The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  But the movement was not dead, her Reuven declared. It was the Jewish people themselves who would be the Messiah, their own Mashiach, and where only a few score Bilu had got up and gone to the Land in the days of her own girlhood—indeed her Yankel himself had dreamed of going in his youth time, this Feigel knew—there were now several thousand young people, good Jewish children, pioneers, chalutzim, like her own son and daughter who had gone up to renew the land.

  Indeed Reuven wrote from the land that if his great-uncle Heschel had remained he would even now be handsomely settled in an almond grove, with his own broad vineyards, like a veritable lord! For to aid those of the Bilu who remained the great Baron de Rothschild had stretched out his munificent hand. No, things were not so difficult as in her Uncle Heschel’s day; her son Reuven, though an idealist, was sensible, and would not have written that the entire family should come if things were truly so difficult.

  Yet who could tell what was best for a Jew? Yankel was mumbling the words, and Feigel moved the child, the little Avramchick, to her other side, saying to her husband, “Lie down.”

  “Will they go on singing all night?” he grumbled.

  They sang on, and he ruminated—To leave had been the right thing, for how could a Jew remain in the land of the Czar after the revolutionaries had lost their revolt and the pogromnicks had again been unloosed! What future was there for the children? There was no life in that land but oppression.

  “And with the kind of children we have,” Feigel whispered, “who could hold them back from the revolutionary movement? If not Zionists, they would become social revolutionaries. If they didn’t go to Eretz Yisroel, they would end in Siberia.” It was indeed fortunate that Reuven and Leah had gone away a year ago, for she could see her eldest son in the chained line of prisoners struggling to the desolate far north, and his young sister would have followed him even there. “And if not Siberia, they’d have caught him for the Czar’s army.”

  The younger boys, lying there on her husband’s side—how much better to take them in their childhood out of Russia! “If only the Turks allow us to land.” Now Yankel had a new source of worry.

  But Reuven had written that it was all arranged, she reminded him. Reuven would meet them on the ship’s arrival, they would only have to pay a small bribe. They must say they were pilgrims going to pray at the Wailing Wall. Yankel growled. “Another whole night with singing,” he complained. “Chalutzim they call themselves. Hooligans!”

  She wanted to ask, had he noticed, Dvora was perhaps getting too close to a certain one among the bold young men from Kostarnitza.

  Yankel’s vast rumble came, his beard rising and falling. She nudged, and he turned heavily, the choked snore subsiding into more peaceful breathing.

  Feigel thought about a name for her baby. They had come almost alternately, a boy, a girl, and it was the turn of a girl; still, if this added child should prove to be a boy? She could not risk giving him the name of her lost little Nachman, for then perhaps the Evil One would again snatch him away. There were names for confusing the Evil One—you could call a baby The Old One, Alter, or Abba, the father … And if the child should nevertheless be a girl? Girls were much wanted there in Eretz, it seemed.

  Perhaps after all things would turn out for the best with them in Eretz Yisroel.

  Through his closed lids Yankel felt the presence of the firmament, and the stars were like thousands of prickling reminders. Be watchful of each possession, all sailors are thieves, only goyim are sailors. But even of a fellow Jew you must be watchful; be wary of everyone who offers to help you when you arrive, particularly if it is for nothing, out of his good Jewish heart. Particularly if they want to sell you land. And especially be wary of Litvaks and Roumanians. The redbeard who had tricked him out of the forestry lease had been a Roumanian.

  Though Yankel had paid for space in the hold of the ship, young Dvora and his wife too had ended by dragging him up on deck, declaring the air was cleaner and there was no human stench. He had yielded to Feigel because he knew that otherwise, down there in the hold of the ship, she might have begun to have her morning sickness. And why had she done this to him now? Just now precisely in the middle of everything she had had to do it, just when a man faced an upheaval in his life, when he had to uproot himself and take his pack on his back and set off anew to a strange land, a new land, yes, even if it was the old land. The Holy Land should not be strange to a Jew, somewhere that was written. Yet it was new to him, for was his upheaval in any way less than if he were going to America? It was worse than going to America, it would be harder. In the Holy Land there were no diamonds lying in the streets. And he must find a living, while carrying on his back his entire family, so many mouths to feed. And now in this very time, why had she done this to him?

