The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Now Shimek slowly repeated the thought. Not private, a farmer on private land, but socialist farming on land that belonged to the Jewish people. This was the way!

  Reuven was inspired to still another vision. With socialist farming, experiments could be made such as no private settler could undertake. Not only crops of the usual staples, barley and corn and chickpeas could be grown here. From the Jordan they had ample water for irrigation. With a pumping station, they could develop intensive farming, and support a much larger population.

  Araleh too had a plan; to construct a sluice-gate to regulate the waters of the Jordan. Suddenly everyone had a plan …

  “Wait! Wait! Stick to reality!” Max objected. “All this is in the far distant future—”

  “Why?”

  —With irrigation, Reuven went on, orange groves could be planted, and bananas as well. In this climate they could grow every fruit and vegetable on earth. A Garden of Eden could be developed here—And higher and higher went their enthusiasm until it burst into song, burst out into a hora in the yard, while Max vainly summoned all to sleep, as the harvest must continue at dawn.

  “Never mind! We’ll be ready! We’ll be ready!”

  News of the kvutsa’s success spread quickly to the training farm at Sejera, and chalutzim began to arrive to lend a hand and see how it all was done, and by the end of the harvest there came Rahel, sent down by Avner from Jerusalem, to write of their feat for the new journal of the Poale Zion. A long table was set up in the yard, there was a feast; Dovidl and a whole wagonload of chalutzim from Mescha arrived with a few bottles of Zichron wine; Nadina and Galil arrived, and Nadina made a speech. “Chaverim, you have proven here that our new way of life will succeed! Not only will our Jewish movement in Eretz embrace this socialist way of life, but the downtrodden Arabs too will learn from us and throw off the medieval yoke of the effendi! And one day”—she took off her glasses, tears were blinding her—“one day over the vast steppes of Russia, communards will go forward, to harvest as you have harvested, for the benefit of the workers themselves, and one day even in capitalist America it will be the cooperativa that owns what it produces from its own toil on its own soil. Chaverim and chaveroth, you may be proud!”

  Such a glow of love embraced them all at that plank table, it was as though they had grown and reaped the first grain known to man, and all their little animosities and grievances were melted in this joy, and Reuven, gazing at Rahel with Avner, felt released from his long secret desire, felt it was indeed true that an over-love existed, a comradely love that was purer than sexual love between men and women, and suddenly from his lips there came the song of Elijah bringing Messiah, but not with the melancholy Diaspora-tone of suffering and longing. The song of Elijah came bursting out in joy.

  Leah and Moshe leaped up to dance, the singing rose, and quickly the whole crazed circle of them were stomping on their harvest floor, their bare feet in this way beginning to thresh the grain, all of them roaring and feeling inexhaustible, earth-demons, earth-angels, children of the giants that once walked the earth here in this place, prophets with the word of universal love and truth and plenitude flowing up from their limbs.

  Surprisingly, after this triumph, the kvutsa again began to break up. First came a violent dispute over Saraleh’s pregnancy, now too visible to be ignored. A remark of Araleh’s at a sitting that they could now afford to get a cow to assure their own milk supply unexpectedly brought a sarcastic response from Max—Saraleh could assure her own milk supply. As Araleh leaped up in anger, Max withdrew any offensiveness in his remark; but after all the kvutsa had not been consulted about their having a baby, and the kvutsa was yet in no state to support child-raising. In a communa this too should be planned and consented to by all.

  Leah was flushing. She had luckily not become pregnant, but perhaps the boys were wondering whether she too—? And suddenly it came out that the womanless men had indeed been thinking and even talking of this problem amongst themselves, and that several agreed with Max’s argument.

  After all, he pointed out when the sitting became more calm, in Plato’s ideal society the children were raised by the state. In their communa there was no personal property. The idea that a child was the personal property of the parents must be aban doned. All children would belong to the whole kvutsa. Therefore their conception must be planned.

  “Shame!” cried Saraleh, and Araleh had to soothe her. It was the theory of it; by nature a child would have ties to the parents, even Max would agree.

  Certainly, Max said, but as everyone in the kvutsa would be contributing to the support of the child—of its children, as in time there would of course be others—then such questions as upbringing, education, and the place in the community must be settled by all, not by the parents alone as in bourgeois society.

  Araleh balked. Surely the parents would have the deciding word!

  They would have their vote like all other members, Max maintained.

  The discussion became heated. Leah felt upset, both sides seemed right, and yet—if you had a child…. Saraleh sat mute. Moshe with a rather foolish look rose to remark, really what decision could they make? The child was already well on its way and surely things could be worked out. Perhaps next time they would have time to discuss the principe.

  “It seems to me the principe is clear,” Max said. “No one is forced to agree. Ours is a free society. Those who cannot live by our beliefs can always leave.”

  Only a few days later came another nasty moment between Araleh and Max. The kvutsa’s clock had broken down, and as Araleh was the only chaver to possess a watch, a wedding gift from Zuckerman, he had been leaving it lying on the table. But that day, as he was plowing alone far afield, he picked it up to take along. “Leave it here,” Max said in a voice more commanding than comradely. “The rest of us will need it.”

