The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  “I just plant them,” Leah said. “At home they grew fine.”

  “Oh.” At once this Rahel became diffident. “I only know from books,” and she began to plant under Leah’s direction. A curious one. Even when she poured water she seemed to need a measuring glass. She had prepared herself with book-learning, she was half an agronomist, but she nearly cut off her big toe with a mattock. And yet by the end of the row they were good friends. “If I only had the feel in my hands like you,” she envied Leah. “But I’ll learn to work, you’ll see.” Leah wanted to hug, to protect, this delicate Rahel. Again there was a premonition in her that a lifelong friendship had begun.

  Just as they finished putting in their vegetable garden, Handsome Moshe brought word from Jaffa, once more rescuing the kvutsa. A forest was to be planted in memory of Theodor Herzl on a tract purchased by the Keren Kayemeth in a place called Hulda on the way to Jerusalem.

  Before dawn the kvutsa set off, Rahel among them. Beyond the outmost orange grove the earth stretched cracked and dry; every green thing had been devoured by Bedouin goats. After an hour’s walk they came to the site; an old stone hut stood in the field, and there they found the overseer, Kramer, a well-known man in the land, an agricultural expert from the Baron’s settlements.

  “But you’re too late!” Kramer gestured—on the field they saw a number of fellaheen working, taking the pine saplings out of their clay pots and setting them into the soil.

  “You’ve brought in Arabs on Keren Kayemeth land to plant the Herzl forest!” Araleh cried out indignantly.

  No help for it! The office in Jaffa had sent them too late; they must leave.

  It was then that the memorable rage of Reuven Chaimovitch broke forth, all the more startling to the chevreh as already in these few days he had become known as a quiet and dreamy fellow. But it was a rage that Leah knew, a rage that belonged in the family, a rage that she had witnessed at home, breaking out of her father—not often, perhaps once in a year—but who in the town of Cherezinka did not know that one must flee before the rage of Yankel Chaimovitch as before a tornado?

  And like a tornado Reuven rushed down the row of young pines, uprooting them, tearing the newly planted trees out of the earth. The startled fellaheen made no move to prevent him, standing back and staring, looking from the mad Jew to the Jewish supervisor.

  “In memory of Theodor Herzl!” Reuven roared. “Jewish land! A Jewish forest! And Jewish hands are not wanted to plant it!”

  Leah noticed Rahel watching her brother with such a look on her face as when one watches a superb display of nature, a sky of lightning and thunder. Kramer uttered not a word. He glanced at the sullen members of the kvutsa, and walked into the stone hut.

  Reuven remained standing among the uprooted trees. His sister went over to him, and in a moment Handsome Moshe joined them.

  “You did well, Reuven,” Moshe said.

  And Rahel spoke also, as though representing the entire Jewish people, “Reuven, you did right.”

  A few steps away the fellaheen were gathering together. One moved to pick up a sapling and set it back into the earth. “Leave it alone!” Reuven roared in Hebrew. The Arab shrugged and dropped the plant. Then he and his companions simply squatted down on the earth.

  After a little time Moshe went over and spoke to them; it seemed he knew some Arabic. Then Kramer came out and spoke to them more fully. They arose and went away. Now Kramer approached the kvutsa.

  The fellaheen were from the village of Zayuma nearby, the overseer said, their sheikh had sent them. Standing with his back to Reuven, Kramer declared that he understood what had happened—did he not have the same ideals in this land as they? Else why was he here, wasting his life in a yishuv full of madmen? But he had his problems too, and not always was he understood. The allocation for planting the forest was virtually nil. He had had to combine and contrive, even to beg, so as to obtain the seedlings, which at last had been donated by the agricultural school, Mikveh Israel. As to these Arabs, a small gift, a sheep, had been offered to their sheikh, who had sent them over, for no pay.

  “Of course you are right,” Kramer recognized, with a side-glance toward Avner’s Rahel. “It is only appropriate to have the Herzl forest planted by Jewish hands. But wouldn’t it have been better to speak to me first, rather than rush out like wild men and tear trees out of the ground?”

  Then they planted the forest, working for token wages, Rahel staying and laboring for a day alongside Leah and Reuven. A few days later, when Kramer swore there was not a copper left, the kvutsa agreed to work on without pay for another week to complete the planting of the memorial forest.

