by Meyer Levin
Then, still beaming, Dr. Lubin placed his hand on each smaller child’s head in turn. “Altogether how many sons and daughters? Seven, eight?”
“Nine,” Dvoraleh whispered to Leah, having divined her mother’s condition, and Leah, even in this tumultuous moment, oddly felt a kind of jealousy—the same jealousy she had felt when she heard that Saraleh was pregnant.
—Not every day did such a family arrive! the official went on. For such a family special efforts should and would be made!
And even before Yankel could put in a word, things had been arranged as Reuven wanted; they would leave with the first wagon, tomorrow, for the Galilee, for the new settlement being built by the Jordan.
The official scribbled a few words on a bit of paper, a folded note—a pitkah—the whole country, Reuven smiled as he put it in his pocket, was being built by pitkah. And still with a thousand questions to ask—What about a shul? What of a cheder for the boys?—Yankel found himself moved benignly out of the office without the German’s even pronouncing a blessing for the journey.
There were two wagons going with supplies to the Galilee; in one of the wagons, implements and tins of kerosene and even, underneath all this—Reuven caught sight of it—Max Wilner’s huge iron plow from Germany, marked for the kvutsa. That stubborn Max with his deep-plowing obsession! Reuven was so furious he could have thrown it off the wagon, but Leah calmed him; the chevreh had after all voted on it. A waste! he fumed all the more angrily because he was curious as to what the results would be. They didn’t even have the animals to pull it! A steam pump was far more necessary!
The other wagon was entirely for the family, laden with the large trunk from the port, and all their bundles. Young Gidon sat up with the driver, the pockmarked Kalman the drayman, wearing his old Russian cap, the kind Reuven had bought for Tateh. Already Gidon assessed the mules correctly, remarking that the right pulled more strongly. And Kalman promised to let him try the reins along the way.
So they rode out. How would they manage to live until crops came, Yankel worried. The loan that had been mentioned in the Zionist office would hardly be enough for many months, but Reuven had at once agreed to it, before Yankel could put in a word.
Meanwhile the children were excited beyond measure by Leah’s description of the Sea of Kinnereth with fishing boats and with flocks of wild geese coming down to sit on the water. Shaindeleh—Reuven and Leah had already changed her name to Yaffaleh—wanted to know whether they could raise white geese on their farm, and Schmuel wanted to know the size of the fish caught in the lake.
And Jerusalem? Was a Jew, Yankel muttered to Feigel, not even going to see Yerushalayim? Not even going to utter a prayer at the Wall? Jews journeyed all the way to Eretz only to shed a tear before the Wall, and here, having come this far at such great cost and with such hardship, to what wilderness was his unbeliever of a son dragging him without even a sight of Yerushalayim?
“It’s only another ghetto full of beggars,” Reuven responded. “And Yerushalayim won’t run away, it has stood there for some time.”
“We’ll go, we’ll go to Yerushalayim, but better first to get settled so we can go with a peaceful mind,” Feigel calmed Yankel. And counting in his mind the money it would have cost to take the whole family first to Jerusalem—and truly what did it mean to his children, atheists the lot of them—Yankel subsided. He would make his own voyage, he promised himself; perhaps he would take Gidon if Reuven meanwhile didn’t succeed in making an atheist out of him as well.
Beyond Petach Tikvah there was only a narrow, lonely wagon road. When, after stretches of wilderness, of high briars and weeds, they passed an Arab village with bits of cultivation around it, and saw a few women walking with jars on their heads like Rebecca in the Bible, all the girls excitedly asked Leah if she had learned to do it. “It makes you graceful,” Dvoraleh cried and, before anyone knew what was happening, she had jumped off the wagon and was walking along trying to balance a teapot on her head.
Yankel frowned, and Feigel said “Stop your foolishness,” while Leah began to lecture them all on the dreadful backward state of Arab womanhood. It was nothing to laugh at, she told Dvoraleh and little Eliza; a woman was a mere chattel, a slave. A girl of ten could be sold by her father to a toothless old man of sixty. Some Arabs owned two or three wives and made them do all the work in the fields, while the Arab himself sat in a cafe smoking his narghileh.
