I was already twenty-three years old, and after three years in the Scorpions, flying fighter planes had nothing more to show me. I gave up any desire to fly Mirages, since it required another enlistment. I preferred to return to my friends in Kibbutz Givat-Brenner and to join them in the grand, righteous partnership of building a socialist- Zionist society in Israel.
On Saturdays I was in the kibbutz, picking oranges and cotton, loading hay and raising my hand in the general assembly on behalf of equality and similar principles. I hoped to marry the girl who loved me, and study medicine in Jerusalem. In my imagination I saw myself as Dr. Spector, distinguished physician and kibbutz member, who once a week puts aside his scalpel and does his reserve duty flying Super Mysteres at Hatzor.
This was a beautiful dream. I even obtained a pipe and began practicing with it in front of the mirror.
I SHARED THESE THOUGHTS with my friends and commanders, and it never crossed my mind that I had hurt somebody’s feelings, especially not the special and stormy commander of the air force, Gen. Ezer Weizman.
Weizman had never said two words to me before, but when he appeared one day at Hatzor and gathered all the pilots for a pep talk, he suddenly pointed a long finger from the podium at me.
“You! You decided to become a doctor!” Weizman knew every pilot by name, and knew all about us.
Embarrassed, I rose to my feet.
“Yes, sir.”
“You want to be released from the service? What, flying isn’t good enough for you?”
I didn’t answer. What could I say?
“You want to be a dentist!”
Laughter. I blushed.
I heard in Weizman’s offended tone a feeling of insult and began to heat up myself, but suddenly I grasped that from his point of view as air force commander I was doing something against him. At the time Weizman was leading a campaign to mobilize the best youth for aviation. It was clear and public knowledge that he wanted the air force to become the leader of the Israel Defense Force, and perhaps all this involved his career as well.
And another thing: Only shortly before, Weizman himself had sent me for a two-month leave to appear in a feature film full of propaganda for the air force. This movie was showing at that time all over the country, and for a time I was a media item—the handsome, curly-headed Israeli pilot. I was interviewed in ladies’ magazines, and my name and picture were on walls everywhere. I was flooded with letters from ambitious boys and romantically inclined girls. And lo, this symbol was going to betray him. Weizman raged, and he wouldn’t let me off the hook.
“A dentist, eh? Answer me!”
“I was thinking psychiatry could be helpful.” I told the truth, and instantly bit my tongue. I believe he never forgave me for this reckless answer.
DURING THE FOLLOWING MONTHS I took the bus to Jerusalem to visit the school of medicine. I audited classes, and even bought
Then another surprise. The kibbutz also viewed my intention to become a physician with an unsympathetic eye.
One evening Jos’l, who had been my class’s teacher and later became the kibbutz’s treasurer, called me for a talk. He sat me in the office of the kibbutz and treated me to a jeremiad on those degenerates who frequent bars and nightclubs and drink alcohol. The members of the steering committee sat around, nodding like Chinese sages. I didn’t understand what any of it had to do with me, and suspected it was a prank. At last they got to the point: Hooligans and drunks from Weizman’s flight school must first get cleaned before they approach the kibbutz with applications of any kind.
This was perfectly fine with me. I said I would happily invest a year or two in the fields and the dairy, to go to medical school. They smiled, but the committee was just the first step. Within a month I was invited to present my case to the general assembly of the kibbutz.
As usual, the assembly took place after Saturday night dinner. The long tables were cleared of white cheese and jam cans, and aluminum teapots were scattered about. Hundreds of members took seats or roved around, talking. The secretary rapped with his fork on his cup time and again, and finally it was quiet enough. He had put my case first on the agenda.
“Iftach Spector applies to go to medical school—”
Before he could finish, the storm of noise resumed. The ladies crocheting in the first row put their needles aside and began discussing my personality and what my mother was doing.
“He is Shosh’s son, isn’t he?”
“She won’t stay on the kibbutz.”
“I hear she has someone in Tel Aviv.”
“Really?” Ringing of a needle falling on the floor. “Do you know who this one is?” And they stopped, looking at me.
Then the men said to each other, “It’s mandatory that he sign a letter of obligation. Otherwise he’ll just get an education and never come back here to do anything.”
I stood there in the crowded dining room, waiting to be called to the table to stand before them and present my case. I couldn’t avoid hearing comments behind my back. Among the kibbutz’s older members, especially the women, some saw me as a “jobnik,” not a real kibbutznik but one who just wants a cushy job. They said I intended to go “white collar” at the expense of the kibbutz and evade hard physical work. I looked left and right at the hundreds of faces I considered friends and family. I heard them speak. The children from my class with whom I had grown up, hid in corners. I was on my own.
I raised my hand and asked the secretary to end the discussion.
“I’m withdrawing my application.”
A tumult broke out; I felt stares on my back as I went to the door and left the hall. From behind, I heard the fork ringing against the cup.
“Silence! Next item.”
I went to the scales room, the small house at the entrance of the kibbutz where trucks stopped for weighing. It also housed the telephone switchboard. Suzy, the operator, let me place a call to my base. I found my friend Mossik there, and he came from Hatzor with a military truck. We threw my bed, mattress, and clothes in it and drove away. At Hatzor we unloaded my few belongings in the bachelor officers’ quarters and went to sleep. So I was homeless and broke until next payday. My dream blew away like fog in the wind. This is how I remained “temporarily” in the military, where I made my living.
AND WHILE THIS INTERMEDIATE period continued, Ali finished her military service. A chaplain married us in a ratty office with dusty windows, on the second floor of the military rabbinate in Jaffa. A minyan was required—a quorum of ten men, mandatory for any religious ritual—and some guys were pulled in off the street. Ali looked very beautiful, thin and slender and fragile in a white dress prepared for her by the seamstress who lived near her mother (a small belly had to be hidden under the dress). On her head Ali wore a garland of tiny white flowers. The dress and the flowers looked out of place in that dreary room.
In the beginning there was no housing available for us, and we had to stay apart during the week and meet at her mother’s on weekends. Then a flat was freed up at Hatzor family housing, and eventually we had a floor on which to unroll our first joint acquisition—a rug. We got a table from the base quartermaster. We slept on my narrow iron single bed from the kibbutz at night, and during the day it metamorphosed into a sofa for visitors to sit on. The jewel in the crown was a brand-new Amcor refrigerator, donated by Ali’s South African uncles.
Mossik—my closest friend at the time, until he was killed a year later—also got married, and the young couple moved in next door to us. A warm friendship bloomed among the four of us, on the common lawn. The summer days were beautiful, and the pain and disappointment after the loss of our home dulled slowly.
News of my son’s birth reached me exactly according to the pilots’ wives’ myth, over the radio. In early November 1964, Ali had been taken to the hospital, and just as I was in the middle of a mock dogfight, the news broke in my earphones. I landed hurriedly, grabbed a vehicle, and sped to Kaplan Hospital, near Rehovot. My beauty was exhausted, her face pale and her lips dry and cracked. I looked around; there was nothing else.
