New Face in the Mirror
“Until we extend the circle of our compassion to all living things, we will not, ourselves, find Peace.”
—Albert Schweitzer
Bottling up the pain of betrayal, Ruth poured her energies into Maskit. By 1960, Moshe had retired from the military and began pursuing more private hobbies. Along with digging up Maccabee coins and oil lamps and marble torsos, there was Rachel and a bevy of other lovers. One distraught lover rang up Ruth to complain that Moshe was cheating on her with a fourth woman. The mother of a different mistress, who was Yael’s age, placed a tape recorder under her daughter’s bed hoping for blackmail material.
Among Jews in Israel, growing prosperity meant that few Jews wanted to work in handicraft. With her brief experience in Gaza working with the six brothers, Ruth decided to venture into Arab villages inside Israel, starting with the women of Umm al-Fahm, at the time a two-mule town, because there was no industry and the Arabs, given the military regime controlling their movements, couldn’t freely seek work elsewhere.
Ruth charged into town with a Romanian-trained technician and an expert on looms named Mandel Vasseli. Mandel, having only read about Fedayeen in the tabloids but having no direct experience with Arabs, was a bigot filled to the brim with every stock cliché current at the time: Arabs as violent, lazy, anti-Semitic, inveterate thieves and liars. But since he loved rugs, he agreed to set up a workshop in the village. Ruth was the perfect matchmaker, and Mandel ended up adoring the women who worked the looms, and they reciprocated the affection. Mandel and the women of Umm al-Fahm produced the most exquisite creations, including a rug that wound up in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton; another, the “Agam” rug named after the artist who designed it, decorated the presidential mansion around the corner from Villa Lea in Jerusalem.
Maskit still had no money in the bank, and the only way to get some was to drum up business abroad: in those days few Israelis could afford high fashion. Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, an old friend of Ruth’s and the general director of Ben-Gurion’s office, promised to help. He knew the biggest names in American Jewry, including Stanley Marcus, head of a retailer for high-end Neiman Marcus. Marcus agreed to organize an exhibition of Maskit’s latest fashion line. But at the last minute, due to the faltering health of the manager—he had terminal cancer—Marcus backed out. Undaunted, Kollek put Ruth up in a suite, at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and set up a meeting with Barney Balaban, the legendary president of Paramount Pictures. Balaban began his career as a messenger boy at a cold storage company to become one of the most powerful and feared moguls in Hollywood. Kollek knew that he was a close friend of Andrew Goodman, the head of the Fifth Avenue department store Bergdorf-Goodman.
Kollek and Ruth stood in Balaban’s office when he made the call to Goodman. “Not interested,” exclaimed Goodman in a loud growl over a speakerphone. He gave money to Israel, loved the country, kept a picture of Herzl in his wallet; he just wasn’t going to do business with Israelis. In his view, they had nothing of value to offer his company. Israeli fashion? It sounded like an oxymoron. What did Mrs. Dayan expect him to do? Introduce khaki shorts into the summer catalog? Balaban was so unrelenting that just to get him off the phone, Goodman fobbed him off by agreeing to at least send one of his buyers up the street to the Plaza to meet Ruth.
The buyer took one look at the Maskit dresses, stripped to her panties, and began trying things on. She fell in such instant love with the clothes that a few months later she helped put together a fashion show, organized to sell Israeli bonds, in which Lauren Bacall and Shelley Winters stood next to Ruth on the stage, in front of two thousand fashion aficionados in Miami, to watch top models present coats and dresses.
Ruth told the story of Albert and how he was burned to death in his tank. You could hear a pin drop. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, an American-Jewish legend in the audience, told Ruth he had never heard such a poignant address. That night the fashion show raised $16 million in bonds, a whopping $100 million in today’s dollars.
Lonely, desperate Raymonda got her first glimpse into the secrets of the Dayan family when in one sitting she devoured Yael’s roman à clef New Face in the Mirror (1959), one of the most successful novels to arise out of the Bonjour Tristesse craze. Someone smuggled the banned book into Jordan, and it ended up with Raymonda. She couldn’t put it down until she’d read through it twice. Sitting in straight-laced Nablus, a town without the basics of cosmopolitan life—no university, no theater or concert hall, the only cafes inhabited by men smoking hookah and playing cards—the Yael she imagined was a Françoise Sagan in khaki, a proud, emancipated woman; and each time she picked up the book she was reminded of the freedom she had had in Haifa. That Yael was the daughter of Moshe Dayan didn’t matter. It was Yael’s courage to defy the norms of society that made her into a kind of alter ego.
Prudish Israeli critics, taking umbrage at Yael’s brazen sexuality, accused her of “undressing on Jaffa Street.” She wrote the book in English, and American readers snapped it up. A Life magazine photographer, fated to die in the Six Day War, captured Yael in a photo titled “La Femme Fatale.” Dressed in an IDF uniform and posing beneath a set of skull and crossbones, her eyes are cast into a corner, and her mouth is opened slightly as if reciting a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. In another photo she stares right into the camera, the skull hovering over her head like a macabre nimbus, her military shirt unbuttoned. In the same series, she is in Paris smoking a cigarette with a silver filter, reading a book in French.
In one scene in the novel, which begs for Freudian exegesis, the female protagonist, a soldier, lies in bed with two long guns. “I could feel them through my pajamas, where I could warm them and get used to them.” Upon waking, she is holding the weapons in her hands “so tightly that they hurt . . . I thought it easier to believe in Father’s hardness than in his love for me, so I ignored the love . . . And you, Mother, it was easy to believe you to be weak and in need of me.” Yael knew about her father’s womanizing; she also knew that her mother was employing more people than any of the large companies in Israel. Still, the mother character comes off as an emotional wreck alternating between fits of hysteria and racing off to assist the next band of helpless immigrants: just the kind of woman Yael was determined not to be.
Shortly after the novel appeared, a scandal broke out surrounding one of Moshe’s mistresses, and in his political-erotic tabloid Uri Avnery covered the story in all its pornographic details. Ruth, lips pressed tight in a grim stoicism, refused to answer the swarms of journalists that followed her. Yael’s response to the lurid revelations wasn’t to judge her father morally or question the way he fled behind what she described as a “solid shell of superior indifference”; it was his taste in mistresses that she found “appalling.” If she was critical of anyone, it was of Ruth, as if it were she who was at fault that Moshe went off, looking for someone else.
Eleven-year-old Assi told Ruth to “leave the bastard.” From that point onward, Ruth and Assi formed a coalition against the competing alignment of Yael and Moshe.