Source

by James A. Michener

  The mob then stormed into the court, where they found the big man dancing ecstatically with nine of his steadfast friends. For a moment the peasants hesitated, unprepared for this strange scene of men cleansing their minds for death. But then a young drunk sprang at the rebbe, screaming, “He crucified Jesus, didn’t he?” And so the Vodzher Rebbe was slain, and his beard set on fire, and his body dragged through the streets to a spot where more than sixty children, women and old men were being slaughtered and tossed through the air like sheaves of harvested wheat. Jerusalem was lost, Christ was dead, and somehow the shedding of this Jewish blood consoled the bereaved peasants in their drunken sorrow.

  Shmuel Kagan returned to Vodzh in time to bury his parents and his rebbe. That night he determined to quit Russia, for he understood at last that what the rebbe had said was true: “When the new Russia comes, you and I will still be Jews and our position will not have been improved.” A vision of Tiberias, beside its lake, grew strong in his mind and he spent the following days consulting with Jews, numbed by the inexplicable ferocity of their neighbors, and he collected from them funds for the purchase of community farm land at Tiberias. Finally he approached the Vodzher Rebbe’s son, now graduated from the yeshiva, and asked him to lead the exile, but the religious young man refused to leave the village of his ancestors. “I shall stay here and be the rebbe. Last week my father told me that pretty soon you would be going.” So the new rebbe prayed with Kagan and at the end they repeated the litany of all Jews in the Diaspora, “To next year in Jerusalem.”

  When Shmuel reached Akka in 1876 he did not, like many Jewish immigrants, fall upon the ground to kiss the soil in which he would be buried, for he saw Palestine not as the end of life but as a beginning, and in this spirit he performed an act even more symbolic than kissing the soil: he dropped his Russian name Kagan and assumed its Hebraic original, Hacohen, and as Shmuel Hacohen—Samuel the Priest—he entered upon his new life.

  His trip from Akka to Tiberias was an adventure in disillusionment, especially to one trained as a timber buyer, for both the Old Testament and the Talmud had taught him that Israel was a land heavy with trees: he found only bleakness. In the entire thirty miles from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, Shmuel Hacohen found only one small group of trees, the ancient olives at Makor, and he wondered who had destroyed the homeland of the Jews.

  His apprehensions were increased when he reached the hillside where Rabbi Akiba lay buried, for from this eminence he looked down to see not the spacious marble-fronted Tiberias of the Romans nor the beautiful Tverya of the Talmud but mud-walled Tubariyeh of the Turks, a mean little town huddling within Crusader walls. What impressed him most, however, was the utter barrenness of the land; he could find no fields under cultivation, and he recalled the lush, dark loam of Russia. Doesn’t anybody down there farm? he asked himself, and when he descended to the town and entered the stone gates he found a desolation equal to the fields outside. It seemed to him that he was returning to the hatreds he had fled in Russia, for Turks ignored Arabs while Sephardi Jews did not speak with Ashkenazim. He tried to establish friendship with the latter group, many of whom were from Russia and Poland, but they rebuffed him as an intruder who might be trying to share in the charity they collected from Europe. When he explained that he did not want this charity, that he wanted to associate himself with those Jews who worked for a living, he found that what Lipschitz the collector had said in Vodzh was true: Jews in Tubariyeh did not work. To protect the sanctity of Jews in the rest of the world they spent their years reading Talmud, and had he tried to explain that he carried in his pocket funds for the purchase of farm land outside the walls, they would have considered him three times a liar: “No Jew has such money. Nor this one in particular. And if he had, to spend it on land outside the walls would be insane.”

  On the afternoon of his arrival he started looking for tillable land, but none lay near the walls, so next morning he went to Capernaum, at the northern end of the lake, where he spotted extensive areas that would be acceptable, and all along the western shore of the lake he found other land that could be tilled. Back in his room, he dispatched an excited letter to Vodzh: “Here empty land is waiting which could be made as fine as any in Russia. I shall inform you as soon as I have completed my purchase.”