For long stretches they saw no one. Then out of the emptiness there appeared two horsemen, thundering alongside, daggers in their belts. The girls huddled together, but Leah and Reuven cheerily called out an Arab word, Marhaba, while Kalman the drayman even held a conversation with the two. One of the riders stooped down, received a cigarette, and said something to Yankel laughingly, before they thundered off.
“What was he laughing at?” Yankel demanded. “What did he say?”
“The weather is good, the rains will come soon if it please Allah.”
“Then why was he laughing at me?”
“Oh, he said you are a rich man, you have so many girls.”
“A rich man! With four dowries to pay!”
“With them it is the other way around,” explained Kalman. “A daughter is a good investment. A pretty one is worth ten camels.”
And so the sun shone on them. Reuven pointed out wild bushes that he said were the castor plant from which castor oil could be made; the children made faces because he said the plant grew everywhere and perhaps it could be useful. Experiments should be made. Then he pointed out places with Biblical names, and Yankel was nevertheless pleased that despite his godlessness his son spoke so much of the Bible. How then could he be an atheist?
Then the wagons halted while Feigel spread their meal and they shelled and salted their eggs. Even Yankel was in good humor.
Before they reached Chedera, at dusk, a somber weariness had come over them all. Feigel, with their youngest, Avramchick, asleep sprawled across her lap, felt that the weight of the child somehow protected the new one unborn within her from the jolting of the wagon. No, she would not lose this one, he would cling to her womb waiting to be born in Eretz Yisroel.
A silence had fallen. Where, how much further, would they be going? How did people live, alone so far away in this emptiness, a whole day’s distance from other Jews?
One room in the khan was for women, and there a few cots could be had for the girls; Gidon and Schmulik declared they would sleep on the ground in an open shed in the yard with Reuven and some chalutzim gathered there.
Halfway into the night, the barefoots, as Feigel had learned they were called, were still chanting their songs in the yard, Leah and Dvoraleh among them. The same songs as on the ship:
Who will build Galilee?
We will build Galilee!
We! We!
Perhaps, Feigel hoped, Leah would dance out of herself whatever was troubling her.
Then, going to the outhouse, Feigel passed a tiny room without even a door; here too, as in the lodging in Jaffa, a young man lay ill on a pallet. As she passed, a sound came from him. She went in. Even in the dark she could see the water jug near his pallet, but he was too weak to reach it. Feigel held the jug to his lips, and he babbled, “Thank you, Mama.”
“What is your name, my son, where are you from?” she said, brushing the damp hair from his forehead and putting her hand there. How it burned!
“Mati, from Grodno,” he managed.
Matityahu, the name she had been thinking of, the name of her father’s father. From the sunken eyes a dark flicker seemed to float out toward her, and Feigel had to exorcise what came to her mind. Nay, she had already chosen this name in memory of her grandfather. “Live,” she said, “live and be well.” Let it not be drawn from this boy.
When they emerged from the valley to the opening onto the great plain, Reuven told the boys this was where Saul and Jonathan fell to the Philistines, and when they crossed the plain he told of the Ten Tribes taken away; in the afternoon, the
wagons rounded the bend at the foot of Mount Tabor, and Leah told Dvora of her namesake, the prophetess who had preached on this hill. As they neared the village of Mescha, also called Tabor, Leah began to call to everyone they passed—everyone knew her. Yankel saw there were householders no younger than himself coming from the fields with implements over their shoulders. Perhaps his son had not misled him after all.
At the gate of the village, housewives, children, the whole town gathered around the two wagons; what news in Jaffa? The drivers handed out packages—a roll of oilcloth for one woman, spices for another. For this one, Kalman the drayman remembered a message, for that one he had brought a pitkah. More men were arriving from the fields, some astride their mules, one with his little girl, the age of Shaindel-Yaffaleh, who had run out a distance to greet him, sitting delightedly before him on his large Belgian farmhorse.
