by Meyer Levin
But out of nowhere there came a doleful wretch with inflamed sick eyes and a ragged beard, who whispered savagely as he passed close to Yankel, “Fool! Turn around, get back on the ship and go home!”
The moment they entered the hotel, Feigel felt better. A true Jewish house, with an odor of home, an odor of cleanliness and warm bread. This was the Zuckerman place, a home to all the lads of the Poale Zion, Leah told her, while calling out greetings to one and another of the young men who sat over their glasses of tea, immersed in discussions. Mother Zuckerman had already come out of the kitchen and was counting the numerous Chaimovitch children with mounting admiration. She already had heard —Leah and Reuven had told her—the entire family was arriving—but such fine Jewish children! such bright faces! Such a family, arriving after such a journey! They must be hungry! She would make a large omelette for them, they must want to rest, and how did it feel to be in Eretz Yisroel! Like her own, Mother Zuckerman gathered them to her.
The family would best lie on the roof; there were no rooms just now, but in any case in the late wave of heat after the holidays, the roof was better, it would cost the father less, and she had prepared a whole separate corner for them with fresh straw mattresses. It was not luxurious, her hotel, but clean she tried to keep it, and that was not easy in Jaffa. And leading them outside to mount a stone stairway, Mother Zuckerman was already deep in household talk with Feigel, telling her that in a place like this, no sooner was the Arab girl finished sponging the floors than she had to begin all over again.
Throughout the meal there was still no moment for Feigel even to begin to talk to her eldest daughter of those things, she already saw, that had not been written in the letters, and that gave her anxiety. Why was Reuven again suffering from his fever when Leah had cheerfully written that it was cured? He looked somehow another person—what had happened to him in this year? And in Leah herself Feigel thought she detected glints of darkness or even embarrassment when their eyes met; something difficult needed to be told, though her big girl was so happy at their coming.
Mother Zuckerman’s milk-soup was good, the meal was like at home, but they must try a dish from here, Leah said, something called hommus, and at last it was brought, a white paste in olive oil, to eat with bread. “The chalutzim live on it, like the Arabs,” Mama Zuckerman laughed, and explained to Feigel how it was made from crushed chickpeas, and seasoned. Eliza tasted it and made a face, but Gidon scooped it with his bread. “Already a native!”
It was only after the meal when Leah returned to the roof with Feigel to sort things out that the time came to talk. Reuven and Yankel with the young ones had gone back to the port to bring out the big trunk, and Dvora was lingering below, for the lads from the boat had also found their way here to Zuckerman’s.
Feigel began with her anxiety for Reuven. The more she learned of his kadahat, the more she feared; would it remain with him all his life then, coming back in these attacks? And what of the younger children she had brought here?—Look at me! Leah said. Not everyone caught it, nor was it everywhere. When you were in the bad places, you had to take quinine every day. Then slowly as they decided who should sleep where, and while they lifted and inspected the bedding—inside the hotel there were bugs, Leah said, but not here on the roof—bit by bit their year unwound before Feigel. Much, with Leah, was as she had feared. Good she had come. For at last when they sat down on a straw mattress, in a gush her daughter told of the Handsome One she had sometimes mentioned in her letters, a “good comrade,” though she had always mixed him in with the other “good chaverim,” a Dovidl, a Rahel. Only now Feigel came to see how it all had been in their first year in the land, how much had happened to them that was not in the letters, how the deepest things in life, even the edge of death, had been touched in these months, and she shivered—If the worst had happened, she would not even have been here, she would have been so far away. Good she had come, for these torments were still not ended, surely she was needed. For her big Leachkeh, whom she had wanted to believe still a girl, was no longer so. And her Reuven, who she had imagined would pass into manhood here, had remained, his sister sighed, without anyone. To both, much, much had happened.
2
IT WAS here to Zuckerman’s that Reuven and Leah had been brought a year before by a gangly, bespectacled Workers of Zion comrade named Avner who attended the arrival of ships. It was the same Avner, Reuven cried excitedly to Leah on seeing him, who had spoken at the secret meeting in Kishinev where he had gone with their cousin Tolya Koslovsky two years ago.
