Now, as to the uncle who advised the girls to cut off their arms, he is right in part and wrong in part. They must wear long sleeves to hide the awful thing that was done to them and they must take no pride in their humiliation. But on the other hand they must take no step to remove this contemptible sign, for God sends signs amongst us for a purpose, and all of us in Vodzh who have survived bear some sign, but none of us a sign so hellish; and when these women move among us they are a walking testimony to the fact that God punishes us Jews terribly, yet redeems us with His love.
The point is, that we must have in society someone who can speak on such matters, and he will have the authority to do so only if he speaks from the Book and only if the Book is old and sacred.
SABRA: Seems to me your brother took a long time to say a simple thing: “Take the girls back, you fools. They fought the war in their way, you in yours.”
REBBE: You miss the point. You could say it as simply as that, but the listener could believe you or not. When my brother said it the Jews of Vodzh had to listen and to obey. They required some higher authority, some moral authority if you wish, to remind them what the law was and then to say, “In this case it must not be obeyed.”
SABRA: What you say applies to the ghetto. But not to Israel.
REBBE: What I say applies to the human heart … to the continuity of Judaism.
SABRA: There’s a famous Jewish saying which I like better than your brother’s response, Rebbe Itzik, I think it applies to us in 1948. “In the palace of the king are many rooms and for each room there is a key, but the best key of all is an axe.” We’re in the age of the axe.
REBBE: In Jewish history each age is the age of the axe, but we seek something more permanent. I wonder if you consider what you may be doing to the man you call your husband? The Talmud has a proverb about the man who was studying Torah and came to a cool tree. In Hebrew ilana. And he cried, “How lovely is this tree,” and in pausing under it, in disrupting his study of the Torah, he had not only committed a great sin but had also put himself in danger of death itself.
SABRA: This, of course, I do not accept. Gottesmann and I will have children, and they will inherit a noble land, which we will rule together without rabbis.
REBBE: The rabbis you will have with you always, for your heart will call after them.
SABRA: Not this heart.
REBBE: Not until you come home with your arm tattooed … in Arabic.
On the morning of Thursday, May 6, the dialogue ended. The final partition of Palestine was only nine days distant and the Arabs besieging Safad received an order from the Grand Mufti’s high command in Jerusalem:
Safad must be immediately cleared of Jews and converted into our permanent headquarters for northern Galilee. Once we are secure there, we can move out to conquer all of northern Falastin.
So that afternoon the final push on the Jewish quarter began. Sniping was intensified and Jews began to die. House by house the Arabs tightened the noose, even crossing over the stairs to do so, and in the Vodzher synagogue men prayed.
… THE TELL
John Cullinane, as he retraced the ground that had been involved in the battle for Zefat, told Eliav and Tabari, “It was during the height of this battle that I just escaped making an ass of myself in Chicago. One of the newspapers discovered that I had worked in this area and knew a little Arabic. The editor asked me for an article about what was going to happen when the Arabs began throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean. I got out my maps, asked our reference library for the latest statistics, and wrote a fairly impressive article pointing out how the enormous Arab superiority in manpower, weapons, training and terrain meant that within three weeks of their initial push they would automatically succeed. I assured the paper and its readers that from my investigations on the spot—I threw in quotes from English experts and a lot of figures—thirty-seven million Arabs against six hundred thousand Jews: ‘Obviously, the war will be short, savage and for the Jews disastrous.’ ”
“Most experts agreed with you,” Eliav reflected sardonically.
“How was your Arab propaganda received in Chicago?” Tabari joked.
