by Meyer Levin
The year was good, the valley a golden cup of grain, cattle were fat, the mules brayed exuberantly in the fields, the whole Galilee sang.
And the younger girls were learning a dance. It was Leah who devised it; where she got the idea from she did not herself know, but it came to her, a dance of the harvest. First there would be a row of boys in white blouses tied with blue cords, then a row of girls in white gowns with blue sashes. Before them, three men would go forward with their scythes, the first reapers, cutting a square open space in the field, and then in this space the dancers would appear, the rows of boys with a reaping sweep, the upward swing carrying them leaping into the air, and behind them the row of girls first bending with downstretched arms in a gesture of gathering, then raising their arms palms upward, as for an offering. The boys would circle them, and the inner circle of girls would move counterwise to the boys, and in the end boys and girls would skip in high leapings together.
She had found among the Sejera villagers a lad who played the halil in unison with his father who played the accordion; Mama Feigel was sewing costumes, and little Eliza, though younger than all the other girl dancers, had pleaded so much that Leah had placed her among them.
There was to be a real Seder, too, after the harvest ceremony. It was Yankel whom Yud Eichelberg had asked to arrange a Seder for the forty young men and women of the farm training center; godless though they were, the chalutzim and chalutzoth came from good Jewish homes and surely would feel their homelessness at Pesach.
And so Chaver Reb Yankel, as the young people now called him with wry affection, went down with a wagon to Tiberias and brought back matzoth and horseradish and the kosher-for-Passover wine of Zichron and all else that was needed. Meanwhile, busy as she was with her dancers, Leah, with Dvora and a few chalutzoth to help her, transformed the upstairs floor of the caravanserie with olive branches and flowers and barley sheaves. “What have you done here! It’s Pesach, not Succoth!” Yankel objected when he returned, but he let it be.
Stopping in to inspect Dvoraleh’s decorations, Yechezkiel and his friend Menahem decided one more touch was needed, and they brought a scythe and a rifle, fixing them crossed to the wall; the farmer and guardsman together, Yechezkiel explained to Dvora, while Menahem adjusted the rifle in such a way that it could be easily seized if needed.
Below, at home by the Jordan, Gidon had gone out manfully all week in his reaping, taking his bread and a jarra of water, intending to surprise them all when the family came back after Passover to help him in the harvest. For the barley was ready, the first to spring out of this earth since who knew how far back.
The wheat too was nearly ready. He waded into the green mass high as his waist and stripped a handful of stalks, rubbing his palms together and blowing away the chaff as he had seen Reuven do when he went over to the kvutsa. The grains remaining on his palm were small, and it seemed to him they were a bit pulpy. In another part of the field it was not the same, the grains were harder. Was this perhaps the blight that Reuvan had worried about when Tateh had bought the seed in Dja’adi?
On the Sabbath, his brother came over from the kvutsa, marvelling at the extent Gidon had cut, all by himself, in the barley field, and then they waded together in the wheat, taking samples here and there. It was the blight, Reuven was certain, affecting perhaps a tenth of the crop; it was not disastrous, but yet he was angry. No one had listened to him, not Tateh, not even the chevreh at the kvutsa, for Max Wilner had planted the same local seed.
Then, in his sudden way, Reuven crammed a handful of the blighted grains into his pocket and rushed off at a half-run toward the fields of the kvutsa, leaving Gidon standing there.
In their outermost wheatfield, almost bordering on Mishkan Yaacov, Reuven plunged from one corner to the other, taking samples. The grains were everywhere firm and good. From the same seed. In the same soil. What could have happened here? Was it mere chance, a good batch, a bad batch, as old Sheikh Ibrim believed? And then as Reuven stood there puzzling, the one difference came to him. These were the fields that had been plowed with Max Wilner’s new deep-cutting plow.
But why? A different nourishment from the earth?
What was the cause of blight? A germ of some kind, an infection, he had read somewhere. Who would know? If he had a microscope, perhaps he could see; he could compare the grain, the blighted and the whole. Pondering, he made his way back to the yard of the kvutsa.
There was Max, with a few of his faithful, studying pictures of agricultural machines in a booklet Max had received from Chicago, America. One machine had huge whirling blades that reaped the grain while horses drew it across the field. Nahama and her Shimek were excitedly discussing with Max: might not a mechanic be able to build such a machine here from the picture?
In general, Reuven and Max had ended their rift this season, partly because they were among the few “old ones” left from last year’s kvutsa, and partly because with more chalutzim on the place, things were expanding, and Reuven had even been allotted a special plot, and a certain amount of time for his agricultural experiments, so he kept much to himself. Still there were flareups.
“Max,” Reuven said, “we need a microscope.”
“A microscope?” What had got into him now! Did Comrade Reuven have any idea what a microscope cost? There were a thousand other things that were more important! This reaping machine, for instance. For the price of a microscope you could import a reaping machine!
—But if they could find out the cause of blight, Reuven said, in the long run it would pay the price of a dozen reaping machines! And he pulled out the two samples of grain.