  Feigel had not said anything of it, but early though it might be, Yankel knew the signs in her, particularly the avoidance of his eyes because she had not yet made up her mind to tell him.

  It seethed in Yankel; but as long as she did not say anything he could not say anything to reproach her.

  Still—to be bringing a new soul to be born in Eretz HaKodesh, this was surely a good action, a mitzvah.

  As at other times in his life, Yankel obscurely felt that a good deed had been kindled by his wife despite something in himself that might have prevented it had he known. And in his soul he was aware that this was why he sometimes allowed himself to be led by her. Of himself Yankel was not certain. In his idealist years as a yeshiva bocher he had dreamed of a life that could be carried out with perfection. It would be a perfect thing if a man lived an entire life and never transgressed a single one of the six hundred and thirteen regulations, also called mitzvoth. If a man uttered each prayer and each blessing in its proper time each day and each holiday, if he spoke the words of blessing for each act of the day, rising, washing, eating, entering a house, leaving, what perfection that would be! It was not so much that he had dreamed of becoming a tzaddik, but an ideal of perfection had been upon him. But after the excellent match with a Koslovsky had been made for him, Yankel had caught the fever of earning, of wanting to prove that he did not need the patronage of her father, her brothers; he had gone into the world, buying sugar-beet crops for them from the peasants. And to make money you squeezed—how could one help but befuddle a moujik who could not add seven and nine?—and then he had tried to be a merchant for himself without cheating or twisting or conniving, and had in his turn been cheated; and then he had turned himself into a dealer and trader in horses, in cattle. Her brothers, each time he failed, would tell him how he could have done well, and though in all this Yankel had stayed faithfully observant of the mitzvoth, kept, as though secretly within himself the image of a life unblemished by ritual failings, he knew that beyond the movements of the lips in the given words, and the perfect binding on of the tfillim, and all those mitzvoth that a Jew could regularly follow, a deeper failing was there, simply because he had to be a man walking and dealing among men. Therefore he trusted at times to the simplicity of soul that came more readily in life to a woman; Feigel was a good woman, a woman of virtue, that he knew, and despite all his sense of appearing as something of a failure, something of a schlemiel before her, Yankel sometimes allowed himself to be led into his decisions, like the decision now to go to Palestine since Reuven and Leah were already there.

  A saying of Rabbi Nachman’s that the Hasidim were always repeating wafted about behind Yankel’s closed eyelids— Wherever a Jew goes, he is on his way to the Holy Land. But then if a Jew goes to the Holy Land itself, what is the meaning of this saying? That was a question that would have sent her Hasidic grandfather running to his rebbe! No, the Hasidim could wait forever, back there in Medzibuz, or they could wander off to America, all the while crying out for the Mashiach to hurry down from heaven’s Garden of Eden and lead them to Eretz, but meanwhile he, a simple Jew, was on his way there by himself.

  In this moment Yankel’s heart swelled and he was awake. He w
as really doing it. He was doing it in earnest. A Jew like himself, without much luck in the world, not clever like his clever brother-in-law Kalman, the Rich Koslovsky, not particularly powerful in his body, not even a sage of the Scriptures, and yet where others feared to take such a step, he, pack and bundle, with his entire family, had heaved himself up and was approaching the land of the fathers! There welled up in Yankel that sense of the miraculous nature of all existence, of the wondrous things that can happen to a simple human being, and the words for this feeling, for this gratitude at living to see the day, the arriving moment of fruition, came to his lips. He must say the Shehechiyanu.

  His eyes now open to the full star-misted sky, Yankel moved his lips with the words: Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast given us life, and sustained us in life, and brought us to this time.

