The Family

by David Laskin

  Jews may have bought the land for Kfar Vitkin, but the Bedouin farmers refused to concede that it was now “Jewish land.” In fact, this parcel had been plagued with tension for decades, and the arrival of Zionist pioneers only exacerbated it. In 1870, a prosperous Lebanese Maronite named Anton Bishara Tayan purchased the 30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) of Wadi al-Hawarith and ran it as a tenant farm. Tayan built a large square limestone farmhouse, dug a well, planted an orchard, and hired local Bedouins to farm and graze some of the acreage. But Tayan’s tenancy was not peaceful. When the Bedouin tenants felt that their rents were too high, they clogged Tayan’s well and uprooted his trees; on one occasion a Bedouin woman struck the landlord and drove him off when he came to collect his share of the harvest. By some accounts, Tayan ceased to collect his tithe regularly because the amount was so trivial and the tenants so intractable. By the 1920s, Tayan’s heirs, now scattered over three continents and saddled with their father’s considerable debts, were compelled to mortgage the land. When the Nablus District Court ordered Wadi al-Hawarith to be sold at public auction in 1928, the Jewish National Fund (the arm of the Zionist Organization in charge of land purchases) moved quickly—and perhaps unscrupulously—to snap it up. The land was especially desirable to the JNF because it was the first sizable chunk of the northern coastal plain to become available for Jewish settlement: its purchase gave the Jews a strategic foothold on the coast.

  The tenant farmers fought the sale of Wadi al-Hawarith not only with sticks and shouts but in court. The crux of the legal dispute involved two laws intended to protect the rights of the indigenous people who worked and lived off the land: one was the right of first purchase under Ottoman law (still for the most part “the basis of justice” in Mandate Palestine), which should have given the Bedouins an opportunity to buy the land before it was put on the public market; the second was the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance of 1929 (amended in 1931), which sheltered tenant farmers from immediate dispossession and required them to be compensated “on their receiving valid notice” to leave. Since the JNF had purchased the land “directly through the courts,” these rights were annulled. The Bedouins countered that this was a bit of legal chicanery that trampled on their long-standing tribal practices. The Mandate government offered to help relocate the Bedouins to another parcel fifty miles away and the Zionists tried to strike a compromise whereby the tenants could lease back some of the land on a temporary basis, but the Bedouins categorically rejected these offers: their livelihood, their culture, their identity depended on this piece of land. It was Wadi al-Hawarith or nothing. The two sides were deadlocked, and they have remained deadlocked over these same issues ever since.

  When the tenant farmers persisted in their refusal to leave, the JNF secured an eviction order, which the Bedouins appealed. A protracted and bitter legal battle ensued. The Bedouins’ first appeal was rejected, and in September 1930, 1,200 of them were forcibly evicted from their farms and ended up camped out at the side of the highway. The case dragged on for three more years and for a time it became a cause célèbre in the Arab press. The Wadi al-Hawarith Bedouins, poor and marginal though they were, showed remarkable solidarity and tenacity in their struggle to hold on to the land and maintain their tribal society. But in the end, the JNF prevailed in court and the Zionist pioneers prevailed on the ground, with their sweat and seed and water.

  The sale of Wadi al-Hawarith was one of the first instances of Zionist ambition uprooting a large traditional Arab agrarian community. What made it particularly significant—and galling to the Arabs—was the size of the parcel involved: it ranked as the third-largest land deal in Palestine during the British Mandate.

  While the fate of their colony was being litigated, Kfar Vitkin’s original group of twenty-one lived together in Anton Tayan’s big stone farmhouse. When the stone house filled to bursting, new settlers moved into portable wooden cabins clustered in a tight compound around the old farmyard. It was a bleak but inspiring spot. Beyond some irrigated orchards and fields near the house, the landscape was featureless scrub for miles in all directions—so empty and uninterrupted that the settlers could look from the Mediterranean to the mountains of the Jordan, Palestine’s west and east margins, with a turn of the head. In most places in the world, a battle over 7,500 acres would be a strictly local concern, but in this pinched bottleneck of a country, it became a flash point for violent regional conflict that still rages today.

