The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Mama had scented out the difficulty and was sending them bits of money—Leah could almost see her unknotting the kerchief in which she tied away coins, the coins saved from household money—Mamaleh’s kniplach. There could even be enough for passage home if need be, their mother hinted.

  From Rahel came the thought of Jerusalem. Months in the land, and they had not even gone up to Yerushalayim! No, Leah denied to herself, it was not because they might leave Eretz without seeing the holy city. They had no thought of deserting. In Jerusalem, Rahel said, they might find building work. Chalutzim were learning to become stonecutters. Women must learn this trade as well! So, with Avner and Rahel, she and Reuven set off.

  At every turn, Avner gave them historical lectures. That was really where his heart was, in searching out old names of villages and valleys; even the names of Arab villagers he sometimes traced to Biblical days, believing these were descendants of Jews who had in the distant past become Moslems to save themselves. But when would he ever find time for this important work?

  Here in the low hills was Samson’s land, the vale of Sorek where Delilah lived. How empty it all was! The air was quiet and luminous, and sometimes they walked for an hour, two hours, without coming upon a village. A small herd of sheep might be seen grazing on a hillside, and once there suddenly appeared three Arab girls with water-jars on their heads, coming from a spring. In the girls’ village they were given hospitality, sleeping on mats in the guest-hut of the sheikh; it was here, Avner told them, that the Ark had rested on its way to Jerusalem.

  Then they were making their last ascent, between two ranges of grayish, barren hills, on which one could see traces of terracing. All this had once been covered by fig trees, olives, and vines. Rahel suddenly launched into a discourse on forestry. Conifers would be the best. All these hills could be green again. But the bald mountains stretched as far as the eye could see, like the planet earth before plants were created. Tens of thousand of seedlings would be needed, Leah said, and where would they come from? Even for the Herzl forest, seedlings had been scarce.

  “Then we must grow them! You and I! That’s something we can do!” Rahel cried and began to sing as they climbed. She had taken Leah’s hand, and they walked behind Avner and Reuven, the huge girl and the little one, their hands swinging as they sang a wordless Hasidic melody. And there atop a hill as barren as the others was the city.

  The massive walls, as they approached, appeared to Leah just as they must always have been, even in David’s time. Rising in the center she saw a vast golden dome, and though she knew it belonged to those others, a mosque, it seemed to her it was the Temple. Just so, just there, it must have stood.

  Through the covered lanes with their stalls, Rahel and Avner led them into narrower, still more twisted lanes, with glimpses of hovels along dark stone stairways, and suddenly around a double corner they found themselves before the Wall. Why should they—all unbelievers—be drawn to this symbol of fanatic Judaism, of weeping and despair? Yet so it was. They had had to come here first.

  Exactly as in the picture that hung in her grandmother’s house in Cherezinka, Leah saw the high wall made of great blocks of ancient stones—ah, in those days Jews indeed knew how to hew stones! In the crevices grew bits of grass like tufts of hair on an old woman’s face, and swaying in prayer at the base of the wall were the old men of the picture, and also a few weeping old women.

  Then came beggars tugging at you and demanding the names of your deceased so they could say a Kaddish, and Reuven wanted to leave.

  Against the opposite end of the Old City, in Mea Shearim, Rahel led them into the courtyard of a rectangular building, once a monastery, she said. Even as they approached, Leah heard the stonecutters’ hammers tapping away; in one corner of the yard a few chalutzim sat on the ground, their faces gray with stone dust, each with a block before him, chipping away under the eye of a tiny Yemenite with short ear-curls, the master. In another corner, before a huge upended block of stone from which a striding Elijah half-emerged, was a sculptor who turned, gazed on Leah with a broadening grin of appreciation, let out an enormous Oho! and came and walked around her as though she were an object in a museum. Oho! he whistled again, from behind a mufflike mustache, and demanded of Rahel, “Where did you find her?” This was Yosi, Rahel said. “Where will I get a block of stone large enough!” he cried out.

