Birthright

by Alan Gold

  When Judit arrived at the bottom of the stairs, Shalman extended his arms and wrapped them around both her and Vered. They embraced without speaking. But it was a cold embrace and relinquished quickly. They hardly spoke to each other. Shalman’s attention shifted straight to his daughter, and he scooped her out of her mother’s arms and kissed her warmly. He turned to face Judit, but she had already turned to where the baggage was being removed from the plane.

  • • •

  Shalman reversed the car out of the grass field and steered it toward the road that linked Tel Aviv with Jerusalem and would return them home. Vered was in the backseat, resting in a cot. Judit sat next to Shalman in the front bench seat, staring out the window; the landscape seemed so foreign because of where she’d been, yet so familiar.

  They said nothing for some time, each alone in thought, until Shalman broke the strained silence. “Did you see your family?”

  In truth, he knew almost nothing about his wife’s family and had no idea what to expect in her answer. But he knew that family had been her pretext for traveling to Moscow, so it was an obvious question to ask.

  “Are they well?” he continued when Judit did not answer straight away.

  “They’re dead,” Judit said, and the cold obliqueness of the answer surprised him. “They passed away.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry . . .” stammered Shalman. “I don’t know what to say.” He reached out his hand to take hers. “I’m still here . . .”

  Judit was desperate to tell Shalman the truth. She wanted to tell him all she had done, all that had happened, all she must do. Of her meetings with Beria, with Molotov, her moment with Stalin when he’d walked into the room, smiled, shaken her hand, and walked out without speaking; of receiving Russia’s highest civilian award; that she was being groomed for high office in the new nation, and with that came a past she must hide.

  Judit’s silence compelled Shalman to say something he’d been holding back until now. “Immanuel Berin asked about you.”

  The statement rattled Judit, but she held her gaze out the window, and when she spoke, she fought to keep concern out of her voice. “I thought you were having nothing more to do with Lehi and the Irgun and the fight. I thought you wanted to put that behind you.”

  “I do. I have . . . It’s nothing.”

  At any other time, the mention of Berin’s name would have been ordinary, but at this moment the name was more than ordinary—a senior leader of the Irgun and the final target for Judit under orders direct from Molotov himself.

  “What did he want?” she asked.

  “He just . . . He just asked how you were, where you had been . . .”

  “And did you tell him?”

  “I said you had traveled to see your family. That was the truth.” The final word hung in the air.

  Judit’s mind raced over the things that she had done and said before she had left for Moscow. Why the hell was Berin asking about her?

  “That was the truth, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course,” she said, but her response was delayed a fraction too long.

  “Why the hell are you lying to me, Judit? I’m your husband. Tell me the truth. Why were you in Moscow? What’s going on in your life that you have to lie to me?”

  He fell silent, praying that she’d answer with the truth and put an end to all his doubts. But after a long and painful moment of silence, she said softly, “I was visiting my family. Believe me, Shalman. Please believe me. But to find both my parents dead, without a word from my brother or sister . . . it was heartbreaking. I’m sorry if I don’t meet your expectations, Shalman, but . . .”

  They drove for ten or fifteen minutes up the hill toward Jerusalem in complete silence. Instead of thinking about how she was endangering the love between them, she thought only about Berin.

  She thought back to conversations and meetings. But she was always so careful. She had been meticulously trained in how to separate her normal life from her clandestine life. She’d been taught to divide her personas into distinct compartments in her mind, to allow those thoughts and events to rise to the surface only when she was in control of her situation.

  Even when she met one of her agents incidentally in the street, their eyes would never meet; they never faltered in their gait; they never turned after they’d passed each other. And yet they would completely recognize each other.

  No, she thought, there was nothing that could have given anybody in the Irgun the remotest clue about her role. She had been so careful. Hadn’t she?

