She stopped at Antwerp, where she loaded an additional 180 people who had escaped from Germany. On the night of August 12 she anchored opposite Shefayim Beach, north of Tel Aviv, and disgorged her cargo of immigrants. It was Saturday, a moonless night. The
Yitzhak Sade knew an anecdote from this landing. “At night, as the last of the illegal immigrants were being unloaded, a British patrol boat appeared and began searching the area with its spotlight. The
“After all the immigrants had been unloaded, Zvi jumped overboard. A kilometer swim got him to the beach. The ship stayed dark and made her escape.
“Surely,” Sade concluded with a smile, “the captain must have been grateful to Zvi for locking him up.” Zvi was twenty-three then.
When I lifted my eyes from the book I saw Dvorah watching me. Blushing furiously, I read her the last sentences in the story about my father. “Zvi, who was very brave, a daring and talented officer, was selected to command the
When the youngest of the four brothers, Shaike, fell in action in the Negev in 1948, I was told that the then- popular song “In the Plains of the Negev” was written about the two Spector brothers. I was proud of the family I came from, and used to hum the second verse to myself, where the mythological mother sums up the situation like this: “I mourned my first in the depths of the sea, and I raised you, the second, to defend the nation.”
THERE WAS ONE MOMENT in my life, a crazy, unforgettable moment, when Zvi seemed to have returned.
It happened one morning in 1947. As usual I was playing on the flat roof. My mother was in her room. I heard the noise at the door and ran to open it.
A man was standing on the stairs. He opened his arms and lifted me up in the air and stuck his nose in my chest. I heard Mother ask, “Who’s there?” and suddenly she made a strange sound. She flew right past me and fell on this man’s neck, laughing and weeping, and if he hadn’t caught the railing they would both have rolled down the stairs. I stood beside them, pressed between them and the wall, and watched them hugging, trembling with excitement. A pipe protruded from the man’s pocket, and this was the final, absolute sign.
When they noticed me again, Shosh introduced me to Maccabi Mutzeri, a good friend and “Rachel’s husband.” Rachel was my mother’s friend and neighbor. Then I realized he was also the father of my friends Oded and Alona, with whom I played in the sandbox.
Shosh and Maccabi had a long talk over coffee, and I listened. Maccabi talked about Europe. He had just returned after a long time away from home. When World War II broke out he had joined the Jewish brigade and was sent to Europe. There he fought the Nazis, and after the victory remained as an agent for the Haganah, to organize illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine. Now he was back.
In the coming months the connections between our families grew stronger. As he became involved in Palmach operations, Maccabi also began to be away more and more. The War for Independence had begun, and the roads were interdicted by Arab snipers. Word of Maccabi’s fall reached my mother in the morning. I was at home, and suddenly I saw her weeping bitterly on the bed. I asked her and asked again and didn’t stop until finally she told me: Maccabi had been wounded in the abdomen near Shaar Hagay, in a battle to open the road to Jerusalem. On the way to the hospital he bled to death. We both wept.
Then she got up decisively, dressed us both, and we went to see Rachel, who opened the door and immediately knew. The women sent the three of us children to play downstairs. The kids grilled me, and I told them what had happened in spite of being told not to. Oded ran upstairs. Little Alona and I stayed in the sandbox, and when we got tired of making fierce faces, we began to dramatize some scenes of Maccabi’s last battle. As the fatal bullet struck, his hands went up and he cried out, “I’m hit!” and then, at the dramatic moment, “It is good to die for our country.”
Years later I learned that in his dying moments Maccabi had really said, “This had to happen sometime. Go ahead, I wish you luck.” He died in April 1948, on his thirty-fourth birthday. The operation to open the road to Jerusalem was named Operation Maccabi, for him.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T TALK about my father, but the books were more generous. “Zvi was not a muscular guy,” wrote Yitzhak Sade, who himself was a big man and a famous wrestler. “On the contrary, his body was slight and delicate. But when he needed to, he showed unusual physical strength. I once saw him carry a wounded friend on his back over rocky terrain in the mountains for several kilometers. Where did he get this strength?” I internalized this, and went back to it in moments of physical stress.
And Sade concluded, “There was a streak of cruelty in him, a non-Jewish attribute. He had no hesitation about pulling the trigger. Still, justice was his guiding star. He kept this attribute inside himself, like a very dangerous weapon to be taken out of its holster only in time of absolute need—for justice.” I kept these things also in my memory.
YITZHAK SADE, “THE OLD MAN,” the father of the Palmach, and its first commander, was the one who sent the boat on her way. The Jews of Palestine were torn at the time in two opposite directions: on one hand, the struggle against the British Mandate government, and on the other, the need to cooperate with the British armed forces against the Nazis. The Brits were looking for “natives” to do special operations; at the same time, the Haganah was seeking legitimacy and arms. Their interests coincided. Sade gave the order, and the
The timeline of those events made many people suspicious, and some interpreted the boat operation as a nasty plot of the British to damage the Haganah and remove its next generation of commanders. Some denounced Sade’s part in the affair, called him naive, or worse—and never forgave him. But my mother never bore a grudge against him. She saw the operation of the Twenty-three as part of the struggle of the Jewish people, and knew that in such struggles mistakes are inevitable and losses occur. She appreciated Yitzhak Sade, and continued to work under his command in the Palmach, first underground and later in the War of Independence.
AFTER THE END OF THE WAR, Sade invited us both for several days at his home in Jaffa. This was an old Arab house that stood on top of a limestone cliff overlooking the sea, and Sade’s son Yoram lives there to this day. I sensed the affection and the admiration that Shoshana felt for this cumbersome, bearded man, who used to go down to the beach early in the morning to jog on the gray, coarse sand and lift weights.
In those few days we spent with him—this was on our way to settle in Givat-Brenner—Yitzhak was very pleasant to me, too, and talked to me a lot. He took me with him down to the beach to do his gymnastics, and once we went for a long walk in the Muslim cemetery, among the rows of tombstones. There we sat, and he told me stories of his own life. At home he opened interesting books and showed me strange pictures, translating the titles from Russian. One evening he talked to me at length about my father. I was ten by then, and I fell asleep on the sofa near him while he talked. Sade had known Zvi well and loved him, and probably he tried to pass something of him to me so I wouldn’t forget. I do not remember much, only his distant, awkward voice. I do not remember if it was he, or perhaps Abdu, who told me about that night in the Jerusalem Wanderers unit, when the Arab sniping at the settlement of Kiriyat Anavim intensified.
Zvi suddenly left his guard post and began crawling among the rocks in the direction of the snipers. When he came close, he began shouting at them (he knew perfect Arabic), “You cowardly sons of bitches, you are afraid to