  All around the courtyard were tiny workshops, a few with looms, others where sheets of brass were being tapped into ornaments. The deserted building had been obtained by Professor Schatz, the great Jewish painter from Roumania, Rahel explained; he was reviving Jewish culture. There he was in the weaving shop, and Leah saw a bareheaded man with a wild beard, like Yosi’s statue of Elijah, except for a large stomach. The professor embraced them all, an enthusiast, a lover of everyone. It would be wonderful to have a chalutza learning stonecutting—Leah was just the one for it. He was building his new Bezalel Art School and Museum on a hill outside the Old City; a great new city of Jerusalem would grow up around his new museum! Reuven too—yes, he needed workers for the walls! “Come tomorrow!” And he beamed on them, and hurried off.

  Upstairs, Rahel stuck her head into one door after another, all of them opening onto the balcony, to find places for Reuven and Leah. The building teemed. Meanwhile they rested in Avner’s room, where there was the usual bed of planks resting on kerosene tins, an orange crate made into a bookcase, and on the floor a large mat with a water jug.

  In the yard a soup cauldron cooked, and in no time Leah was quite at home, helping with the soup. During the day she sat among the chevreh, chipping away at the golden-hued blocks of stone; though the Yemenite, who was called Abadiah, had at first balked at teaching a woman, she had simply taken her place, and now he was her friend. Professor Schatz passed, and beamed on her. Reuven was already at work on the new Bezalel building, carrying stones up to the masons. He was even to receive a wage, as Professor Schatz had just returned from a money-raising trip abroad.

  It was like the kvutsa again. In the talkative evenings a circle of chaverim sat on the mat in Rahel’s room, next to Avner’s; on her mat was a samovar and she poured tea for everyone; after endless discussions and song-singing, Avner would go back to his own room, others would depart, Reuven would silently leave Leah at her own door and go to the chamber he shared with a half dozen chalutzim. He had understood finally about Rahel and Avner—what was there to understand? But Leah saw that he was unable to keep his eyes from the girl.

  For herself, Yosi the sculptor had got her to pose for him, in the afternoons when her stonecutting stopped; he was modeling her in clay, a life-size figure with arms bare, and his hands seemed more often on her than on his clay. Though half her size, Yosi was unabashed. Where he got his energy no one knew, but four times a day he would disappear into his cavelike chamber, and after the door had been closed for a time, you would see a girl flitting out. Nurses! he bragged. From the nearby French hospital. He even hinted at nuns.

  A month went by. Professor Schatz again ran out of money and halted his building operations. There was no work to be had in Jerusalem, and Reuven was miserable; what was he doing here in the city—he had come to labor on the soil! Luckily, a message came from Dovidl in the Galilee, calling Avner to a meeting. Why not go along? And there Reuven and Leah found their destiny.

  They walked by way of Samaria, and there they saw another land, a land filled with olive groves and flocks on green hillsides; no Jewish settlements were here, though Avner halted them at one effendi’s house where a Russian Jew named Shertok had been installed with his family to manage the estate. Music was heard, they had brought in a piano, and the youngest boy, called Yehvda, was a genius on the violin. A real Jewish family, alone among the Arabs.

  Two young daughters wanted to go off with them, while the eldest son—with the name of Moshe—small, slight and witty, jested with Leah that she must divide herself in two, and one of her should stay here!

  On the third day they came ou
t on the vast flat plain of Jezreel, with the morning dew rising off the swampland and the stretches of tangled underbrush. All morning they followed a wagon trail toward the soft-rounded breastlike mountain of Tabor. Before nightfall they managed to reach the settlement of Mescha, a walled enclosure of some forty houses—how far from everyone it seemed! Yet here were the real Jewish farmers they had heard of; the center lane of the village was filled with cattle being brought in from pasture by little boys with sticks and dogs, and as they watched the cattle turning off each to its barn, Leah heard her name called. A stocky young laborer with a large head—Dovidl himself. In these few months he had already become the real thing, Dovidl declared, a plowman no less—why torture his head with politics!

  Though this was also one of the Baron’s settlements, here there were no Jewish effendi. Dovidl’s own employer labored side by side with him in the fields, a real peasant, and the farmer even refused to pay land-rent to the Baron’s agent!

