endured the pain. Doctors didn’t try saving the right eye because there was no eye to save; they couldn’t even give him a glass eye due to the absence of bone. The best they could do was to scrape away the burnt tissue, shrapnel, and bone fragments, and hope he wouldn’t die of infection. What the sniper’s bullet left him with was a lifelong case of severe and recurrent pain, paralyzing headaches and insomnia. Ruth includes a personality disorder to his list of troubles.
She dedicated herself to him and felt strangely content, because at least he was home—no more fighting, no more secret mission, half blind but otherwise intact with two strong arms; and even a man missing one eye could be a fine farmer. For Moshe, his life was over; he felt most alive leading men into battle. What good was an expert in Wingate’s counter-insurgency warfare with much of his field of vision cut off? How could such a man lead commandos into battle? He now considered himself useless, washed up.
The shooting had a deleterious effect on his already anti-social leanings: Moshe became even more of a loner, an aloof laconic man who communicated with nods and gestures more than words. Back on the farm, when he heard Ruth was pregnant again, his reaction turned “violent” because it was too late for an abortion. How was a “cripple” supposed to support yet another mouth? The remonstrations were of no use. Their first son, Ehud or “Udi,” the “strong warrior” from the Bible, came along in January 1942.
Oddly, Ruth regards the war years as the happiest they ever spent together. Despite the interminable hardships of the place, the small family set down roots, each year working the fields from brown to luminous green. Ruth still had just one desire, that they stay wedded to the wholesomeness of the farm, their lives enriched by the transcendent feeling of sowing and reaping.
She relished sloshing through mud up to her ankles, planting crops, raising Yael and Udi, milking cows, and scooping up manure so that Moshe could plow it back into a garden where he was experimenting with strains of Japanese cauliflower. She loved the haystacks and goats, the boxer bitch Buggy, a new mule nicknamed “Lord,” and trips into the hills where she and her farmer husband made love. Living in threadbare but blissful poverty, she and Moshe had their third child. A milk truck drove her to the local hospital for the delivery of their son they named Assaf or “Assi,” the leader of King David’s choir.