  Two days later he hiked to the southern end of the lake, where the River Jordan begins its steep descent to the Dead Sea, and beside this bountiful river he found both the land he wanted and the ancient gold coin. After that first acquaintance he sought no other land; here the persecuted Jews of his village would build their farms and replant the vineyards that had lain vacant since the days of Rome. In his second letter to Vodzh he reported in Yiddish: “I have named our land Kfar Kerem, the village of the vineyards, and here we shall make wine, for did not Solomon himself sing, ‘Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear …’ Start packing now.”

  Shmuel found his land in February, 1876, but when he tried to buy it he encountered such confusion that he quickly warned his villagers: “You’d better not leave Vodzh until I find who owns our land.”

  It took him eighteen months to discover this simple fact, and not until he had bribed three different officials was he allowed to know the owner’s address: “Emir Tewfik ibn Alafa, well known in Damascus,” but when he paid an Arab letter writer to send the emir a message, offering to pay a good fee for the idle land, he received a curt reply from a secretary: “Emir Tewfik has never seen this land, receives no rent from it, is not certain where it is located, and has no desire to sell.”

  So in late 1877 Shmuel taught himself Arabic and walked to Damascus, where he tried for two months to see the landowner, but the emir refused to meet him. A tall dignitary in tarboosh and white robes explained, “Emir Tewfik ibn Alafa has never spoken to a Jew and has no intention of starting now.”

  “But doesn’t he wish to make a profit on his land?”

  “Emir Tewfik never buys or sells.”

  “Doesn’t he care that the land is idle?”

  “Emir Tewfik has thousands of acres of idle land. They are no concern of his.”

  Shmuel was forced to leave Damascus without having seen the landlord and was about to decide that the enchanting fields could not be his, when on his way back to Tubariyeh he fell in with a delightful Arab, who advised, “Handle it through the kaimakam. For enough money he can do anything.”

  “Even buy me the land?” Shmuel asked.

  “Anything.”

  So Hacohen spent the next three months learning Turkish, and in early 1878 presented himself at the kaimakam’s office, petitioning for an interview. To his surprise, the kaimakam, a tall, thin Turk in his seventies, admitted him and listened sympathetically to his problem. The situation was this: the kaimakam knew that in two months he was leaving Tubariyeh, but no one else did, least of all Shmuel Hacohen. So the governor teased the little Jew along, milked him of considerable baksheesh, and retired from active service without having written a single letter regarding the land purchase. When Hacohen discovered the duplicity he also found that the delightful Arab traveler who had suggested that he take his problem to the kaimakam was the latter’s cousin and had collected ten per cent of the baksheesh.

  Shmuel’s disappointment was so great that he could not have continued in Tubariyeh, badgered by corrupt officials and outcast by the Jewish community, had he not in the spring of 1878 gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and while it was true that sight of this noble city on the hill inspired him with Jewish longing, its great stone blocks in the temple wall reminding him of the Vodzher Rebbe, it was not this spiritual adventure which was to sustain him. In Jerusalem he encountered something more significant than racial memories: he met young Jews from Russia and Poland who were convinced that Jews had a chance of one day controlling their homeland; he met others who predicted that in years to come
the Jews of Israel would speak not Yiddish but Hebrew, “as the prophets spoke to us three thousand years ago”; he met businessmen who had started factories and others who were erecting houses outside the wall; and one night which he would long remember he met six young Jews who had begun to build a Jewish village near Jaffa.

  “The Gate of Hope, we’re calling it,” they announced. “It’s to be the first of many.” One of the men turned to Shmuel. “You? From Tubariyeh? Are you starting any villages there?”

  The men reminded him of the young Russians he had met in Kiev who were planning to rebuild that moribund nation, and of the poet in Berdichev who dreamed of a Jewish homeland; and as he discovered the vitality which these Jews had brought to Palestine he found new determination and replied, “When I get back to Tubariyeh I’m buying some land … Near the Sea of Galilee. We’re building a village there. Kfar Kerem.” And he returned to his hovel restored in his belief that he could do it.