  Everywhere people talked of the tree-uprooter. The quiet, shy Reuven had become a David and Samson rolled into one. The forest planted, they were again looking for work, nearly the whole kvutsa stopping into Mother Zuckerman’s in Jaffa where Araleh had a long-standing credit, as there was doubtless something between him and the grown daughter, Saraleh of the long braids. From the kitchen much whispering and giggling was heard, and finally it was the younger sister, Esterkeh, hardly ten, who brought in the great bowl of lentil soup so she could stare at Reuven Chaimovitch, the tree-uprooter, before fleeing to a gust of general laughter.

  For weeks there was nothing. The men could only present themselves early each morning in the village square at the “slave market”; there, a grove owner who might need an extra hand for the day would drive up on his wagon, looking them over, sometimes even getting down to feel their muscles before he made his choice. Reuven was taken for a day or two of mattock work. Al ready word had got about that this patriot was also a diligent laborer, a natural hand with the mattock, as deft as Handsome Moshe himself, but if they summoned him onto the wagon, the squires inevitably jested, “Remember, I want trees planted, not uprooted.” Then, when one of the writer Smilansky’s steady hands fell ill, the planter himself came to the cabin asking for Reuven Chaimovitch, and on Reuven’s steady employment the kvutsa managed to survive.

  One morning Dovidl the Clever reappeared. “The wine-treaders!” he proclaimed. He had pulled them out on strike! Everyone must come and show solidarity!

  A mixed crowd had gathered at the gate before the winery, the largest establishment in Rishon le Zion. The strikers themselves, mostly older men, heavily bearded and wearing the ritual fringed undervest so that the tzitzith dangled out at the waist, now stood together in a group, looking bewildered and uncertain about what they had done, but reassuring each other in Yiddish that no, a Jew could not feed a family on such a pittance, and the pious Baron in Paris could surely afford to pay a pious Jew better wages.

  Another group had already formed, a group of planters and villagers, and these called at them with indignation, addressing each by name: Zalman! Have you lost your senses!—What’s come over you! Why do you listen to these socialist troublemakers?—Let them go back to Russia! Do you want the Baron to get angry, do you want to ruin the whole yishuv! A shame!

  A wagon drawn by a fat-sided Belgian workhorse drove up, and off jumped a heavyset black bearded settler, holding his long whip. A village founder, owner of an enormous vineyard, in his anger he even reminded Leah a little of her own father on that famous day when he had shouted down the peasants who wanted a higher price for their sugar beets.

  “I’ll tread the grapes myself!” the grower shouted, marching toward the gate, waving to the other villagers to follow. Before the gate stood Dovidl, and instantly there was a scuffle with Dovidl in the center; the whole kvutsa rushed to his aid, and as Leah planted her bulk before the wrought-iron gate, the planter paused. “Shame!” he shouted into her face. “A Jewish girl! Do you want to bring the Turkish police down on us!” And he appealed to the striking wine-treaders themselves. “Jews, come to your senses!”

  On the second story a window flew open. The manager, wearing a high stiff collar and a necktie, stuck out his head. “The wine-press is shut down!” he shouted in a blend of German and Yiddish, with a French acce
nt. “I have telegraphed to Paris.” And to the militant vintner he called, “BenZion, you too better go home.”

  By evening the cabin of the kvutsa had been inundated with barefoots. News of the first strike had emptied out the whole of Mother Zuckerman’s hotel in Jaffa, and Araleh’s Saraleh had also come, bringing a sackful of bread. Leah and the sweaty Nahama were busy over the soup cauldron, cutting up carrots that had already grown to a good size in their garden—what a brilliant idea to plant their own vegetables, everyone exclaimed, it should become a principe! Excited talk went on, rumors of victory; lanky Avner arrived and went into a sitting with Dovidl and Handsome Moshe; for quiet, they used the girls’ corner behind the burlap curtain.

