“What work do they do?” Shmuel asked.
Astonished, Lipschitz replied, “They study.”
“All of them?”
“Yes,” and he recited the Jewish legend which said that on the day when holy men no longer studied the Talmud in Safad and Tiberias, Judaism would perish. “You give your money in Vodzh so that the Mes siah can be protected in Tiberias,” he explained, but Shmuel thought tha much of what he said was nonsense.
In succeeding months the young timber merchant spent many nights talking with his rebbe, who picked his way like an agile deer through the complexities Shmuel was encountering: “Joining a revolution I could not approve, for when the new Russia comes, you and I will still be Jews and our position will not have been improved. Emigrating to Eretz Israel might be right for you, with your energy, but it would be wrong for most of my court. Holding fast to ancient Jewish custom is still our salvation.” As the big man talked, Shmuel acquired his understanding of what Jewish rectitude meant. There was a right way to perform any act and a wrong way, and honest men clung to the former. Each aspect of business life had its moral tradition, which to ignore meant distress. Human relationships were governed by inherited law, which in the long run proved just. At times the rebbe experienced a mystical apprehension of the future, for in late 1874 he warned Shmuel, “One day our Jews in Poland and Russia will again face the days of Czmielnicki. I’m too old to escape. I’ll stay here and help my court survive whatever strikes. But others should ponder the future and act upon it.”
One warm spring evening in 1875 Shmuel discovered what his rebbe had meant, for in a nearby village a casual group of Russian peasants were sitting at an inn getting happily drunk after the day’s planting, and as the sun set, a sense of moroseness overcame one of the farmers and he observed, with no intention of harm, “Every kopeck I get falls into the hands of some Jew.”
“That’s right,” a second farmer said. “Either we give them to Kagan for rent or to Lieb for vodka.”
The farmers turned as a body to study their Jewish host, and Lieb, recognizing the look, began to put away the glassware. He signaled his son.
“Lieb,” the first farmer shouted, “what do you do with our money?”
“I run this place only for the landlord,” Lieb said apologetically, hiding his employer’s money.
“And Kagan?” the second farmer asked. “What does he do with our money?”
“Like me. Gives it to the landlord.”
The men had to admit that Lieb was right, and the second farmer said, “You Jews are as bad off as we are,” and Lieb breathed easier.
But then the first farmer said idly, as if reflecting upon some critical event in his life, “Jerusalem is lost.”
Like a spark this mournful observation lit up the eyes of the half-drunk peasants. A man who had not spoken repeated, “Jerusalem is lost.”
There was a long moment of hesitation, during which Lieb the innkeeper prayed while the sun went down. The farmers watched it go, waiting. The signal came from a youth, drunker than the others, who uttered the fatal word, that hateful word which once pronounced could never be recalled.
“Hep,” he said quietly, and Lieb turned white with fear.
“Hep,” the first farmer repeated as Lieb looked to see if he could reach the door.
“Hep!” the peasants began to chant, and villagers hearing the ominous word began boarding up their windows. Lieb, with panic on his face, shrank into a corner among the bottles.
“Hep!” the drinkers repeated, and of a sudden the young man leaped from his chair, flung himself upon the bar, sliding down to where he faced the innkeeper. Grabbing a knife from a leg of meat he threw himself upon the white-faced Jew and cut his throat.
“Hep!” roared the growing crowd as it surged toward the Jewish section of the village, bellowing the ancient cry of the pogrom: “Hep!” Hierosolyma est perdita. And somehow the fact that Jerusalem was lost, a distant city which they did not know, became an excuse for murdering Jews. If any people in the world had a right to mourn the loss of that sacred city to Islam it was the Jews, but its surrender was used as a reason for exterminating them.
There were some in the crowd who recognized the irrelevancy of their cry and these substituted another of equal potency: “The Zhid crucified our Lord.” But whichever cry was used, it fed the wild spirit of the pogrom and all united in the culminating wail, “Kill the Zhid.”
The peasants, having destroyed the ghetto of their own village, stormed into the countryside, gathering strength from every farm until they reached Vodzh, where someone screamed, “Let’s get the rent collector!” They rushed to the Kagan home, shouting with approval as a swordsman tore off the head of Shmuel’s father with one blow. They cheered again when the same sword slashed open the belly of the old woman. With axes and hoes the Christians gained revenge for the loss of Jerusalem, hacking to pieces four bearded Hasidim who were trying to reach the rebbe’s court.
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 ignore
d 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 c
harges 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.
The Source: A Novel Page 109