“Then ours is good! So what are you worrying about!” Max grinned at him, and several of the younger lads laughed. “What do we need a microscope for?—here we see the results! It’s the deep plowing that did it, you yourself now admit! So you see I was right.”
“Yes, Max, you were right. But why is it? Why does deeper plowing make a difference?”
“Ach, Reuven! When we can build a laboratorium, we’ll put you at the head! Another Aaron Aaronson we have among us.”
To avoid exploding in anger, Reuven went off. But the mention of Aaronson gave him a thought. Perhaps go to Zichron and consult him?
Sitting atop a wagonload of barley sacks to be dropped off on the way at the merchants’ in Tiberias, Reuven, with Gidon too, and a number of the chevreh, set out for Dvoraleh’s wedding and the great doings in Sejera.
Such gladness was in the air, simply that all were arriving, the whole group of the previous day, and this day a flood, a force of workers in the land, and nearly all talking Hebrew! Each greeting held the incredulous—“What, you’re here!”—Here, not only from Petach Tikvah and Chedera and Beer Tuvia in the south, and Metulla in the north, but here really from Vilna in the north and Odessa in the south, from Poland, from Roumania, from God knows where; that was the incredible—to have reached this farmyard in Sejera, despite the dangers of secret meetings in Kishinev behind the baker’s flour sacks, to have come here despite the cell walls of the dungeon in Kiev—Here I am!—Mendeleh, you came!—Yehoshua, you too!—Leah! Rahel!
So busy she had hardly a moment to embrace Rahel as the whole Jerusalem group arrived in the caravanserie yard, “Rahel! you haven’t seen my baby!” Leah cried. No, her mother’s baby naturally! Her new little brother Mati, born here! And over the cradle, amidst Rahel’s cluckings and exclamations, she went on: “You’ll sleep here with us, we’ll find room.”
But where was Avner? Avner was to meet her here, Rahel said, he had been to Constantinople to study the political situation, now that the Young Turks were in power; he would deliver his report at the conclave.
“Ah, what a strong baby!” and their intimacy swept back on them. And now little Dvora was getting married! Not a word was said between them of Moshe; Leah was grateful. She had to hurry back to her dancers, the procession was starting to the fields, the entire village was coming out to watch.
“But, Le
ah, where did you learn this!” Rahel cried when the dance was completed. The steps, the movements, it was as though Leah had witnessed this in the days of King Solomon, Rahel kept repeating. Here before their eyes the true Hebrew culture was being brought back to life. How had Leah come to imagine it so clearly? Had she found pictures—in history books perhaps? “It just came to me,” Leah said happily. “I asked myself how it must have been done in those days, and it came to me.” How pleased everyone was! And little Eliza, so slim, with the grace of a princess!
With the new baby, with the joy here, Leah felt certain now she had found her life again—she did not need Moshe, just as surely as with his shikseh in Siberia he did not need her.
Then Avner arrived, and with him a notable guest. On the way back from Constantinople, in Damascus, Avner had met Ostrov the Landbuyer who was hurrying home for Passover with exciting news. Here in Sejera they were the first to know. Ostrov had at last bought the Fuleh!—a large section of the great plain, Emek Yisroel, the Vale of Israel, long owned by Syrian bankers living in Damascus.
Beaming, still wearing his flowing Arab robes with the broad ornamental belt over his enormous girth, the pasha-like Landbuyer sat in the courtyard among a circle of chalutzim, painting a glowing picture of the fertile fields that would be drained from the bog, of the Jewish villages that would flower on the great plain, the heartland of Palestine.
Dvora’s Yechezkiel and others of the Shomer were aflame with the words. At once, Shabbatai Zeira cried, they should go out and send a plow across the area. Here in the heartland, in Emek Yisroel, the quick-minded Galil proposed, they should establish the Shomer’s own cooperative. And at once they fell to making lists: how many mules, how many cows—while Dvoraleh pleaded, “And an egg incubator from America!”
More and more the yard was crowded with arrivals: Wagonloads came; chaverim from the other side of Tabor could be heard singing “Yahalili”; the wagon from the kvutsa, with Reuven and Gidon, arrived. “Ah, you missed Leah’s dancers,” Rahel cried to Reuven. “Your sister found the authentic movements from the past, exactly as I saw in the library in St. Petersburg in pictures of excavations!”
He too had found something from the far past, Reuven wanted to tell Rahel, for he had brought with him the curious wheat grains from below the caves. But being near her brought back his shyness on him. Meanwhile, little Eliza—in her costume and with her hair in ringlets, he had not at first glance even recognized his own sister—was insisting she would dance the whole dance over for them. While she ran off to fetch the boy who played the halil, Reuven hurried to Yud Eichelberg’s office, where there was a shelf of agricultural works.
It was not only the blighted grain he wanted to look up; he recalled that when he had been convalescing in Zichron, the Aaronson girl, Sara, had brought him her brother’s French encyclopedia of plants, and there—it stood perfectly before his eyes now—he had seen a drawing of ancient wheat stalks as they were found in an Egyptian tomb: “The mother of wheat.” Luckily, here on Eichelberg’s shelf, he found a copy of the same encyclopedia and turned to the drawing, but what the French text said, he was not certain.