  In the dusk, among the gathering crowd there appeared a figure, half emaciated, in a peasant blouse, and by his long ragged beard you would have thought it was Tolstoy himself. This was the “Old One,” Reuven knew at once, the sage, A. D. Gordon—who had not heard of him? Who did not already know him, from his writings in the Young Worker? A lifelong member of the intelligentsia, who had been managing an estate for a relative, Baron Ginsberg of St. Petersburg, the richest of Russian Jews, he had suddenly, at fifty, left all behind, family, home, books, and come to Eretz as a laborer. Frail, often ill, he would take no other task than laboring in the fields.

  Catching sight of Dovidl, the Old One called out like a scolding teacher, “You shouldn’t have done it!”

  “But isn’t he with us?” Reuven was puzzled.

  “He’s with us, he’s with us,” Moshe laughed, “only he’s against strikes. He believes in passivity.”

  “No. In patience!” Gordon had heard them. “In endurance.”

  “Then how will things ever change?” Moshe demanded, more respectfully.

  They would change. Old Gordon was off on a lecture, just as though he were reading from his writings. The Jew, restored to his natural self as a toiler on the soil, would become stronger inwardly. And thus things would change—not through strife and conflict that would only sharpen the difference between Jew and Jew in the so-called class struggle, for what could this achieve? “They will only strike back at you. They will divide you,” he predicted. “All true strength is from within.”

  Max Wilner had been listening; now he opened his tight-pressed lips. “Our true vegetarian,” he remarked. And he told a little incident. Not long ago Gordon had stayed at the kvutsa. “You know on top of everything he is pious. He puts on tfillim. At least until then he did. One morning I said to him, ‘Gordon, you are a vegetarian. How can you bind on your arm and forehead these strips of leather cut from the hide of an animal?’ And you know what happened?” Max gave them a moment, savoring his coming point. “The next morning he prayed without his tfillim.”

  It was from that moment perhaps that Reuven felt his first impulse of dislike in Eretz, though Max was so intelligent and hardworking a comrade, and widely read.

  Singing had begun. Despite the words of the sage, which troubled few of them since everyone could not after all live up to all the ideals of a tzaddik, there was a happy sense of triumph. At last a blow had been struck at the barons, big and little! A bonfire sprang alight and already the circle of dancers swung around the fire. Leah jumped into the hora ring, Handsome Moshe was on one side of her, his fingers squarely around her waist, and on the other side she could feel under her hand the bony shoulder of Old Gordon. Almost the first into the circle, he danced as one ageless, possessed, with the ecstasy of a Hasid. Even Dovidl, she saw, was pulled into the dance. Whatever would come in her life, with such good comrades, never had she been so happy!

  When Leah danced, some said the earth shook. But it was from fervor, not from heaviness. As is often true of large women, when she danced, her fleshiness vanished, she was possessed of a weightless grace. How good, how good it was, and the words stamped out in their song said the same: How good and how pleasant for brothers to dwell together in unity. It was a Psalm of David, it had become a chalutz song.

  Reuven too was swept into the hora; in the circle his shyness was suspended—as long as he was one with the others, he did not feel it, but the moment the circle halted, this shyness returned on him and he stood alone. There were few such solitary moments tonight as the end-gasp of each song was drowned in the upsurge of a new one. Now Araleh called out the favorite refrain, “Im ayn ani li, mi li?” “If I am not for me, who will be?” The words of Rabbi Hillel, stomped into the earth, harder, always faster. “And if not now, then when, then when!”—“Ay ma-tay!” One by one the chevreh lost breath and dropped out; the circle constricted until there were six, Araleh and Saraleh dropped away, then suddenly Moshe and Leah were standing aside, gasping, laughing, and only Avner’s Rahel was left with Reuven. She flew faster, Reuven too, he waved his free hand for others to come back, but everyone clapped them on. “If I am not for me, who will be!”—“Mi-li, mi-li,” until suddenly he felt the small of her back weighing on his hand, resting there the briefest instant, and then Rahel broke away, breathing rapidly, shaking her head, her eyes sparkling their acknowledgment. Oo-wah! What a dancer was Reuven the Tree-Puller, the longest lasting of all! But Old Gordon sprang back. Now Reuven and Gordon danced on, the fire lighting their faces. “If for myself alone am I, what am I?” They could not let the dance die, it was as though the whole movement would stop, the chalutziut, the redemption of the Jews, the turning earth itself!