  In the spring of 1930, Kfar Vitkin’s one married couple had a baby daughter, a sign from God that this enterprise might thrive after all. The settlers celebrated their first Passover seder in the stone house. Since there was no electricity, some of the men went to Hadera to borrow lamps and lay in ingredients for the feast. On their return, they dressed themselves in boots and Russian shirts (the height of Zionist fashion at the time) and waited for the guests—young single women from Hadera and a nearby kibbutz—to arrive. Night fell with no sign of the girls. Since it was dangerous to travel the roads after dark, some of the men went down to the nearby British military camp and enlisted four soldiers to escort them in a troop transport. When they got to Hadera, the Jewish-British scouting party found the young women waiting impatiently in the street. The moshavniks piled them into the transport, drove on to the kibbutz to pick up more girls, and returned to the stone house. Finally the Passover seder could begin. “Everyone gathered together—even the British soldiers were invited to join,” one of the settlers recalled. “We read the Haggadah. The food was plenty and sumptuous. Later we played the gramophone and danced until morning. We continued to celebrate after dawn, riding horses to the beach and bathing in the sea. Only toward evening did we drive the girls back home.”

  All the improvised magic and hope and sexiness of the Zionist endeavor were present that night—and so were the fear and constraint that shadowed every Jewish celebration in the Land. The tragedy of modern Palestine was that one oppressed, thwarted people had come to settle among, and inevitably to displace, another oppressed, thwarted people. Since they didn’t find a way to live together, they lived separately until one was large and strong and determined enough to oppress the other. It is the nature of human society, at least human society in the Holy Land, that the bliss of one people dancing all night and racing horses into the sea at dawn would lead directly to the other people’s sorrow, bitterness, hatred, and revenge.

  When Chaim bought into Kfar Vitkin during the spring of 1933, the moshav was in its second stage. Having evicted the last of the Wadi al-Hawarith Bedouins and divided all the acreage into individual lots, the moshavniks finally felt secure and numerous enough to leave the compound by the stone farmhouse and live on their own land. One by one, the portable cabins of the founding families were mounted on wheels and dragged by tractor out to their designated parcels. But still nearly half of the plots stood empty, waiting for new families to arrive and join the community.

  Sonia and Chaim were among those new families. They moved into their house before Passover 1934 and got to work. More money was needed for tools and farm equipment, so they borrowed. They lacked a pot large enough for making jam, so Sonia asked her parents to send one. She had toughened to the rigors of farmwork during her year and a half in Palestine. It was a good thing, because the labor of getting a small farm up and running was herculean and never ending. Side by side, she and Chaim planted citrus and avocado trees, plowed up the field behind their house to grow feed for cattle, and hammered and nailed together sheds and outbuildings. Tomatoes were Kfar Vitkin’s prize summer crop and Sonia and Chaim set aside a patch of their land for the sprawling, pungent vines that bore fruit from June through September. Day after cloudless hot day they watched the fruit swell and darken from pale green to milky jade to glorious ruby red—day after summer day they fretted over mildew, viruses, too much or too little water. On summer mornings they were up at 4 A.M. to get a jump on the work before the sun was too punishing. A couple of seasons in, when Kfar Vitkin
had reached its capacity of 150 families and the fields were pumping out quantities of produce all summer long, Chaim signed on to become the moshav’s truck driver. The dexterity at loading a hay wagon that he had acquired in the Kinneret came in handy now as he packed the Kfar Vitkin truck with canisters of milk and crates of eggs and rattled up to Haifa to deliver the produce to the Tnuva food cooperative. When Chaim came home late in the evening, Sonia always had a meal waiting for him. Actually “meal” does not do justice to the breadth and depth of Sonia’s cooking. For all her Zionist austerity, Sonia was a real ima Polania (Polish mother) who took pride in heaping her table with gefilte fish, kreplach, chicken soup, potatoes cooked in oil, and a pearly brown gelatinous delicacy made from rendered calves’ hooves and known as p’tcha. It took some maneuvering to get her hands on calves’ hooves in Kfar Vitkin back in the 1930s, but Sonia was equal to the task. She would have died of shame if anyone, most especially her husband, rose from her table less than stuffed to bursting.