“Fortunately for me I had the good sense … Moses or Muhammad must have been watching over me. Anyway, on a hunch I took my article around to the chaps at the British consulate to check the figures, and the two top men said they couldn’t spot any errors, but when I got home I found that the chap they call the Cultural Attaché had been phoning frantically and insisted upon seeing me right away. He came over and with no formality blurted out, ‘My God, Cullinane, you haven’t submitted that article yet, have you?’ I said no, and he fell into a chair and asked for a drink. ‘Thank God, old man. You’ve saved your neck.’ I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, ‘Well, the Jews are going to win and I don’t want you to look a bloody fool in public.’ I remember that I stopped pouring the drink and gasped, ‘What? Jews win?’ He looked at me with surprise and said, ‘Of course. Everyone knows that!’ I pointed out that his own superiors hadn’t known it, and he laughed, ‘They don’t know their bums from third base. They think that because some dotty English colonel has been teaching the Arabs how to ride camels that somehow an army has bloomed in the desert.’ He said a lot more, most of it profane, then told me something that helped make me a prophet in Chicago. He said, ‘Look at it this way, Cullinane. It’s positively impossible for the Arabs to move a motor cavalcade of petrol and ammo from Cairo to Gaza.’ I called up in my mind’s eye the map of the area … saw the roads and the various conditions and corrected him. ‘You forget. There’s a good paved road now. They’re not driving over rocky wadis any longer.’ He banged his glass down and cried, ‘You miss the whole bloody point. So do the military blokes at the office. They see the figures on paper. Egyptians, eighty thousand armed troops. What the bloody hell good are they in Cairo if the fighting’s in Gaza? They see on paper, Egyptians, eight hundred heavy guns. What are they going to fire at from the pyramids? Take my convoy of essential military hardware. It’s moving up to the front under the command of two colonels. It forms up in Cairo one night, and before it leaves the city Colonel One sells to his cousin who’s operating in the Cairo black market all the spare tires. Every one. At the first inspection point Colonel Two allows his uncle to steal half the reserve supplies of gasoline. At the second inspection point Colonel One sells off two thirds of the ammo. At the first village a large operator in the black market, a nephew of Colonel Two, offers to buy half the trucks and pay in cash. And at the border the drivers of the remaining trucks decide to steal the machine guns and sell them to the Jews.’ I remember how he dropped his arms and made his fingers flutter like leaves falling from a tree in November. ‘So you see, Cullinane, it’s morally impossible for that convoy ever to leave Egypt.’ His argument was so seductive that I tore up my essay and we got stinking drunk together and collaborated on an analysis of the war that gained me some notoriety. In fact, Paul J. Zodman read it and he was so gratified to find someone who thought his Jews might win that later on he put up the money which is now paying my salary, and yours, and yours.”
The three men walked to the flight of stairs that had once separated the Arab and Jewish quarters, and to the left they could see the deserted mosque, so marvelously proportioned and with such pleasing juxtapositions of wall and dome and minaret; it was a minor work of art gracing the hill and lending character to the deserted Arab houses that clustered about its base; while to the right they could see the blunt, squat old synagogue of the Vodzher Rebbe. It lent neither the countryside nor its encroaching mud-walled houses any artistic dignity, but it did cry out the fact that to its doors had come, through the centuries, stubborn men who believed that there was a God who was one, and who in the affairs of men played a significant role, if the men would permit Him to do so.
Tabari sat on the stairs with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped on his knuckles. He said to Cullinane: “Have I ever told you about the defense of Acre? Y
ou know, as Sir Tewfik Tabari’s son I was handed the job of defending the old city, and I certainly had the men and the machines to do it. I was particularly pleased about the fact that in the caravanserai of the old Venetian fonduk we had ammunition enough to blow up all of Falastin. In particular, we had two million rounds of British ammunition. Two thousand ammo cases of a thousand rounds per case. And other goodies to match.”
“I fought at Acre,” Eliav said.
“What happened?” Cullinane asked.
“You ever read about the fall of Acre in 1291?” Tabari asked. “That time it was Mamelukes attacking and Christians defending. But the Christians were broken into about ten different autonomous groups: Venetians, Genoese, Templars, Hospitallers … This time it was Jews attacking and Arabs defending, and we were broken into four thousand groups.”
“Four thousand?” Cullinane asked.