  “But it’s my watch.”

  “Your private property?”

  Certain things were personal, not community, property, Araleh retorted. The watch was a gift from his father-in-law.

  “So now we have bourgeois sentimentality?”

  Araleh burst into a tirade. “My watch is not mine, our child will not be ours, next it will apply to my wife!”

  The story was repeated and the chaverim resented it that one of their own number should have stooped to the same slander spread by outsiders against life in a communa. They were going through enough deprivation without having the lucky bastard who had his woman make such remarks.

  This time the breach was not easily healed. Araleh and Saraleh stayed up in their room, failing to come to sittings, and mutterings even arose about the privileged ones with their private chamber.

  In the meantime another clash came; now it was between Reuven and Max over a question of plowing. Max had received a German catalogue of farm implements in which deep-plowing was declared to yield a doubled harvest. Though it would strain the kvutsa’s funds, he insisted they must order the heavy plow—the soil must be deeply turned over to tap its full resources. Reuven, though also given to the most advanced agricultural methods, in this instance argued that the light Arab plow was better adapted to the stony soil of the area. Besides, grain crops did not tap the deep soil. What was really needed first was a pump to raise up water to the fields for irrigation.

  Another raging sitting ensued, with half the men siding with Max, half with Reuven; Moshe for the plow, Shimek against, Leah asking if there was no money to buy a cow, how they could afford this expensive plow, Tibor jesting, “A cow or a plow, that is the question.” Araleh and Saraleh had returned to the discussions, and Araleh argued that it would take two pair of mules to pull such a plow, something they surely could not afford. The vote came, the sides were even, and Max announced he would therefore cast his deciding vote and order the plow.

  Soon after this, Saraleh quietly told Leah she and Araleh had made up their minds to return to Jaffa for her child to be born. And Araleh had a quiet talk with Reuven. Perhaps the kvuts
a was not the final way. He had been thinking of another way, a “semi-cooperativa,” as it were. All would be owned together; the crops, the livestock, and labor would be shared as here, but each family would live its own life. He had heard of a new settlement being planned not far from here, further along the river, and perhaps if Reuven was interested, he would make inquiries at the Zionist office in Jaffa.

  “No, I don’t know, as for me,” Reuven said. For a homestead, for one thing, you had to be married.

  But the thought came back to him about bringing the family from home.

  * * * *

  Then, when they went out to plant another stand of eucalyptus, Reuven fell ill. Leah was the first to notice it, for he made no complaint. But in the evening she saw it in his eyes, his unfocused gaze. She felt his hands; they burned.

  Almost, Reuven welcomed it, as the burning brand that Eretz put on you. Only when you had passed through the fever were you truly a part of the movement of redemption. And so he lay on his planks, his eyes glazed, hardly able to lift an arm while his sister sponged sweat from his face, taking kitchen work so as to remain near him.

  When the tremors came, Leah grasped him and held him to her; Reuven’s muscles became hard and rigid and the whole body began to thrash not like a human body that belonged to itself, but like a thing, a thing overwound with tight steel springs. Like the kvutsa’s old clock when she had wound it too tight, and suddenly felt the whole thing spin backward, loose and lifeless. Reuven’s eyes had yellowed like when you turn down a lamp. It seemed to Leah there was no longer the glaze of fever in her brother’s eyes, but the glaze of death. “Moshe!” she cried wildly, letting down Reuven’s rigid body and running in panic to the field. Moshe was far, everyone was far, the bare field seemed endless, but at last Moshe came running. Reuven was pouring sweat, the tremor was over.

  In an hour it began again. Moshe decided to ride for Dr. Rachman in Mescha, but Leah was so fearful of the day of waiting until he brought back the doctor that instead they harnessed the wagon, putting a bed of straw on the bottom. Reuven had become so weak that Moshe had to carry him in his arms to the vehicle.

  Dr. Rachman saved him, of this Leah was always certain. Though Reuven was already filled with quinine, the old doctor got more into him. With Leah he stayed by her brother’s side all through the night. Twice more the wrenching tremors came, and the second time Reuven was in a delirium, trying to rise and go to work, crying “I must get up! I must get up!”

  “Help him to stand up,” the doctor said. Leah helped him. Reuven stood, tottering, his teeth knocking from the tremor, while she held onto his burning hand to steady him. Oh, how she then wanted to engulf him and give him her strength. “Beloved, my loved one,” Reuven plaintively repeated, “appear to me, appear.” It was as though he awaited the Shechina. Tears ran down Leah’s face.

  Moshe had been dozing fitfully in the wagon; now he stood in the doorway, wordless, sorrowful. Then the seizure was over and Reuven lay on the cot.

  The doctor patted her hand. Oh, what a good man he was, to have come here with the earliest settlers, to have remained here through the years, riding to Sejera and Yavniel when needed. Now he told her to try to rest. He had a leather couch there, an old leather couch he had long ago brought all the way here from “home.” She lay down. The doctor went to the other part of the house, to his wife.

  In the morning Reuven awoke with the sweetest smile. “Now I have the land in my blood,” he said to Leah and Moshe. He had crossed over to the side of those who had engulfed the kadahat.