  Between her twenty-second and twenty-third birthdays Sonia had changed everything: her country, her marital status, even the language she spoke every day. Though she and Chaim had learned to speak Hebrew back in Poland, it was not their mother tongue (Yiddish was their first language, Russian and Polish their second and third, respectively). Indeed Hebrew was no one’s mother tongue back then except for the sabras—the children born in the Land. It would have been soothing for Sonia and Chaim to lapse into Yiddish in the privacy of their home, but they made the effort to speak only Hebrew, even with each other, as a point of pride and loyalty to the cause. “It is necessary that we have a language to hold us together,” Ben Yehuda, the Russian-born father of modern Hebrew, declared—and he took it upon himself to fill that need by recasting biblical Hebrew (which had not been spoken except in prayer during the centuries of the Diaspora) into a modern living language suited to “the business of life.” Ben Yehuda’s heroic campaign to get Hebrew adopted throughout Jewish Palestine was one of the Zionists’ proudest accomplishments: it was a rare instance of a language being willed back to life by zeal and discipline alone. Among settlers on the kibbutzim and moshavim, speaking Hebrew became a badge of honor, a sign that they had put the shtetl mind-set of the Diaspora behind them for good. Children picked up the language effortlessly, but for adult immigrants like Sonia and Chaim the shift of idiom required ceaseless, sometimes excruciating internal warfare. No matter how drained they were by their work, no matter how excited or worried or eager they felt to share some bit of news or simply to relax with a chat in Yiddish, they swallowed the words that came naturally to their lips and willed themselves to converse in Hebrew. Their children remember hearing Yiddish spoken when their parents wanted to hide something, share a dirty joke, or chat with old friends. But the children grew up with only one tongue.

  In America Itel and Hyman worked hard to erase their Yiddish accents: it embarrassed them to say “vell” and “vuz” and “dis” and “dat” in front of gentile business associates. Sonia and Chaim erased Yiddish not out of embarrassment but out of pride. They believed it was their duty to ensure that the Jewish homeland was not tainted by the language of the ghetto.

  Behind the cinder-block walls of their tiny, spartan house, the cousins worked out the economy of their marriage. Sonia did the laundry (outside, under the burning sun, in a ringer washer that she filled with a pail, stirred with a paddle, and cranked by hand); Chaim drove the truck and changed the oil. Sonia baked bread in an oven whose design dated back to biblical times. Chaim laid irrigation pipes and built an incubator for the chicks. Sonia raised the chickens, tended the vegetable garden, butchered, cooked, cleaned. She was a bright young woman, well educated, well-read in several languages—she could have spent her days reading, teaching, writing, arguing about politics or books in city cafés. She could have run a business. She could have opened a shop. But she had come to the Land to be a farm-wife. Sonia had a stubborn rebellious streak—she never would have made it out of Rakov without one—but in her depths she was dutiful, generous, maternal, and long-suffering. She never resented being Comrade Kaganovich’s wife—on the contrary, it was a source of pride. “She worked just as hard as Chaim,” says Galit Weiser, the oldest of her granddaughters, who knew her well in the last years of her life, “and did not see her role as any less than what Chaim did. Sonia accepted her role. If she had any feminist qualms about it, she did not project them outwardly.”

  At Kfar Vitkin, Sonia always considered herself wealthier than her sisters or cousins. On the moshav, she had food, freedom, love, camaraderie, and the satisfaction of living her ideals. As it took root and flourished, Kfar Vitkin became not only Sonia’s home but also her homeland. Far from being a second-class citizen, she was the mistress of her own tiny but bounteous kingdom. Relatives who counted their blessings in coins or comforts were to be pitied. To ripen a tomato or fill a bucket with milk in the holy land of Kfar Vitkin was Sonia’s fortune.

  —

  They had staked everything they had—and whatever they could borrow—on Kfar Vitkin, but in the first summer, Sonia and Chaim risked losing all of it by getting involved in an illegal smuggling operation. They were not smuggling merchandise but people—their fellow Jews. It was a sign of the times that smuggling clandestine Jewish immigrants (ma’apilim in Hebrew) into Palestine had become necessary by 1934. The portal through which Chaim had strolled in 1924 and around which Sonia slipped eight years later was closing fast. It was closing precisely because so many were now pressed against it. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the numbers of Jews seeking entry into Palestine from Europe spiked: Sonia was one of 12,533 who made aliyah in 1932, but the following year the figure tripled to 37,337 and it would double again in 1935 to an interwar peak of 66,472. Horrified at the Jewish influx, Arabs began pressuring the British to restrict the flow, and the British complied. Hence, the ma’apilim. To Zionists, immigration to Palestine was the lifeblood of their movement; for German Jews in 1934, it was becoming the only hope. The Jewish community took matters into its own hands by organizing a secret human smuggling campaign under the name “Aliyah Bet.”