  In the summer of 1878 the new kaimakam, Faraj Tabari, took office, and when Shmuel reported his predecessor’s trickery in taking baksheesh for services never performed, the official laughed disarmingly and promised, “With me you’ll get the land,” and with these honeyed words Tabari had launched an agonizing period in Hacohen’s life. Postponements, lies, chicanery, these were the rule in Tubariyeh now, while in Russia the Jews of Vodzh, having concluded that Kagan had absconded with their funds, were making plans to arrive en masse in Akka. In frustration Hacohen went to the kaimakam and asked, “When can I get the land?” But Tabari merely stroked his mustache and said, “Mmmmmmmmm, on a matter as grave as this I’d better consult the mutasarrif in Akka,” and Shmuel understood that this would require more money. To approach the wali in Beirut would cost much more, while a letter to the sultan in Istanbul was prohibitive.

  At the end of 1879, improbable as it seemed, Hacohen, this inconspicuous Jew from Vodzh, had seven different officials of the Turkish empire in his employ, one way or another, but the land was not yet his. By applying constant pressure and bribes whose number he had lost count of, Shmuel had advanced his case to a point where Emir Tewfik in Damascus was willing to sell the useless acres for the not exorbitant sum of nine hundred and eighty English pounds, but the baksheesh required to reach this agreement already totaled more than seventeen hundred pounds. And still the Turkish government would announce no decision.

  Yet Hacohen did not lose faith in Kaimakam Tabari, for in a curious manner the thieving Arab had demonstrated an unquestioned friendship for the Russian Jew. One night, as Shmuel sat in his filthy room wondering whether or not to abandon Tubariyeh, he heard muffled footsteps on the cobblestones and intuitively checked to see that the places where he had hidden his money were secure. He had barely done so when his door burst open and eight Jews in fur caps, side curls and long coats rushed at him, pinioned his arms and dragged him off to a rabbinical court convened in the Ashkenazi section of town.

  It was a gloomy, portentous scene, with three rabbis waiting to judge the prisoner. In Yiddish the charges against Hacohen were read: “He is not a part of our community. He does not observe our laws strictly nor does he study at the synagogue. He has been heard speaking against Lipschitz, who knew him as a suspicious one in Vodzh, and he disturbs the district with his folly about land purchases and Jews working as farmers.” As the preposterous phrases rolled forth Shmuel thought: The real charge they don’t make. That I endanger their way of life.

  Then came the sentence, incredible for the year 1880, but made possible by the Turkish custom of allowing each religious community to govern itself: “Shmuel Hacohen is to be fined to the amount of his possessions. He is to be stripped, stoned and banished from Tubariyeh, and may he leave Eretz Israel without further disturbing the ways of Judaism.” Before Shmuel could protest, the first provisions of the sentence were carried out.

  Jewish men who had come to fear the little Russian who lived outside their narrow world laid hands on him and stripped away his clothing until he stood naked. Pockets in his torn garments were searched for money, which was handed to the court, after which he was hauled to a corner of the wall, where the general population began hurling rocks at him, not caring whether they blinded him or killed him, and he might have died except that one of the rabbinical judges interceded and the bleeding prisoner was dragged to the main gate of town and thrown outside the walls. The mob then proceeded to his hovel, where they started digging up the floor to find any gold he might have hidden.

  It was at this point that Kaimakam Tabari interfered. His gendarmerie, hearing that a Jewish punishment was under way, had paid no attention, for this was a matter concerning one of the religious communities, and how they disciplined their people was not a governmental concern; but word of the unusually harsh sentence reached Tabari: “Did you say Hacohen? The Jew from Russia?” When he knew that it was the little land buyer who was being stoned he summoned his guard and went to the town gate, where torches showed the naked and bleeding Jew wandering vainly outside the walls.

  “Take him home,” Tabari ordered. “You, you and you, give him your clothes.” When gendarmes reported that officers of the rabbinical court were wrecking Shmuel’s hut, Tabari hurried there and said to the mob, “Go home, all of you.”