“Yes. I’m the only general in history to command four thousand one-man armies. We had Iraqi Arabs who had slipped in for the kill. We had Lebanese Arabs who had come down to open shops as soon as we had won. We had some Egyptians, some Jordanians, a lot of Syrians, a few Arabians. I had Falastinian Arabs from Jerusalem who wouldn’t speak to the Arabs from Haifa, and I must have had about three thousand valiant tigers whose sole ambition was to loot Jewish stores. They were willing for the other Arabs to fight the Jews, but their job was looting.”
“Was it that bad?” Cullinane asked.
“Worse. Because on the ground floor of the caravanserai there was a thin, ugly, mean-tempered Arab whose uncle knew the Grand Mufti, which gave him peculiar powers, even over me. He had the key to the ammunition depots in the Crusader vaults, and he refused to hand out a single cartridge unless his uncle said it was all right, and his uncle refused to act unless he felt that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem would approve. He drove me mad. I’d plead for more ammunition … a raiding party … two hundred men. He’d refuse to issue it. One day I thought: I’ll shoot that ugly bastard and take his key; but he must have guessed what I was thinking, because he warned me: ‘Don’t think that you can get the ammo by shooting me. Because I keep the key hidden.’ ”
“What happened to him?”
“When the Jews approached the city as if they intended to fight, he jumped into a sailboat and fled to Beirut.”
“The key?”
“He took it with him.”
• • •
The Arab push on the afternoon of May 6 would have ended the Jews had it been followed that evening by a house-to-house mop-up, but for some reason which Gottesmann could not understand, at dusk the Arabs halted their advance, providing the Jews with time to regroup. But it was apparent that the defenders could not hold out much longer, for MemMem Bar-El was exhausted and Gottesmann was near to falling apart. His nerve was quite gone, and Ilana wondered if he could last another day. Of the small command group only Nissim Bagdadi was in good shape, and he seemed to be living off his fat.
That night the Palmach held a gloomy meeting in Ilana’s house and the plans discussed were those of a prostrated remnant, courageous enough to go through the final motions but lacking the energy to devise any tactics other than wait and hold; and as they talked in the midnight hours they heard frightening sounds coming out of the wadi below the cemetery, and Gottesmann shivered. If the Arabs were launching their final push, he’d have to go but …
Then voices were heard, as if the red-capped Iraqis and the white-robed Lions of Aleppo were cheering one another on for the kill, and petite Vered grabbed her submachine gun and pushed open the door. Through the starlit night the voices grew stronger. They came from people singing, men … women. Now even Gottesmann could hear the words, the defiant words in the night:
“From Metulla to the Negev,
From the desert to the sea,
Every boy is bearing arms,
Every girl is standing guard.”
It was Vered who spoke first. “There must be hundreds.” She dashed from the room. Bagdadi followed her and Bar-El, finding a strength he thought had vanished.
“Come on, Gottesmann,” Ilana cried.
“I’ll wait.”
“All right.” She left him sitting there, staring at the open door, and hurried to overtake the excited Jews running down the narrow streets toward the cemetery, but at the corner of the Vodzher synagogue she stopped dead and stood alone in the night. “It’s a trap!” she said. “They’re Arabs, and when we’ve gone down to meet them the others will attack across the stairs.” On the spot she turned, lowered her rifle and sped alone to the vital sector, but when she got there, ready to fire, she found nothing; for any would-be invaders were paralyzed by the sounds rising from the wadi.
Two hundred Palmach troops arrived that critical night and leading them came Teddy Reich to add a new dimension to the Jewish effort. Wiry, alert and charged with that intense fire that came from knowing there was no alternative—“We capture Safad or we’re pushed step by step into the sea”—he characterized the impassioned Jewish command as it was to operate for the next eight months. Dressed in faded khakis, with hand grenades hanging from his webbed belt and a revolver convenient to his right hand, he somehow managed to handle with his one arm a small Shmeisser submachine gun. His left sleeve he kept neatly pinned at the shoulder. He was a short man and his tense body seemed to have been transmuted into rock, for when he assembled the local leaders it required only his appearance to reassure them. “We’ve come to do a job,” he said.