Tolya wore a student cap and was already a member of a social revolutionary cell, but he had condescended to listen to “the other side,” the Zionists. The lanky Avner, come back from Eretz at the risk of arrest, was no fiery orator. Like a teacher, he set things forth. Thus and such were the labor conditions. These were the limited possibilities at present. Spadeful by spadeful the land would be built, brick by brick. No use to go begging as Herzl had to the great powers, the British, the Kaiser, the Sultan, for rights in Palestine. Go to the land and work. Solemnly Avner had repeated the ancient saying of Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, then when?”
Tolya was sarcastic. “There he stands, your leader, even a modern fellow who claims to bring socialist ideas into your Zionist movement, and whom does he quote? A rabbi. Reuven, Zionism is a movement that will never rid itself of religion, which means superstition and reaction.” And he was off on a flood of quotations from the brilliant young Jewish revolutionist Leon Trotsky, who had led the strikes and headed the soviets in St. Petersburg and was even now on the way to Siberia.
“Forget you are a Jew, immerse yourself in the world revolution!” Tolya exhorted. “Only then will we get rid of the curse on our people! The trouble with you, Reuven, is you are still at heart a yeshiva bocher!”
“You are wrong! I am a freethinker!” Reuven insisted to his cousin. He had left the yeshiva and was reading at home, while working in Tolya’s father’s sugar-beet mill to help out, for his own father had had another failure. Now he retorted to his cousin from the writings of Joseph Brenner, the Awakener, who had broken with the Jewish Socialist Bund and joined the Zionist camp. “What are our Jewish socialists? They’re blown by the wind, trying to ape the goyim, but they are dancers at a stranger’s wedding. They rush to lead a strike in the steel mills, yet not one Jew is a steel worker! First we must become ourselves, tear off our masks and face the emptiness of our own lives. Even our leaders, our intelligentsia, are false to themselves—they want nothing but to be acceptable to the goyish intelligentsia, they’re simply assimilationists, and so are our social revolutionaries. We will be true social revolutionists when we remove the motive of getting away from our own people, and are revolutionists so as to reconstruct our own Jewish life. And for that we must remove ourselves bodily. Only as workers in Zion—”
That was the way! That was the only way, Reuven decided. The writer, Joseph Brenner, was a vegetarian and he too, after reading a screed against flesh-eating in The Awakener, decided no longer to eat meat.
In the last year at home, Reuven and his sister Leah had grown closer and closer. They had planted their vegetable garden. Every scrap of knowledge that Reuven brought from his self-teaching from botanical books drew wondering enthusiasm from Leah. They saved their kopecks and made their plans. And when they arrived in Jaffa, though Reuven had exchanged hardly ten words with the leader at that secret meeting in Kishinev, Avner had remembered him and cried out his welcome. And the boy had brought his big strapping sister, too!
From the harbor, Avner had taken them here to Mother Zuckerman’s. Then, too, tea-drinkers had been sitting around the four or five little tables, where you entered from the street—workers who had come to Jaffa from the settlements for a bit of news of the world, for a look around, to find out if jobs were more plentiful in Rishon, in Petach Tikvah?—or perhaps shamefacedly to inquire for a boat home.
Upstairs were cots,
seven or eight to a room, and there were also a few holes off the stairway where a sick chalutz might lie in miserable solitude trying to overcome his fever, his dysentery, his bleak despair over a failed ideal.
On the very day of their arrival, eager to begin at once to labor on the earth of Eretz, the brother and sister, leaving their belongings with the Zuckermans, had set off across the sands to the settlements.
A diligence plied between Jaffa and the little chain of “the Baron’s” villages to the south, Rishon le Zion, Nes Ziona, Rehovot—First in Zion, Miracle of Zion, Broad Fields—but Reuven and Leah chose to set out, as befitted laborers, on foot. It was best, Mother Zuckerman advised Reuven, at least to carry a stick.
Suddenly before an endless stretch of dunes the town of Jaffa stopped. Leah sat down on the earth, unbuttoned and pulled off her shoes, her stockings, and Reuven did the same. So now they were barefoots, as the Baron’s settlers called the chalutzim. As the thinker Borochov wrote, you must renew your contact, bare feet to the bare earth! How warm, how good it was, under their feet!