  As Shmuel regained his mournful room he saw with gratitude that the searchers had not reached the money intended for the purchase of his land. He fell on his mattress, too bewildered to cry. The sentence of the court had been so unexpected, the punishment so harsh, that he was content to have escaped with his life, and as for the kaimakam’s intervention, this Shmuel could not explain, but as he wiped his sores with a dirty cloth he asked himself: Did he keep me alive only so that he could rob me of what I have left? The thought was unworthy, for Shmuel could remember that as he had stood naked outside the walls the torches had shown him the kaimakam’s face, and it was that of a man who could not tolerate such punishments. If in the forthcoming months Tabari stole all of Hacohen’s savings, this would not alter the fact that tonight he had acted as one human being toward another. Why had he done so? Shmuel fell asleep before he found an answer, but Faraj Tabari, sitting alone in his room overlooking the mosque, asked himself the same question and replied: He was little and he had a swayed back, but he looked like my brother-in-law, so I had to save him. And for the first time the kaimakam expressed the hope that his brother-in-law might soon visit Tubariyeh to explain which of the new ideas could be put into practice here.

  The next days Shmuel would not remember. In a daze of pain from the stoning by which Eretz Israel had rejected him, its mountains falling upon him in his nightmares, he lay upon his mattress while insects came to inspect his wounds. Each of the Jewish communities left him alone, the superstitious Sephardim viewing him as a curse and the vengeful Ashkenazim hoping that he would die. By tradition Arabs did not come into the quarter where he lay, so his fever and nightmare were allowed to run their course and for two days of delirium Shmuel imagined that he was back in Vodzh, through whose cool lanes he went seeking timber.

  When he recovered, unaided by anyone, he went into the alley to buy food, but the stares he met from the Jews were so hateful that he retreated to his hovel more wounded than he had been by the rocks. Was he wrong? Was it impossible to bring European Jews to this district and with them to build a new way of life, independent of charity? Weak though he was, he said to himself: It can be done! And he went back into the streets of Tubariyeh determined to resist his tormentors, but when he saw the bearded faces staring at him, waiting till they could catch him away from the kaimakam’s protection, he returned to his hovel and whispered, “God of Moses, I can accomplish nothing in this evil town.” And he prepared to flee.

  From the earthen floor he dug up his money, and in the ill-fitting clothes which the kaimakam had forced his tormentors to give him he slipped out of town. Children saw him going and ran to tell their fathers, who left their studies to taunt the fugitive as he headed toward the north. At Safad he found c
onditions even more repellent than in Tubariyeh: old, suspicious Jews huddled over their Talmuds while young men took to robbery; the spiritual glory of the hilltop town was not even remembered. He left it behind and climbed over the hills that lay to the west, and what he found there saved him for the work he was destined to accomplish, for one evening as he wandered across a barren hillock, where he knew that trees must once have flourished, he came upon a little settlement that changed his perspective on what Jews could do in Israel.

  It was Peqiin, at first sight merely another mountain village with narrow paths clustering about a central well and a synagogue hidden in a distant quarter, but when Shmuel came to know the place better he found it had distinguishing characteristics. For one thing, the Jews of Peqiin did not stay in their synagogue reading Talmud, for they were so remote from centers like Safad and Tubariyeh that no European charity reached them; they grew crops or they starved, and Shmuel found their fields in excellent condition. Nor did the Jews of Peqiin hide behind a wall, lest the Bedouins attack; they lived in the open and set men with rifles to guard the mountain passes. Four times in the 1870s Bedouins had thought to ravage the settlement and had retreated with their dead. The Jews here were a sturdy lot and for many weeks Hacohen found refuge with them, working in their fields and repairing the lacerations of his mind.

  But the principal quality of the village he did not discover till late. It was a long evening in spring, when grape arbors were showing promise of a good crop, and as he sat gossiping in the village square he remarked, “Jacob, you’ve never told me where you came from.”

  “From Peqiin,” the farmer said.