  They ate their supper at a large round table in the farmhouse, the housewife serving a chicken soup such as you would not find in all the rest of Eretz Yisroel, while Dovidl overwhelmed them with talk of yields of barley, of fodder-crops, of mules and oxen, as though he had been here all his life. Reuven was loquacious as never before, not shy, not even refusing when the farmer’s wife, exclaiming, “Oh, a vegetarian,” insisted on making a special milk-soup with dumplings for him.

  Of the farmer, Yehuda Shepshovitch, Reuven asked a thousand questions, and Shepshovitch had a way of replying as though each problem were nothing, you found a way to overcome it. Naturally, this settlement flourished. Why? Because they bought virtually nothing from outside, they did not seek to get rich and raise crops for gold, like the orange growers, the pardessanim; here, they grew what they needed, vegetables even four times a year—fodder, wheat, barley, the beans called fuhl; they had geese, chickens —in sum, a true farmer’s life.

  “What milk!” Reuven cried.

  “And what cucumbers!” Leah added. Could she take along some seeds? Though where she would plant them she didn’t yet know.

  As to the milk, Shepshovitch had journeyed to Holland last year and brought back a prize pair of cattle. Never again for him the scrawny black cows of the land. His yield was three times as high and much richer in fat. His bull was now breeding to the little black Arab cows and in a few years the whole of Mescha would flow with milk. And as for honey—taste it!

  Seeing her brother so filled with admiration, Leah asked, could they perhaps find work here in Mescha? Nu—Shepshovitch ticked off the names of the villagers; this one had sons, and that one already had a helper … With Dovidl, he discussed various prospects in the nearby villages of Yavniel and Sejera.

  Alongside Sejera, a training farm had been started, so farmhands were now plentiful, but Shepshovitch would keep his ears open as far as Yavniel was concerned. If Dovidl said Reuven was a good worker, then a good worker he must be!

  They walked out into the open compound. In the Jaffa area the villages had been spread out, but here each house faced the compound, forming a kind of community. Behind each house was its yard and stable, and the rear wall of each stable was connected on each side by the continuous surrounding wall so as to make an enclosure of the entire village, open only at the gate.

  Just then an Arab rode up, sitting a slender-legged brown mare. He sat taller than most Arabs and was, oddly, blue-eyed. “Our watchman,” Dovidl remarked with an accent of distaste. “They’re not even Arabs. Circassians from the Caucasus, that settled here the devil knows why. They have their own village. You find everything, in this mishmash of a country!”

  The watchman wore crisscrossed bandoliers and carried a long rifle. “Our protector!” Dovidl spat in the dust, a rural manner he had already picked up in his transformation to a man of the soil. Exchanging greetings with the farmers around the compound, the watchman rode out to circle the village wall, while a couple of grown sons closed and bolted the gate.

  Was there trouble in this area, then?

  “Trouble?” Dovidl shrugged. “He makes a few rounds and rides home and goes to sleep.” The Circassians had been given a watchman’s contract for the three or four settlements in this area, but it was all blackmail. True, there was a nasty pair of bandits, sons of a half-Bedouin who called himself the Sheikh of Fuleh, a collection of huts in the middle of the plain inhabited by tribesmen from the time the Turks had built the railway line. They had been brought over from across the Jordan to keep materials from being pilfered. Some had settled there, though yellow fever was bad. Those two sons of Fuleh had good horses; they were known throughout Galilee for preying on travelers or running off with livestock if they caught a few cattle grazing away from their herd. But such raiders never ventured inside the settlements, Dovidl went on. The contract with the Circassian watchmen was nothing but tribute, arranged by the Baron’s representatives in their compromising way, and Dovidl for one wanted to see it ended.

  Suddenly this diminutive farmhand, in the oversize pair of boots that Shepshovitch had lent him, was the cocky strike-leader again. Could anyone really believe that Dovidl would remain here, a simple plowman? “We’ll soon change things!” he declared, with a touch of conspiracy in his tone, to Leah and Reuven. For though these Galilee farmers were better than the planters of the coastal villages, where was the real difference in outlook? Had Jews come here to continue the fearfulness of their old ghetto mentality, paying bribes to goyim so as not to be attacked? The first requirement of manhood, of a people, was to be able to stand up for itself, and this Dovidl declared was the new spirit that must come to the Yishuv before real progress could be made.