  Shalman knew he couldn’t take the issue further without causing a catastrophe in his marriage. He had seen his parents’ lives ruined by his father’s arrest by the British. The people on the kibbutz had told him repeatedly that his dad was a hero who’d sacrificed himself for the lives of others. But Shalman had still lost his father, and the loneliness and yearning never left him. He had then watched his mother slowly sink and almost will herself to death from grief. Family dissolved around him, and he knew with utter certainty that if he pushed Judit too far, she’d walk out on him and Vered. And that was a lifelong trauma that he had no desire to ever cause for his beloved daughter.

  Jerusalem

  January 7, 1948

  “I NEED TO be absolutely plain to you about the coming war.”

  Immanuel Berin spoke to the men and women of the North Jerusalem forces of the Irgun gathered before him.

  “Our best advice is that when the UN vote for partition is passed, the Arab armies will not hesitate. They are gathered and well armed and have made their intentions clear. Their target will be Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a symbol, and it’s been easy for Arab leaders to motivate fighters from abroad—from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—to fight with that one target in mind.

  “Should we fail to defend Jerusalem, then Israel will fall, no matter what other territory we manage to keep. If we lose Jerusalem, we’ve lost the war.”

  Berin knew he was giving a speech, but the men and women were listening intently. Nobody needed to be reminded why they were fighting.

  “For the past six months, Palestinian Arabs have been conducting a guerrilla war against us, hoping they will frighten us away. Small targets: homes, businesses, kibbutzim. But this is not the real war and will not prepare us for what is to come. You’ve seen the map a thousand times. We are surrounded. North, east, and south, with our backs to the sea. When they come, it will be a massive pincer movement.

  “The two armies that most concern us are the Jordanians and the Egyptians—the other Arab armies are not nearly as dangerous. The more medals the generals wear, the less professional they are. Not so the Jordanian army. It was trained by General Sir John Glubb, a highly regarded British military strategist who rose to fame as commander of the Bedouin Desert Patrol. He has done much to galvanize Arab fighters, who are often more focused on internal tribal fighting than external enemies. He’s now commander of the Arab Legion and effectively the Trans-Jordanian army, and we have to be very wary of him.

  “The Arab Legion is a serious force to be reckoned with. They’ve got modern equipment and are well trained. They’ll be a problem for us and the Palmach. The other force that concerns us is Egypt. Egyptian soldiers are poorly trained and known to be cowards on the field, but they’ve been whipped into an Islamic jihad frenzy by crazy members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and into nationalistic fervor by the Arab Higher Committee. In case you don’t know that one, it’s led by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, Adolf Hitler’s best friend. And one of their best field officers, Gamal Abdul Nasser, is under his sway.”

  The young men and women looked incredulous at the mention of Husayni’s name.

  “Let me just remind you of the real enemy we’re facing. This bastard, the former mufti of Jerusalem, is a vicious piece of work. He aligned himself closely with Hitler and led a vitriolic anti-Semitic political campaign before the war. He was expelled by the British, and now that he’s in Egypt under the protection of King Farouk, he’s had a
mple time to instill a religious as well as a nationalistic Islamic fervor into the armed forces. They’re being impelled to fight because they’re told that they have to free Jerusalem from Jewish hands, since Jerusalem is the third holiest site in Islam. Not so. Jerusalem isn’t mentioned once, not one time, in the Koran. Jerusalem becomes important to the Muslim only when it’s used as a political weapon. Remember that when you hear Islamic war cries.”

  As he spoke, Berin knew he had yet to tell his men and women about the biggest problem: that of logistics, which might well eclipse any religious or strategic issues. The British had embargoed the importation of more sophisticated weaponry to the fledgling armed forces of the soon-to-be-created nation. Against British- and Russian-supplied tanks, artillery, and aircraft, the Israeli forces would be equipped with small arms. Or as Berin had dryly observed to his other commanders, “kitchen knives and pitchforks.”

  Berin held nothing back. This would be a life-and-death struggle. Sadly, this was nothing new; many of these soldiers, two years earlier, had been refugees from the genocide of the Nazis.

