The daughter of Israel's first rocket inventor spoke about her investigation into her father's secret involvement in the Israeli military at the second event of the Meet the Author series Wednesday afternoon.Sharona Muir explores the life of her father Itzhak Bentov, who worked for Israel's Secret Science Corps after surviving the Holocaust, in The Book of Telling: Trading the Secrets of My Father's Lives. Muir is an associate professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling State University.

Muir told the approximately 25-member audience, only a handful of whom were students, that her book is "not just about Israel, or about my father, or about myself, but primarily about the very nature of invention."

Muir said a male classmate from graduate school at Stanford University-who was also raised in Israel-revealed to her that their fathers had worked together in the Secret Science Corps during Israel's 1948 War of Indepence.

"That generation was used to keeping secrets," she said.

The classmate gave her the phone numbers of six prominent physicists who had worked with their fathers in the Secret Science Corps. Muir said she had been skeptical, but decided to follow up on the story.

The former colleagues, who would become the sources for her book, were delighted to be in touch with her, she said.

"'We have been looking for you,'" she said they told her. "'Where have you been?'"

"When talking with my father's colleagues, I realized that nobody initially told their family," she said. "However, many colleagues wanted to begin to tell children."

Muir spent 30 minutes reading what she called her "experimental" chapter that moves between fictionalized scenes among the scientists working on their invention with scenes from her meeting with her father's assistant in 1999.

Despite having "nothing but an American book on rocketry," she wrote, the team created its own version of a rocket using water pipes and kerosene. Muir described the scientists as being elated after their success.

"It was with that rocket," she said, "that Israel proved it had a future ... these people were making weapons, but they were also making themselves."

"It is really important for people to hear about a woman looking for her father and trying to find herself," said Barbara Singer '71, the wife of Bentov's former Boston business partner and an attendee of the event.

Muir is also the author of a collection of poems and a scholarly study of science fiction. She has received awards for her poetry and prose, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.