  Chaim and Sonia joined the network. In the summer of 1934, the couple was called to action. The first ma’apilim ship, the SS Vallos, chartered in Europe by members of HeHalutz, was due to arrive off the coast near Kfar Vitkin on August 25 with 350 passengers. Haganah had arranged to meet the ship and get the passengers safely to shore and then slip them into Palestine. Under cover of night, Chaim and his fellow Haganah recruits gathered on the beach and waited for a signal from the Vallos. Then they rowed out, off-loaded a few ma’apilim into their small boats, and rowed them to shore. The operation went on for several nights until all 350 passengers were off the ship. Sonia welcomed groups of ma’apilim into her home with food and hot baths and provided them with clothing in which they could pass for Jewish settlers.

  If they had been caught by the British military police, Sonia and Chaim would have been arrested and imprisoned, but they were willing to take the risk and to live with the anxiety.

  The anxiety was all the more intense because Sonia was four months pregnant.

  —

  Leah, Sonia and Chaim’s first child, was born on January 27, 1935. The baby’s arrival in the winter was a stroke of luck—or careful timing—since farmwork was relatively light during the rainy season. The miracle of having a beautiful rosy dark-eyed baby girl—a sabra—sleeping and squalling under their roof somehow seemed even more miraculous in the Land. Sonia chatted and sang and soothed and shushed the baby in Hebrew; and, another miracle, when Leah began to speak, Hebrew words came bubbling out of her mouth. Another tie with Europe severed, another stake planted in the sandy soil of Palestine.

  Leah was two months past her first birthday when anti-Zionist violence shook Palestine once again. As with the riots of 1929, the trigger in 1936 was a seemingly isolated incident—in April, some Arab thugs boarded a bus and attacked and
killed two of its Jewish passengers. A spiral of revenge and escalating reprisals ensued. With incredible speed fueled by rage, the initial rounds of random killings and uprooting of crops coalesced into a disciplined, prolonged, unified national uprising. Arab leaders urged the people to quit paying taxes to the British after May 15, and then attempted to shut down Palestine’s economy through a nationwide strike. Arab workers walked off their jobs en masse and Arab business owners shuttered their shops and offices. Though it halted public transportation and snarled government, the strike actually proved to be a boon to the Jewish economy. Jewish immigrants who had long complained of being shut out by low-wage Arab workers were finally getting hired in the citrus groves and vineyards. Urban markets, deprived of cheap Arab produce, had no choice but to stock fruits and vegetables grown on the kibbutzim and moshavim. But the economic benefits of the seven-month shutdown were more than offset by the violence that swept the region. Arab guerrilla bands, swelled by thousands of volunteers from neighboring countries, struck at outlying Jewish settlements. Under cover of night, the insurgents slaughtered livestock, burned, crops, cut down thousands of trees that Jewish settlers had lovingly planted, and picked off the unlucky and unwary. Most of the attacks were fleeting and furtive—a lone farmworker shot in a field, a grenade thrown from a train window, a couple of Jewish nurses killed in a Jaffa hospital.

  Kfar Vitkin was not spared. One of the moshavniks was on his way back from the beach with a cartload of building soil when an Arab gunned him down. Now every time a jackal screamed in the night Sonia stopped to listen and wonder.

  —

  When the general strike was called off on October 11, 1936, the death toll stood at 305—80 Jews, 197 Arabs, 28 British (many of the Arabs and British troops died fighting one another). But even though Arabs returned to work and reopened their shops, the killing was far from over. As fighting spread and intensified the following year, the Jews were forced to reckon with the fact that they were facing an Arab nationalist movement akin to Zionism in its ferocity, pride, and determination. This was civil war—one people hurling against another in the same land. And there was a new element: this time the Arabs were fighting with the active support and encouragement of the Nazis.