There, pumping water into a trough, Leah caught sight of Dovidl. He was wearing high boots far too large for him, and even a bandolier—Dovidl a shomer! Something about him always gave her the impulse to laugh, though one couldn’t laugh at Dovidl, he was too clever. She ran toward her good friend—had he heard anything of Moshe?
“How would I have heard anything you haven’t heard of Moshe,” he asked, “when you are just coming from Jaffa?”
Still, if something had happened and no one else would tell her—?
Solemnly, Dovidl shook his head. There were no secrets from her among the chaverim.
“My whole family has come!” Leah cried. “To settle!”
He beamed. Then sighed. “Leah, they have called me to Jerusalem.”
“To Jerusalem?”
“Yes,” Dovidl declared resignedly. Avner was overworked. He needed help with the new journal, Unity.
“But that will be wonderful!” Leah cried. “Someone like you is needed more there than here.”
Dovidl sighed again as though he saw his true life flowing away, the good life of the fields, of productiveness and gratification. “You really think I should go?”
Just then a young woman hurried toward them calling, “Dovidl, the boots!” It was Bracha, the wife of Shabbatai Zeira, the Kurdish watchman. While pulling off the Shomer’s only pair of boots, Dovidl continued his speculations: could he really be of more use in the headquarters than on the land? Must he enter a life of organizational work and politics? “You know, Leah, the Shomer is making progress, we already have two horses,” he said, handing the boots to Bracha. Unlike the boots, he said, a shomer’s horse could not be used both day and night, so for the night-watch they had borrowed money and bought a second steed. And in a moment the boots appeared on Zeira as the dark Cossack figure rode out, erect and fierce.
Gidon was staring, mouth agape, at the mounted shomer, and Dvoraleh too could not take her eyes from the horsemar.
“Then if the riders need the boots day and night, perhaps you should leave them here and go to Jerusalem,” Leah said to Dovidl. He always made her feel brighter.
“Nu, Leah, perhaps you have just settled my whole life,” Dovidl laughed.
Over the last part of the way, Zeira warned, the wagons must stay together, and he would ride with them until beyond Kfar Kana. Last week even Dr. Rachman had been waylaid on the road to Sejera, and his horse had been seized from under him.
“No!” But Dr. Rachman was known in every Arab village, he always went when they called him, even across the Jordan!
The mukhtar, the mayor, of Kfar Kana himself had brought back the horse when he learned from Galil of the affair, Zeira related. Half the children of that village owed their eyesight to old Rachman. Still, the glimpse of a good horse made the bandits forget themselves. They would seize the steed of the Messiah himself!
The village was passed without incident; in midafternoon the wagon mounted the last ridge of Mount Yavniel, and Reuven felt the old exaltation rising up in him. “Look!” he cried as the lake was revealed below them, his Kinnereth, his shining bride, as beautiful as the first time his eyes had beheld her. “See how it is shaped like a harp,” he repeated to the young ones. “From that, it gets its name.”
Leah saw how her brother’s eyes were glittering. She began to sing, and though Reuven rarely sang except when he stomped the hora, now he joined her. The younger children picked up the tune “Yahalili” and, as the wagons creaked downward, even Yankel hummed in his beard.
This, all of them understood, even to little Schmulik, was a moment of joy and unity they might not reach again in their entire lives, a moment each must cherish forever. Indeed even two-year-old Avramchick sensed everyone’s joy and began jumping restlessly on Feigel’s knee.
Catching their excitement, Kalman the drayman looked back on them, smiling, on Eliza the beautiful little girl, on Dvora with her breasts already high, on Yaffaleh, on Schmuel, on Avramchick, on Big Leah the chalutza.
Deep into her soul Mama Feigel breathed this moment, telling her son yet to be born that she had carried him from Cherezinka to Eretz Yisroel, to his destined birthplace here beside the lake of song, the harp-shaped Kinnereth.
But was this all? The wagons halted in a yard before a small old khan of black stones—was this the vaunted kvutsa of Leah and Reuven? And not a soul to meet the wagons, Kalman grumbled, after plaguing him to haul the big iron plow! Had they all been butchered? Were they all dead in there?