  He was talking through Leah to Reuven, who began to feel uneasy. This farmer, Shepshovitch, had seemed an admirable man to him. What was there to change?

  Just then there came a rattle of wagon-wheels outside the gate; Dovidl himself hurried to open it, hailing four men in a mule-drawn cart. One Reuven and Leah at once recognized—he had been at a workers’ conference in Ramla, where they had stopped on the way to Jerusalem, and had spoken often and with fire. Galil, he called himself; the son of an enormously wealthy lumber merchant of Minsk named Gewirtz, he had interrupted his law studies to become a social revolutionary, and then been won over to Zionism. Now he was at the training farm in Sejera, not far from here. Two others on the wagon were brothers; even in the evening light they looked fierce, with mustaches like double-pointed daggers that reached beyond their cheeks. These two were called Zeira—Shabbatai and Aaron, Kurdish Jews from Turkestan. Even there, it seemed, there were Zionists. They now were from Sejera, from the village itself, where they had a homestead. The fourth was quite young, a boy called Herschel from the training farm. The ride had been without incident, Galil said, and the whole lot of them at once went off with Dovidl, who made a motion with his head to Reuven to come along, and shrugged at Leah, excluding her.

  So they were up to something, the fine chaverim, and even they, with Dovidl and all their “equality,” were excluding women!

  What they were up to, she found out quickly enough from the eldest Shepshovitch daughter Genya, a placid, buxom sixteen-year-old who, unfortunately, Leah had seen at first glance, was not the type for Reuven, a vain girl and a gossip. The men were forming a secret society, Genya said; they wanted to replace the Circassians as watchmen, they wanted to ride around on horses, but they didn’t even possess a revolver between them, much less a horse. Besides, the village leaders would never agree to give them the contract unless the Baron’s supervisor for the whole area, the all-powerful Jacques Samuelson, agreed, and Samuelson wouldn’t agree, as he had his own arrangements with the Turkish police chief, the Bimbashi, in Nazareth to keep everything quiet. Her own father, though, might be for it, as he hated everything to do with the Baron and wanted complete independence. And also Dovidl had already stirred up some of the younger lads of Mescha for the scheme. Their secret society called itself Bar Giora after the last defender of Jerusalem a
gainst the Romans. They had a fearful secret oath in blood, and not everyone could join—they had tests, and accepted only the bravest.

  All this Reuven was learning in Dovidl’s room, a lean-to by the barn, in which there was a cot, a table with a water jug, a chair. A few milking stools had been brought in. On the window ledge Dovidl had his books.

  Nine men had gathered, a pair of them from the settlement of Yavniel, farmhands like Dovidl, one of them affecting an Arab keffiyah and fancy boots, something of a loudmouth it turned out—Zev the Hotblood he was called, and he interrupted everyone. The main thing was to show no fear, he kept repeating, show you were strong and fearless, and the bandits would give you a wide berth. He had grown up with Arabs, in the north, in Metulla. Theirs was the ancient code, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. What was the Turkish government to them, they whistled at it. They kept their own laws. Show them you could be strong and determined according to the ancient tribal laws, and they would respect you. A life for a life.

  To this, the fierce-looking Zeira brothers cried their approval.

  Galil, with a swift, intimate way of talking, interrupted them. “Agreed, we must show strength, and no fear, but even the old laws don’t always demand blood for blood. In many cases payments are made. We are not seeking to start blood-feuds. We must stand for law. Sometimes even the law of the land, instead of tribal laws and the feud.” Once a blood-feud, a ghoum, was begun there would be no end. Between some of the Arab tribes, where a ghoum existed, men were killed on each side, generation after generation. No, if there was a death, their organization must aim to apprehend the killer and bring him to law. Even with the Turks. Once and for all this land must be brought into the world of today. There were Arabs too, in the cities and among the effendi, who would prefer it. “Nevertheless, as you say, we must quickly make known that we can be strong in the old way too. We must be crack shots, each of us. We must outride their best riders. We must win ourselves a name in the whole of Eretz.” He looked to Reuven, as one who already had a name, and Reuven saw that even in the Galilee his angry deed was known. But the thought of turning into a guardsman, riding the rounds at night, did not attract him. —Would they all be guardsmen, he asked, or could they perhaps also make their own settlement?