  Though he had passed the crisis, Reuven’s face was hollow and his limbs were reeds. As the mules were needed at the kvutsa, Moshe had to return while Leah remained with Reuven. Her brother’s strength did not seem to return; she could barely coax him to forego his vegetarianism and sip a bit of chicken broth. A month of convalescence was needed, Dr. Rachman said; Reuven must not go back to the deadly heat of the Jordan valley. He had best be taken to the convalescent home in Zichron Yaacov, and the doctor wrote a note for her. Luckily a villager was driving as far as Chedera, and could take Leah and Reuven in his wagon. From Chedera, Zichron was but a few hours away and they would manage to find another ride. Once in Zichron, Leah was determined to get work, so as not to burden the kvutsa with keeping her brother in the convalescent home.

  Zichron Yaacov sat on a hill from which the salt marshes of the Mediterranean shoreland could be seen and the sweep of the sea. Just as they arrived, the western vista was under such a sunset sky, with such purple clouds undershot with fire, that Reuven breathed in the beauty of the world once again and Leah felt heartened. He would get well here. On the horizon they made out ruins, a Crusader’s castle called Athlit; they must one day go there, Reuven said.

  This village was one of the Baron’s best, with a large wine press and a street of goodly houses, and in a wooded nest on the crown of the hill was the rest home kept by the kadahat expert, Dr. Hillel Jaffe, who at once put Reuven into a whitewashed room on a bed with sheets.

  But how would she find work here? The settlers of Zichron were known for their avoidance of Jewish labor; they had an entire village of Arabs at the bottom of their hill, and even when it came to housework and the kitchen, the Arab women had long ago learned the laws of kashruth as well as the fine points of Roumanian cooking. “Don’t worry, don’t worry, my girl, I am not worried, so why should you worry? In time you will pay me,” the doctor told Leah. But as she would not rest, and went from house to house, he put in a word with a leading family, the Aaronsons, and told her to try there.

  It fell out well. This was clearly one of the most substantial places in Zichron, Leah saw, with two dwellings, one quite large, on either side of the courtyard. In the center stood an enormous shade tree, and behind, you looked out over a rich valley called Faradis, or Paradise, so named, Reuven had already told her, by the Crusaders.

  Mother Aaronson reminded her of her Aunt Minna, wife of her mother’s rich brother Kalman; she wore a fine ruffled shirtwaist over a high-boned corset, with an elaborate ritual wig topped by a lace cap, as though she were living in the city. As it happened, her Arab woman had chosen Erev Shabbat to have a baby, Mother Aaronson declared, not as one who complains so much but as one who is patient with the foibles of the simpler folk. The Arab woman had sent up her twelve-year-old daughter, a primitive who had never held a dish in her hand and had already broken a French porcelain bowl. As to her own daughter, Mother Aaronson complained with a touch of pride, her Sara was a modern girl who didn’t even know how to light a fire in the kitchen stove.

  Leah soon saw the daughter—plumpish, a few years younger than herself—as she crossed the yard from the smaller house, eyed her and at once announced that Leah must never go into the cottage—as though Leah had any thought of it—for that house was the laboratorium of her eldest brother Aaron, the famous agronomist, and he was away in the United States of America on an important mission, and above all his books were not to be touched!

  Leah could scarcely feel offended, for the girl babbled on in evident adoration of that brother who even as a young boy had been selected by the Baron’s agent, Jacques Samuelson, and sent to the best academy in France, in Grenoble; he had returned and made important discoveries which soon would be announced to the world. He was now in Chicago where, Leah must know, the most advanced agricultural machinery was made, and Aaron intended to bring back such machinery to Zichron.

  —Fine and good! Leah thought of the chaverim having to decide between a cow and a plow, and of Reuven with his dreams of agricultural experiments, and his self-taught agronomy learned from a book seized here and there, and pored over by candlelight after twelve hours of labor in the fields. And yet she could not feel envious, and even found herself telling this girl that she too had an older brother interested in agronomy—he was recovering just now at Dr. Jaffe’s, a chalutz.

  —Oh, a barefoot, the girl said, but with interest, so that, unable to suppress her matchmaking instincts
, Leah even glanced again at Sara Aaronson—in a year at most she would bloom. “If he is convalescing,” young Sara offered of her own volition, “and is so interested in agronomy, I might lend him some books if he will be careful. Can he read French?”

  “No,” Leah said.

  “Or German or English?” Sara Aaronson’s own brother of course read them all.

  “A little German, but the best is Russian.” All there was in Hebrew he had read, and Yiddish was no longer mentioned.

  “Oh,” Sara said. There were a few works in Russian, but the best were in French. She would see what she could find.

  There was also a younger sister named Rifka, who aroused in Leah a longing for little Eliza, and there was another brother who dashed off on his horse every morning. The father she liked; he went off early to his vineyards and labored there himself side by side with his Arabs.

  In the second week, when the Arab woman returned to the kitchen and Leah saw she was no longer needed, and when Reuven, though discharged from the convalescent home, was advised still to rest in this hill climate, it was Father Aaronson who bethought himself of a place for them, the watchman’s hut in his vineyard.