Leah had already hurried inside. Max Wilner lay with his face to the wall; he did not even turn. On another pallet lay a chaver she had never before seen, the lad who must have wandered in during the last few days; he too was in fever. Then Max muttered, “Shimek went for help.”
“I’ve brought your German plow,” Kalman announced. “I’ve got to get on while there’s light.”
At the mention of the plow, the shivering Max sat up. “Can you,” and somewhat shamefacedly he included Reuven who was in the doorway, “Can you bring it in here? It will be safer.”
It was so that Max could lie there gazing at it, Reuven knew. The hardhead! The stiff-neck!—As stiff-necked as I am, Reuven thought, and went out to the wagon. With Gidon and the driver Kalman, he dragged the clumsy iron structure through the doorway. “Yallah! Behold thy beloved!” He forgave Max, though it still rankled that Max had used his own vote. Yet, for planting bananas, deep plowing might show results.
“I’ll make tea,” Leah said. She would have to remain here with the sick chaverim. The family could continue on to the new settlement; it was less than an hour away, Kalman said, if the ford across the twist in the Jordan was not too high just now.
“When did Shimek go?” Leah asked. They should have encountered him on their way from Yavniel.
“This morning, to Sejera,” Max replied.
“Sejera?”
“He’s coming back with a whole new kvutsa. Seven fellows from the training farm.”
“A new kvutsa?” Reuven stared at him.
“What else was there to do? Call in Arab workers? Give up the place? Desert?”
“But—for such a decision—”
“Moshe goes off! Araleh and Saraleh leave! You and Leah are away for months at a time!” In feverish anger all Max’s old resentments poured out.
Bleakly, Reuven felt, was it still his place? His kvutsa? Where he had dreamed of a Garden of Eden for his comrades? After all that their group had gone through here, and after the first crop and their triumph together—to give the place over to a whole new group of strangers?
From the wagon his father called testily that night would catch them on the way. “I must stay here with them,” Leah repeated, her eyes telling her brother she understood all he felt, but that he must not yet decide.
Reuven went out and mounted the wagon.
Beyond the kvutsa there was scarcely a set of ruts. Desolation, rock-strewn soil reaching as far back as the high ridge they had crossed. On the opposite side of the Jordan, the late afternoon sun began to color the sheer wall of rock in its purplish red; beyond, up there, lay the plain of Golan. With each day’s
passing, Reuven had been in the habit of gazing across on this glowing rock wall, in never-failing awe at the beauty of creation. But on this day the cliff seemed harsh, oppressive; all earth was estrangement. All the elation of the family’s first view of the valley from the Yavniel heights had departed, except in the boys; the parents’ apprehension and anxiety had returned.
“Caves!” Gidon cried out, pointing up the Yavniel ridge, and little Schmulik demanded to know who had lived there. The fighters of Bar Kochba?
“Christian monks once lived in them,” Reuven answered distractedly. “Around this sea their religion began.” Even this remark heightened the tension in the wagon. His father’s face grew livid. Was this the moment for Reuven to discourse about them!
But at last the wagon rumbled onto a bypath: in a moment they would reach the new settlement, their home.
On a flat area halfway up the hillside the wagons halted. A few men in long saffron robes, Sephardim they must be, sat on the ground, tapping on blocks of black stone. There was a wooden cabin, such as one saw on construction sites, and a shed for work-animals. But where were the houses, the barns of the settlers?
From the cabin the overseer emerged, in riding breeches and clean boots—Kramer again! He glanced at the wagons, at Reuven. “There are no trees planted here as yet for you to pull out,” he remarked, but without hostility.
Reuven cursed himself for not having come before to inspect the site. But when could he have done it, sick as he was, and with only four men left in the kvutsa? And he had not even known Dr. Lubin would really send them here. Reuven handed Kramer the note from the Jaffa office.
“I’m sending you the Chaimovitch family,” Kramer read out aloud. And then he gazed at the wagonload of immigrants. “What family? Who family? Are they out of their heads there in Jaffa?”