At that time in this sleepy impoverished byway of the decaying Turkish empire, there were scattered perhaps three hundred thousand inhabitants in all, less than a tenth of the population supported by the land in the thriving days of the ancient Jewish kingdom. But here along the coast behind the rim of the dunes was a relatively prosperous area, the golden strip bearing the golden fruits, groves of oranges and lemon, almond trees, and vineyards. South of Jaffa were the richest plantations of the Arab effendis, and amongst them in the last quarter of a century several Jewish settlements had grown. To Reuven and Leah and their comrades this growth was on a mistaken basis.
The Jewish planters had started with the best intentions. Even before the Lovers of Zion groups had begun to arrive from Russia and Roumania, the moribund, pious old Jewish community in Jerusalem had caught a spark of the back-to-the-land ideal. A devout textile magnate from England, Moses Montefiore, had visited the Jews in their hovels within the ancient city walls, the pious ones who lived on a system of dividing donations from abroad. It was called the sharing out, the chaluka. With the thought of changing their mendicant mentality, of bringing them out from their dungeon habitations into the clear air, and of providing them a means of self-support, Montefiore had built houses just outside the Old City walls and set up looms powered by a windmill. This industrial effort had failed, but a few of the enlightened supervisors sent by Moses Montefiore had remained. Tolstoyan and Fourierian ideas of a return to nature were in the air, and there had also come to Jerusalem a leader from the French Jewish Society, the Alliance Isráelite Universelle, who founded an agricultural school on the Jerusalem-Jaffa road, calling it Mikveh Israel, the Well of Israel, and hoping to lure to it the sons of those same chaluka Jews. From all these impulses together, a small group of Jerusalemites had ventured down to the coastal area, bought swampland around the source-springs of the Yarkon River, and founded a village they called Petach Tikvah, the Door of Hope.
Though Arabs living on a hill some distance away had warned them against the infested lowlands, the good Jews built houses and brought down their families. Joyously harvesting their first crop of grain, they carried it triumphantly to Jerusalem in a garlanded convoy of wagons, like King David bringing back the Ark of the Law from the Philistines, up the very same road. But that winter many in Petach Tikvah died of yellow fever. One house after another stood abandoned, until the village was so empty that a settler’s body lay for a week undiscovered.
A few years later, with houses built on higher ground, a new effort was made. In the same years groups of the Lovers of Zion had begun to arrive, founding their colonies south of Jaffa. Foundering in their first year for lack of water, they had desperately sent an emissary to Paris, to the “Great Giver,” Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and he, a pious Jew, influenced by the Chief Rabbi of Paris who was himself a Lover of Zion, and impressed by the horny, toil-hardened hands of Reb Feinberg, the emissary, had given money for well-digging. Gradually the “Great Giver” had turned the redemption of the soil of Israel into a personal project, founding a score of new settlements in addition to subsidizing earlier ones. The Baron’s overseers controlled everything. They even selected bright children for schooling in France, and the daughters of the pioneers returned home playing Mozart.
Fellaheen in nearby Arab villages found they could earn more in Jewish settlements than they could from their tiny share of the crop on their debt-ridden lands. And so, year by year, the Jewish planters themselves went more rarely into their vineyards. The golden orange was discovered, more profitable than the grape, and their groves expanded. Only a few of the Baron’s more isolated settlements in the Galilee kept to “real” farming, growing wheat.
The Baron’s private messianic movement seemed to have leveled off after creating but a dozen villages. It was then that a new wave of pogroms stimulated Theodor Herzl’s politically messianic vision of a Jewish state. This renewal of the ideal aroused a new wave of young people, imbued with a socialist ideal as well, to “go up” to the land. They were called the second Aliyah—the second “going up.” They would go up as toilers, chalutzim!
The first steps of the newcomers, naturally, like those of Reuven and Leah, were directed to the already existing Jewish villages that had been nurtured by the Baron, where they hoped to find work. But there, unhappily, they found themselves regarded as a plague. Arab labor was cheap and subservient.
Trudging across the sands, brother and sister were for quite a time alone. To their left, inland, they had kept in view a fringe of greenery where the citrus groves began; now, as they plunged downward on a dune slope, the groves vanished from sight, and all before them and surrounding them was sand.