  Then Leah leaped back, and Moshe, and Araleh and Saraleh, and Nahama and Shimek, and Dovidl, and Avner and Rahel, Max Wilner too, and the circle expanded, grew larger than ever. “Anu banu artsa,” they sang, “We have come to our land, To build and have her build us …”

  The yard all around the hut and the floor inside the hut were covered with them, the sleeping chalutzim, while in the girls’ corner Leah had insisted on giving her place to Saraleh Zuckerman, and she herself lay on the mat with Rahel. Too excited to sleep, Rahel talked and talked in a low voice into Leah’s ear; the significance of the event, the first strike, the way was now open, in the orange-picking season they would strike the groves. Jewish labor would become a force, did Leah realize how many chalutzim were arriving? Over a thousand had appeared this year in the Poale Zion hut on the shore near Jaffa. And as many more surely had come to Eretz without registering in their labor exchange. Avner could no longer cope with it all. And a journal was needed, a labor paper to offset the only Hebrew paper with its Old City odor—and suddenly Rahel interjected, “Your brother, what a dancer!” and went on—Handsome Moshe, she had noticed that Leah was attracted to him. No? And dropping to a more intimate whisper she asked was Leah still a virgin? To her chaverteh, Leah answered honestly, and Rahel now embarked on a lecture on sexual freedom as though it were a duty. About Rahel and Avner, Leah was too embarrassed to ask, though everyone took it for granted.

  She and Rahel must have drowsed, for before dawn Leah awakened to movement from the other side of their curtain, among the men sleepers on the floor. Dovidl was up and already making off. “Dovidl, wait!” she hurried out to him—at least a mug of tea and a slice of bread. He took the bread but wouldn’t wait for the fire to be made for the water to boil.

  From a distance as he entered the village Dovidl already saw them, his fine pious strikers, in a little knot in front of the shul, while their leader, Reb Weintraub of the always-narrowed eyes, was off to a side in a discussion with the planter, BenZion.

  So, as Dovidl soon related at the kvutsa, his pious wine-treaders had betrayed him. An advance in wages had been received, but other demands, such as for Jewish hands throughout the winery, would await an opinion by the chief rabbi of the Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Dovidl himself, of course, was no longer wanted in the winery, not because of his radical labor ideas but because he was unobservant, and unkosher—tref.

  With this point, a foxy glint had come into Weintraub’s eyeslits.

  So it was he who had been used, Dovidl realized; the men had got their increase in wages, and behind their beards the
y were laughing at him.

  Big Leah, bringing hot tea in a large canister as she arrived with the chevreh, at once saw from the way Dovidl walked toward them what had happened. Afterward, sitting on a bench outside the cabin when the crowd of barefoots had gone their way, she listened to his analysis of his mistakes. It was not wrong to work with the religious element, as with any element, for to grow strong the maximum of groupings must be drawn in. Though he should have realized that BenZion the planter would approach the pious workers with his tallis-bag in his hand. The mistake was that before the strike, he, Dovidl, should himself have obtained some sort of hold over the men.

  “Nu,” she said, “no use to sit with a let-down nose.” After all he had done something. He had shown that a strike could be effective even here in Eretz.

  But then there was no work at all to be had. The orange-picking season was slow in starting. And as Old Gordon had pre dicted, the growers were striking back in their own way. Each dawn the chalutzim stood in the “slave market.” The “little barons” would drive up and stop at the Arab side of the square. Entire families of Arabs they led off to do their cutting, never a Jew. Even for Arab wages, chalutzim were not wanted.

  The little kvutsa was breaking up. Shimek of the twisted lip had received a letter from home, from his father, saying his mother would not live through the winter. Though everyone knew about such letters, he was going back—with the vow that he would soon return to Eretz. Moshe was going off to try the Galilee, where it was said hands would be needed for a big plantation being started for wealthy English Jews, on the shores of the Kinnereth. “He’s running away from his orange-grower’s daughter,” Nahama scornfully told Leah. Things had reached the point of tears and marriage demands. And soon poor Nahama herself was running after Handsome Moshe to the Galilee.

  With the picking season over, even Reuven’s days of employment were few. It seemed almost as though their coming here were a failure. Who would have imagined, with all the difficulties that had been forecast of fevers and of Arab bandits falling on them, that the greatest hardship would come from other Jews refusing to give them work?