  • • •

  As the fighters were departing, Berin noticed Judit seated at the back of the room. He watched her stand and turn to leave with her comrades, but their eyes met for the briefest of moments. It was her look that Immanuel Berin pondered now as he sat at his desk and watched Ashira walk toward him and sit down. They were sitting in a schoolroom on the western side of the city, abandoned because of the fighting, but a convenient and usually overlooked part of the city where British troops or Palestinian gunmen rarely ventured.

  The trepidation she once displayed so prominently now seemed gone. She had changed. The tasks he had set her had instilled confidence. And yet he felt profoundly saddened as she sat down because she reminded him of his wife now long dead in the Nazi concentration camp of Maidenek. Some women did remind him of his wife. He had long resigned himself to this burden.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Since she returned, she’s not put a foot out of step.”

  “She’s met nobody?”

  Ashira shook her head.

  “Not in Tel Aviv when she went there? She didn’t meet up with anybody?”

  Again Ashira shook her head.

  “Phone calls?”

  The young woman shrugged. “Maybe from her apartment; I wouldn’t know. She goes to Irgun meetings.”

  Berin nodded. “Of course.” He paused. There had been many deaths in recent weeks but no one important, no one extraordinary. Perhaps his suspicions were misplaced. Perhaps Ashira was wrong.

  “Why don’t we just deal with her? We need to act,” said Ashira, and her confidence and coldness worried him. Immanuel shook his head. When she’d come to him a few weeks ago, she’d been an ingénue, an innocent, an impassioned but naive kid. Now she was suggesting murder as though it were an extension of the life she led, a part of her normality.

  “We do not yet have facts.”

  “I have facts, Immanuel. I saw her shoot that man in his home. In front of his family. I saw what she did. I know what I know.”

  Berin put a calming hand on Ashira’s. “I understand. But I must be certain. Another agency could have instructed her; there might have been something about the professor that we don’t know . . .”

  She nodded, but her anger didn’t subside.

  • • •

  Later, Immanuel Berin drove toward Tel Aviv to meet with someone he believed might provide insight. Though questions raised about Judit were pointing in a dark direction, one that terrified him, there was little proof.

  He’d done his own investigations of recent violent Jewish deaths. Why had so many prominent Jewish leaders, intellectuals, militant politicians, and journalists suddenly died, many violently? Their murders had been blamed on the British army’s extra-judicial way of removing troublemakers, or else rogue Arab gunmen targeting those who spoke out publicly. Even in a world of violence and a cacophony of gunfire, those who had been killed had not been gun-wielding members of the Jewish paramilitary but civilian firebrands, speaking to crowds, their only ammunition microphones and typewriters.

  Berin had examined all the cases he could find, all those that stood out. And he had begun to see a pattern in the information. He’d managed to confirm at least six instances that put Judit in the vicinity or at least where her whereabouts could not be verified.

  Before too long, Berin was sitting in the smoke-filled apartment of Avraham T’homi, an old mentor. T’homi was once a senior commander in the Haganah but now had little to do with the Jewish paramilitaries, angered as he was at their politics. He was nonetheless a man who understood the subterranean world of spies and spying.

  T’homi believed in direct and immediate action and was called a wildcat by his colleagues. Some years earlier, he’d murdered the Jewish Dutch poet Jacob Israel de Haan because the man spoke out against violence and wanted a negotiated settlement between Arabs and Jews. Berin rarely agreed with T’homi’s hard-line approach but respected his insight and experience enough to ask what might motivate such a woman as Judit and whether he was right in thinking that she was behind the murders.

  T’homi’s initial question was: “Where does she come from, where was she born?”

  Immanuel told him she was Russian. T’homi laughed. “Then she’s working for the NKVD, or the MGB, as they call themselves now. Put a bullet in her head,” he said bluntly.

