Sharona Ben-Tov Muir discovered after the death of her father, inventor and New Age guru Itzhak Bentov, that he had created Israel’s first rocket. A secret group of scientists working in a rooftop shed, the “Science Corps,” of which he was a part, invented weapons during Israel’s war of independence and later developed Israel’s nuclear resources and other major scientific projects. Bentov, however, settled in Boston and made his fortune with such medical inventions as a cardiac catheter, which he created in his home laboratory, where Muir played as a child. Haunted by the question of why her father had never discussed his past, Muir traveled to Israel to find the Corps.
Through her own memories and the memories they share, Muir comes to know the brilliant, impassioned, and creative young Bentov as he demonstrates his latest invention for her, takes her canoeing, and reveals his thoughts about consciousness and the cosmos. Muir elegantly evokes the hubbub of Jerusalem streets, the wartime adventures of her hosts, and the inner lives of Israelis. The resulting story of invention and self-invention, of the Corps’s wartime experience as told for the first time, and of a deep, abiding love between father and daughter is an incandescent memoir. The author provides a new preface for this new Bison Books edition.
“Sharona Muir’s gifts for narrative, cultural insight and imagery make this memoir a brave and remarkable book, all the more remarkable for being free of easy sentiment. As a tender but unflinching memoir of a lost soul, it is hard to forget. As a personalized account of a country shaped by desperation, it contains the kernel of the Israel we know—or think we know—today.”—Kapka Kassabova, Times Literary Supplement
“In her compelling memoir . . . . Muir discovers that Hemmed’s work and the inventiveness of her father in particular was grounded in something other than weapon-making.”—Jerusalem Post
“The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.”—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams
“Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process—at once her own story and the tale of a nation.”—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story
“In the rich field of contemporary Jewish American female memoir, this book is among the finest in print. With this daughter’s journey come remarkable insights into the nature of genius, the nature of cultural dislocation, the inventions of new identity, memory, femininity, and history. Identity, female identity included, as Muir painstakingly unveils it in this novel of origins, is inseparable from world history, personal memory, postmodern diasporas, the age of science, and the ever-present threat of Jewish extinction.”—Gloria Cronin, editor of Saul Bellow Journal
“An extraordinary story, exceptionally well told, and absolutely true to character. I met people like these during my years in Israel, painful amalgams of irrepressible brilliance and unconquerable melancholy who would sometimes allude to a mysterious past but seldom elaborated. Sharona Muir has done so well in getting them to talk while, at the same time, bringing out their faults and human flaws.”—Norman Lebrecht, author of The Song of Names
“The Book of Telling opens with a sequence of lyric evocations of the elusive father whose influence made Sharona Muir into both a poet and a scholar. By the end of this memoir, her passionate investigation has drawn Itzhak Bentov partly out of the shadows that protected his work as an Israeli defense scientist, and given the book a historical scope that never ceases to be poignantly intimate.”—Diane Middlebrook, author of Her Husband: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, A Marriage
“A fascinating narrative, both poetic and sober, appreciative of complexities and free of self-delusions, working from sign to symbol, through personal experience and second-hand testimony to flashes of imaginative reconstruction and existential insight.”—Leona Toker, Hebrew University, Jerusalem