Beyond the Walls
With Moshe safely interred in Nahalal Cemetery, Ruth returned home to Tel Aviv. She was there for the premier of Assi’s latest film, Beyond the Walls (1984), which was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign picture, and can be seen as an allegory of a land forcibly divided into Jewish and Arab halves, by leaders playing on people’s fears and prejudices. The setting is Israel’s Central Prison. Mohammed Bakri, Israel’s leading Arab actor, plays the lead role of Issan, a PLO leader serving a life sentence for terrorism; Assaf, Assi’s character, is a leftist in jail for meeting the PLO in Europe. Behind bars, Assaf witnesses suicide and corruption, and finally, an unlikely coalition between radical Arab nationalists and Jewish criminals. A murder engineered by the prison director leads the Arabs and Jews to join ranks to oppose the real criminals sitting upstairs in the prison administration building.
Raymonda saw the movie right after it opened and phoned up Ruth choking with emotion at the film, “a masterpiece,” an assessment Ruth shared.
Meanwhile, other members of the Dayan clan were rising to prominence. Assi’s cousin, Yonathan Geffin, a poet, songwriter, and playwright, came out with a book on the Yom Kippur War titled simply, The Failure. On his Peace Ship Abie Nathan played Geffin’s song “Ihyeh Tov,” “It’ll Get Better,” over and over until it became the Israeli anthem of peace and one of the most famous songs in the country:
We will yet learn to live together
between the groves of olive trees
children will live without fear
without borders, without bomb-shelters
on graves grass will grow.
Jonathan raised his son Aviv, a future international rock star and a member of what he terms the “screwed up generation,” in an atmosphere of orgies and cocaine. In 1984, Aviv made his public debut on Israeli television when he sang a song written by his sister.