  Immanuel was shocked. “But—”

  T’homi waved away his protests. “I’m not being irrational, Immanuel. And I’m not leaping to wild conclusions. You’re just not asking the right questions. No one does. It’s why everything has turned to shit! How did she get to Palestine? Who did she come with? Was she alone, or did her family accompany her? When she arrived, did anybody on the ship know her previously? Was she invited to join Lehi or the Irgun, or did she just turn up one day and volunteer out of the blue? Has she been suddenly absent for any amount of time without her colleagues knowing where she was? Has she had meetings with people you don’t know and recognize? Have you been following her and seeing with whom she associates? If the answer to these questions is that you don’t know, find out. If the answer is yes, then put a bullet in her head.”

  The village of Ras Abu Yussuf

  January 17, 1948

  BLEAK-FACED, FRIGHTENED, BREATHLESS from walking eight miles through valleys and scrubland to avoid being seen by British patrols or Arab insurgents, Shalman Etzion finally crested a hill and saw the village ahead of him. He stood there for a few moments, drinking from the canvas-covered flask he’d stolen from a dead British Tommy in the days when he was in Lehi, and tried to see who was moving in the valley below.

  It was the height of the day, and although the air was cold for January, the sun had a radiating heat. He took off his kova tembel hat and wiped his brow. It was such a stupid shape for a hat, like a pointed cone, yet it had become the national symbol of Israeli farmers, and now everybody wore one.

  A few days earlier, not far from the village he now surveyed, a massacre had occurred.

  Arab fighters besieged the kibbutzim at Gush Etzion, blocking all food and supplies in and out of the settlement. The remaining British forces were under orders not to intervene and so sat and watched. The settlements were on land that was due to be ceded into the Palestinian–Arab state after the UN vote. And this created a ripe target for Arab anger.

  In truth, Shalman knew, it was one of many such places—communities of Jews on land that was soon to be Arab, and Arab villages soon to be deemed on Israeli land. A complex patchwork of people deeply and irreversibly intertwined, now politically divided by invisible map lines.

  The Israeli paramilitary group Haganah sent a troop of thirty-five men and women with supplies of food and water to relieve the kibbutzim. These men and women walked on tracks through the night so they weren’t observed by British or Arab patrols. But the path was more difficult than they’d thought, and they were delayed. They
were still on open land when the sun came up, and they were spotted by Arab patrols, who raised the alarm. Residents from the local Arab villages, men and women, poured out to block their path.

  And that was when the fighting started.

  Hundreds of Arab fighters from a militant training base arrived in trucks and cars. The Haganah fought until they ran out of ammunition, and then they were hacked to pieces.

  Shalman had convinced himself that he’d come to try and stop the fighting, to speak to the people of the village once more and urge them not to participate. But this seemed an entirely futile, even childish notion.

  The truth was that Shalman had come to see Mustafa. It had been some time since he’d seen his friend. Now that war was surely upon them, he knew they would soon be viewed as enemies. This was perhaps his last chance.

  It took Shalman just ten minutes to descend the hillside and walk into the middle of the village. Arab men and women came out of their houses to see who the stranger was. None smiled. He had been tolerated before—some even liked him or respected the hospitality offered by Mustafa’s father—but things were different now.

  Shalman stopped and waited. He knew word traveled fast in villages. Mustafa soon appeared down the road and walked up to him. The two young men stood and looked at each other for what seemed a long time. Finally, Mustafa spoke. “Why have you come here, Shalman?”

  Shalman didn’t have an answer. Not one that was easily expressed.

  “There is no place for you here.” The words were blunt and cold, and they hurt.

  “I heard what happened . . . at Gush Etzion . . . It wasn’t you, was it?” said Shalman calmly.

  Anger flashed across Mustafa’s face, an anger Shalman had never seen in the young man.

  “And what if it was? What if it had been my rifle? How would that change anything now?”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this. I came to beg you not to be a part of this bloodshed. The talk in Jerusalem is of reprisals. If you make yourself a target, they will come for you . . .”