  But again doubts came over him. Was it indeed such a mitzvah to return to this particular land? What of Rabbi Nachman’s saying, after all? Wherever one goes—so it need not be Palestine at all. Should he rather have gone, should he still go, to America where his wife had kinfolk who would help them? And with a new baby, too.

  He was not clever enough to find the inmost meaning of such a saying as Nachman’s, Yankel told himself. And it had had to be Feigel’s brother Simha who had brought up the troubling quotation. Though Simha had never in his life got through a page of Talmud, he was one of those Jews who could spout you apt sayings from the Tractates or from the Gaon of Vilna, as though he were a scholar of scholars. Everything he had picked up from others. So by that saying of Rabbi Nachman’s, Simha had proved himself right in going to America.

  Yankel saw again the family gathering in that month of barred windows and doubly barred doors, after the assassination of the “minister of pogroms,” Plehve, may his name be erased from eternity and let an eternal fire burn in his entrails in Gehenna! It was Reuven, his own eldest, the book reader, the freethinker, a godless son who since his Bar Mitzvah had never once put on his phylacteries, it was suddenly Reuven who had challenged all his uncles to go to the Holy Land.

  Hadn’t they been drumming at God’s ears four times a day for nineteen centuries, Reuven demanded, with their pleading and their beseeching and their promises and their weeping and their breast-beating, to let them return to the Holy Land? Well, who was stopping them? The Turk? The Turk was nothing. A little baksheesh. Others had gone. A few coins and the doors were open. It wasn’t even far. Only halfway down the Mediterranean coast. Why must they drag themselves to the other side of the world, to America, the capitalists’ “paradise,” with its ghettos and sweatshops as everyone already knew, the Golden Land for those who sweated gold out of the toil of their brothers?

  To this, Feigel’s clever brother Simha had replied with another maxim: the long way around was the shortest way, and if the streets were not paved with gold, where did the remittances come from on which half of Cherezinka was living? And as for Eretz Yisroel, that was where a Jew went to die, and die they did, even the young, as had the Bilu in their time, as his uncle Heschel could tell them, he who had barely crawled back with breath in his body. From hunger and from fever they died. Besides, Simha reminded them all, Mashiach had not yet appeared to lead the Jews back as it was written. Or did Reuven perhaps believe that the journalist from Vienna, that unbeliever, that apicoiras Theodor Herzl, had been the Messiah? And as for America, it was just as Rabbi Nachman had said, Godliness was everywhere, and whichever way a Jew goes if he is a decent and observant man—

  What the saying really meant, Reuven had interrupted, was that a Jew could not escape his destiny to reach the Holy Land. And therefore the best solution was to go at once, directly, and an end! “Well said!” Feigel had proudly cried out, and Yankel himself had felt pride at the clever answer his son, despite being an unbeliever, had given his wife’s falsely clever brother.

  But Feigel’s eldest brother, Kalman, who owned the sugar-beet mill, had taken another view altogether. “Why go anywhere? Why flee? Why uproot ourselves? There have been pogroms before and there have been edicts before; the storm blows, you sit quietly in the cellar and the storm blows over. Here in Cherezinka, God be thanked, we are alive and well. A few heads have been cracked but they will mend, the hair will grow back, not even a scar will show.” And Kalman blew smoke from the long Turkish cigarette that he held cupped in his hand, while he smiled his prudent wisdom upon Yankel.

  A few cracked heads. Might his own head be broken, and every bone in his body, the smiling one, the cigarette smoker, the wealthy gvir with his sugar-beet mill! In Kalman’s interest and for his sake, Yankel had stood up to the raging peasants, refusing to pay a kopeck more a pood for their beets, until a drunken Ivan had leaped from his wagon onto the platform, his whip raised. Yankel had spit in the moujik’s face, it was true, before the whip-handle came down on his head. So he had been carried home, blood clotting his beard, and all the children had wailed and lamented around their Tateh, Leah hurrying with the kettle from the stove to help her mother with warm water to cleanse the wound. It was then that Feigel had declared: “An end! We must go! We must leave this gehenna! An end!”