After brief introductions of his lieutenants—“Gabbai, Zuchanski, Geldzenberg, Peled, Mizrachi”—he marched out to a night reconnaissance of Safad.
“These are the stairs,” the MemMem explained. “Up there the concrete police station.”
“How many Arabs inside?”
“About four hundred.”
“Machine guns?”
“At least thirty. Left by the English.”
He moved swiftly to the other end of the Jewish holdings and pointed to the ominous stone house, three stories high with a flat roof. “Defended the same way?” he asked.
“Yes,” Bar-El nodded.
He then returned to the middle of the line and stood for some time looking up at the menacing Crusader ruins dominating the entire town; then he climbed to the roof of a Jewish house to view the most forbidding of all the Arab installations, the great fortress on the mountain back of town, built solidly by the English and impregnable. It had thick walls, abundant food and a sure supply of water. Looming out of the night this fortress was foreboding in a special way. It seemed so powerful, so unassailable by ordinary men. Gottesmann, trying to control his nerves, thought he heard even Teddy Reich gasp when he saw the monstrous thing.
If Reich did suffer shock at seeing the Arab positions, he hid the fact. “Back to headquarters,” he snapped, and in the quiet hours of the night he held a commanders’ meeting that none who attended would ever forget. Taking a steep-sided bowl he inverted it on the wooden table and said, “Men, this is what we face. The flat part is the Crusader hill. The flanks of the hill are divided into six parts. The Arabs hold five of these parts. We hold one.” Gottesmann closed his eyes. Somewhere he had heard those words before: “Stone house … cement police station … Crusader ruins.” Once someone had shoved such a bowl across a table and the sound echoed in his ears … echoed. He was about to shout something when the incredible words of Teddy Reich struck him.
“So,” the one-armed German said, “that being the case, what we shall do, as promptly as possible …” The wiry commander stopped, looked directly at each of his lieutenants, focusing at last on Gottesmann, to whom he said, “We’ll move out every man, every woman, and capture those three strongholds.”
“Capture?” Bar-El gasped.
“Yes. Up the hill. Across the Arab road. And we’ll smother each of the three points.”
Even the men he had brought with him were astounded and for a moment no one spoke. Then Bar-El pointed to the area above the bowl. “And what about
the fortress? Up there?”
Now it was Teddy Reich who had nothing to say. He took a deep breath, leaned back, then came forward slowly and grasped Bar-El’s hand as it indicated the massive fortress. “About this we shall think later.” He caught the looks of fear and with a sudden leap grabbed Bar-El by the shirt. “We’ll leave it!” he stormed. “Because I tell you that when the Arabs up there hear that we’ve taken the stone house …” His fist crashed onto the table. “The concrete police station …” Another crash. “… and the top of that bowl. Men,” he shouted, “it’s the Arabs up there who will be worried. Not we Jews in Safad.”
He knew that it was essential to convince his handful of men that this quixotic scheme of taking the fight to the Arabs could succeed, so before they could discuss it among themselves he started working with dizzy speed. “You, Zuchanski. You saw the stone house. How many men? You’ll have to take it floor by floor. Lot of fighting … same as Haifa. How many?”
Zuchanski mumbled, “Well … with Gabbai and Peled …”
“They’re yours. How many?”
“Thirty.”
“Pick them out.” Zuchanski hesitated, and Reich snapped, “Pick them. Now!” The detachment for the stone house was chosen.
“You, Bar-El. How many men to capture the Crusader ruins?”
“If I had Gottesmann, we could use forty-five … fifty. It’s spread out, you know. Trenches.”
“Fifty men. You have them.” Then Reich looked at the remainder and said, “The police station … at the head of the stairs. That’s for me. And for Bagdadi. Can you still dynamite a wall?”
“Yes,” replied the placid Iraqi.
Then Teddy Reich saw Vered and stopped the military planning. “Aren’t you Pincus Yevneski’s daughter?”
“Yes,” said Vered shyly.
The Source: A Novel Page 121
