The Source

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by James A. Michener


  From where he stood at that moment he could see the spot in Tiberias where he blew up the English lorry, the streets of Zefat in which he had used his machine gun, and he vowed that violence was behind him; he would try to be the kind of Jew that Akiba had been, a peasant who had passed the age of forty before learning how to read, a self-taught man who had become the legal master of his day, a man who at seventy launched a whole new way of life and who, when the Romans finally executed him by tearing away his flesh with hot pincers—a man ninety-five years old and perhaps not legally a Jew, for it was believed that he descended from Sisera, that lascivious general whom Jael had slain with a tent pin—proved himself so dedicated to God that when the Roman soldiers gripped the flesh near his heart, he forced himself to stay alive until he could finish his defiant cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” to die on the long, wailing pronunciation of the word “one.”

  BY JAMES A. MICHENER

  Tales of the South Pacific

  The Fires of Spring

  Return to Paradise

  The Voice of Asia

  The Bridges at Toko-Ri

  Sayonara

  The Floating World

  The Bridge at Andau

  Hawaii

  Report of the Country Chairman

  Caravans

  The Source

  Iberia

  Presidential Lottery

  The Quality of Life

  Kent State: What Happened and Why

  The Drifters

  A Michener Miscellany: 1950–1970

  Centennial

  Sports in America

  Chesapeake

  The Covenant

  Space

  Poland

  Texas

  Legacy

  Alaska

  Journey

  Caribbean

  The Eagle and the Raven

  Pilgrimage

  The Novel

  James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook

  Mexico

  Creatures of the Kingdom

  Recessional

  Miracle in Seville

  This Noble Land: My Vision for America

  The World Is My Home

  with A. Grove Day

  Rascals in Paradise

  with John Kings

  Six Days in Havana

  About the Author

  JAMES A.MICHENER, one of the world’s most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the best-selling novels Hawaii, Texas, Chesapeake, The Covenant, and Alaska, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.

 

 

 


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