This was a moment that neither was to forget. Each pioneer in later years was to be fond of relating something akin to a mystical experience when “Eretz entered into him.” So it was now with Reuven and Leah. The skinlike smoothness of the untrodden sand, the absolute cleanliness of all creation, the pure sea-blue of the quiet Mediterranean, the solitude around them and the presence of each other exalted them. We have done it! Brother! Sister! We are here! Leah’s and Reuven’s eyes said this to each other in a pledge of fervor, joy, dedication, a declaration that what they had known in their souls to be their true course was indeed so.
So they stood still and breathed, smiling happily to each other.
They would not have expected this joy to come to them in an emptiness of untouched sand. They would have thought it would come when they stood amidst the first Jewish fields; yet it had come to them here in the open dune.
After a time they heard a soft clanging and realized these were camel bells. The caravan appeared on the ridge, coming toward them, perhaps from Egypt as the brothers of Joseph must once have come, returning with their beasts laden with grain, swollen sacks on each side of each animal.
Exactly as in Abel Pam’s Biblical pictures, a small Arab on a small donkey led the train; alongside the camels walked other long-robed men. Leah stilled her heart and smiled to Reuven. One should not fear the Arabs.
So the two continued walking as though quite familiar with these dunes, and presently as they neared the caravan the Arab on the lead donkey greeted them. “Ma’asaalam,” he said. In this moment both Reuven and Leah caught the real meaning of the ancient greeting offered when strangers approach each other.—Peace, they call out, to say “For our part there will be no hostility.”
“Shalom!” both cried, and Leah smiled her large, warm, healthy smile.
A tall one in a long striped galabiya made a remark, then laughed, showing gold-studded teeth. They didn’t know he had jestingly offered to buy the shoes and the girl together, but Leah laughed a responding laugh, and kept walking. When the camels had passed, she said to her brother, “There is really nothing to fear. They are good friendly people,” and Reuven nodded his agreement. All people were at heart good.
So they reached the top of a high dune and b
eheld square white houses with tiled roofs, not unlike a shtetl. Presently they arrived at the village. There were Jews with beards and Jews without beards, hurrying, or riding donkeys, or sitting on wagons just like peasant carts at home, or buying from the stands and shops in the open square where there also stood a shul. And there was indeed the little fashion shop that satirists of the Baron’s settlements had written about, a shop with women’s gowns from Paris in the window. It was all true.
A passerby, one of their own kind—a barefoot—and tall, Leah noticed at once, with thick black curly hair—greeted them with an ironic, “Well, does our Little Paris find favor in your eyes, chaverim?”
At the same time Leah saw in his smile a comradely intimacy, welcoming them for having come here just as he had come. True, his eyes also examined Leah with a young man’s speculation. And she herself—was she not after all a girl of seventeen looking at each man she encountered with that fateful romantic wonder—would this be He?
Despite all the talk of a new generation and freedom, at home a girl knew there was constant scheming about a match for her. Already seventeen! And her mother’s worried eyes. But she had at fest truly broken free, to seek her destined one by herself. Sometimes Leah suspected that perhaps this was even a reason her mother had finally permitted her to come with Reuven, so that she should have a chance to follow her own heart when it came to marriage.
“Work?” the young man chortled, talking to Reuven while his eyes still gazed intimately into Leah’s. “In this town if you put on a galabiya and a keffiyah you have better luck.” Still, he said, if one of the growers took a liking to you, and if you could live on olives and pittah, the generous Jew might provide you with a cabin in his vineyard as a watchman, for the Baron’s settlers had finally learned that their Arab watchmen were themselves the biggest pilferers. And what was the news back there? He had caught himself up from saying “back home,” Leah sensed. He spoke of “that place” with contempt and yet a kind of eagerness; how was the movement progressing? He meant not just the Poale Zion, she sensed, but the whole revolutionary movement. Naturally he wanted to know. Then, even while lamenting that there was no work, the chaver grumbled: Why didn’t more comrades come, especially girls? The movement—and now it was their own movement, of course, that he meant—ought to organize an immigration of girls!