  Nevertheless at the family council there was Feigel’s fine fat brother, the gvir, with his voice as smooth as schmaltz, declaring there was no cause to flee. And there had been the younger generation as well, Kalman’s son, one of the intelligentsia from the goyish gymnasia, talking of smuggled pistols and iron staves and the new spirit of self-defense, of Jewish fighters in Homel and Kostarnitza and Odessa who had beaten off pogromists. So declared Kalman’s son Tuvia, who was the same age as Reuven, also a freethinker, a revolutionist—he had even Russified his name—Tolya he now called himself—and he had a fat-lipped smile like his father’s. He too announced there was no cause to flee, indeed it would be treason to the social revolution! In the revolutzia everything would be changed, everything would be solved! No, the revolution had not been broken at all, promised Tuvia-Tolya, the mighty stream flowed underground, and when it burst forth again, it would sweep the world clean!

  Oh, what a tumult and confusion in the family. They were like a double-span of horses in the forest pulling a heavy half-buried log out of a wallow of mud, Yankel told himself, with the driver’s long whip reaching them whichever way they tugged and struggled, and each beast pulling in another direction under the lashes.

  And so he had permitted Reuven to leave for Eretz Yisroel. Better Reuven should labor and risk himself for the Jewish cause at least, than for the Russian revolution. Better a Zionist with a plow than a Narodnick with pistols and bombs. That had been Feigel’s pleading too. Let Reuven go. If not to Eretz, he will end up in Siberia.

  And then came a new confusion. If Reuven went, his sister Leah stubbornly insisted she too had to go. A girl not yet seventeen, but already a “new woman” with equal rights: if a man can go, a girl can go too! Always Leah had followed Reuven around, more like a younger brother than a sister. Together they had joined the youth movement of the Jewish Workers, laborers of Zion, going to the secret meetings behind the wall of flour sacks in the rear of Mendelovitch’s bakery. What was to be done with a girl like Leah who went out beyond the town into the fields and asked the peasants to teach her to plant potatoes?

  Regarding his eldest daughter, a feeling had come over Yankel in those days as though the house were bursting with the femaleness of the girl. She had grown like some Russian peasant woman, broad-boned, tall, nearly a head above himself, taller than her brother Reuven, full-bodied, with great red cheeks and strong teeth. Though he was not of the backward over-observant Yidden who forbade themselves even to look at a woman for fear of Satan’s temptation, Yankel in those days in the presence of his large energy-charged daughter felt an inkling of the fear of those pious men: It was not so much a horror of some drunken sin happening, as between Lot and his daughters—for one thing Yankel was no drinker, only a schnapps now and then to close a bargain—no, it was the surge of femaleness that he felt with Le
ah in the house, of an overpowering presence of womankind that he had not even sensed in the deepest of permitted doings with his wife. Nor, thank God, did he sense anything like this now from his younger daughters.

  And Feigel too had taken count of this in Leah. In the whole village there was not a Jewish boy of the height and size of Leachka, and in any case could one even hint about matchmaking to a girl of today? But there among the pioneers in Eretz a shortage of girls existed, it was known, and perhaps Leah would find herself a big strong chalutz; so perhaps for her to go with Reuven would after all be a good thing.

  “Let her go with Reuven,” Feigel had decreed at last. “Leah will keep an eye on her brother; otherwise, idealist that he is, he will forget to put food into his mouth, even a cucumber, the vegetarian!”

  For this of late had been an added complication in the house. Reuven the idealist had declared himself against meat-eating. He and Leah had even started a vegetable garden in the yard, planting cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, and cabbages, to the amazement of the shikseh who helped in the kitchen. Reuven had brought home botanical books, and Leah had got the peasant girl to bring seeds from her family’s own garden. In their experiments the brother and sister had, astonishingly, raised a bed of strawberries larger than any to be found in the market. Only in his vegetarianism did Leah fail to follow her brother—she devoured everything, flesh-food, milk-food, engulfing with lip-smacking love whatever she put into her mouth.