In the winter of 1965, Yonatan L. decided to leave his wife and the kibbutz on which he had been born and raised. He resolved to pick up and walk out and start a new life. For years on end he had been told what was right and what was wrong. He could barely grasp what those words meant. Sometimes, when he stood by himself at the window toward the close of day, to watch the sun fall, watch the deep, bitter night descend over the fields, envelop the land, like a disaster, to the end of the hills to the east, he calmly conceded that the night was right.

One evening he told his wife that he had decided to pick up and walk out. Life, he said, must go on; suppose I was killed.

He first waited for the rain to stop, for the political tension to ease, for the thunderstorms to subside, for the tractor shed to be taken over. Thus, the year ’65 had passed and the year ’66 had begun.

It was a long, hard winter.

Yolek Lifshitz announced at a general meeting of Kibbutz Granot that he would soon be resigning the post of secretary and that it was not too soon to start looking for a successor, perhaps Srulik the music man. Gossip had it that he was scheming to return to a position of power in the party and perhaps even to a cabinet seat. The wilder speculation was that he was cunningly counting on some crisis, factional rift, or war of succession to propel his name to the fore as a dark-horse candidate who might prevent a party split. It was Stutchnik, in fact, who stopped Yonatan Lifshitz on the path between the tractor shed and the metal shop to inquire in a cordially sly manner about his father’s plans. Yoni shrugged. “Lay off, for God’s sake. What the old man wants is grandchildren. So he can found a dynasty.” His reply only confirmed what Stutchnik and others had already begun to suspect.

Amos, Yonatan’s younger brother, a sturdy, curly-headed, keen-witted prankster who was also a champion swimmer, took part in a retaliation raid into Jordan and received a medal from his paratroop commander for bayoneting two Arab Legionnaires in hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, there was no choice that winter but to strike across the border every few weeks and punish the enemy for the murderous raiders crossing from Jordan almost nightly.