Leah came and dragged him out—Eliza was ready to repeat the dance for him and Rahel. “Already he has his nose in a book!” She pulled him into the yard, book in hand. The boy began on his halil, and Eliza in her long white gown swooped like a gleaner. Meanwhile Reuven, finding he stood next to Rahel, showed her the page—didn’t she read French?
“Reuven, not now!” she said, but after they had applauded Eliza, she translated a few lines for him. “ ‘An ancient type of wheat shown on ritual sculptures in Eygpt, also in Greece and Persia, indicating a common origin from some original wild plant, the mother of wheat, as yet undiscovered.’ Oy, Reuven, why all this now?” she said.
“Then to find this mother of wheat would be important? a discovery?” Reuven mumbled, and brought out in half-trembling hands the dry grains from his pocket. Rahel glanced down and then burst into a laugh. “Ay, Reuven!” Didn’t he know that Aaron Aaronson had already made this discovery, four years ago, on the slopes of Mount Hermon? Didn’t he know even that? And she turned back with more praise for his little sister Eliza.
At least, within his shock of disappointment, Reuven felt free of his dream of Rahel.
Only Leah had caught his humiliation. After all, without any knowledge of Aaronson’s work, Reuven had found the ancient wheat himself, she was reminding Rahel; but he didn’t want her to say this, he ran off, and in any case, just then came a commotion.
Half-stumbling into the compound, gasping, his shirt in tatters, there appeared a bald, short man, Pechter the photographer; coming from Haifa to record the historic farmworkers’ meeting and also the double wedding, he had been waylaid. His puffy face smeared in dust and sweat, his high-pitched voice hardly understandable, Pechter gabbled out his story backwards, as though everyone must already know what had befallen him. From the bushes—his valuable apparatus and the donkey—his coat and money torn away—he was sure he had shot one of them—in his shirt he always carried a pistol …
At last Galil made a coherent story of it. Pechter had come on the train from Haifa to the stop at Fuleh. There he had hired a donkey and loaded his apparatus on it. Halfway to Sejera, assailants had attacked him, ripped off his coat, knocked him to the ground. They had made off with the animal, the photographic apparatus, everything! But he had fired his revolver, he believed one had fallen and been dragged away by the others—
“One fell? You are sure?”
He had seen him dragged away.
“How many were there?”
Three, perhaps four, they had all assailed him—
Mounted?
Mounted, mounted. The bandits had surely followed him from Fuleh.
—The one who had fallen—could he be dead?
Pechter gulped down water.
—Had the fallen one moved by himself, or had they carried him?
Pechter could not tell. He had been beaten, robbed, blood was in his eyes—
Zev the Hotblood was already mounted, shouting that once and for all they must finish with the marauders of Fuleh. It was surely the same two bandit brothers, there—
“But he says there were more,” Galil pointed out, “and those two always go alone.”
Never mind how many! A raid, and finish with the whole rotten village.
“Zev, get down,” Galil ordered. Startled, Zev looked around, as though everyone should cry out.
“I’ll go myself,” Galil said, and as this was no longer a rebuke, the Hotblood dismounted. Just then Menahem, having completed a patrol of the fields where the first grain lay cut, rode up to the gate; Galil motioned and they galloped off together.
Pechter, proud of knowing every byway in the land, had taken a donkey path instead of the wagon road. Menahem and Galil followed it, high along the slope. An extraordinary quiet lay over the valley. At this time of day a few fellaheen could usually be seen in the fields below, or a woman or two passing with a headload of brambles for firewood. But today everything below them lay vacant as on the day of creation, and the air was still.
Every Arab had vanished.
There was not one who sat at the long plank tables, even to the young Schmulik, who did not feel that on this night in this place the Pesach was as it must have been the very first time. Listening, the way the Hebrews had listened for the pursuing Egyptians. The men’s ears were strained for the sounds of attackers, or, on the favorable side, of Galil and Menahem returning.
At each neighing—was it only from animals already tethered in the yard?—Zev the Hotblood and young Aaron Zeira started up, only to sit back slowly as Shabbatai Zeira and Avner unmoving remained in their places. Dvora’s Yechezkiel was rigid; he had kept a seat beside him on the bench for Menahem. On his other side, Dvora whispered to Leah, “He is listening more for hoof beats than to the Haggadah.”
It was Yankel Chaimovitch who intoned the Passover Haggadah, sitting ent
hroned at the head table, against a velvet-covered pillow that Feigel had brought along. On one side of him sat Yud Eichelberg, and on the other side the guest, Yehoshua Ostrov, appearing in his splendid robe like Elijah himself, come from heaven a little early—before the moment in the Seder when the door is opened for the Prophet. Avner and Rahel too sat at the head table, and Nadina, with an open place beside her for Galil.
Turning to the guest, Reb Yankel with fine dignity offered him the saying of the holiday blessing. Ostrov, who sat against a vast embroidered goose-feather pillow supplied by Chaye-Pesya, which seemed to increase even his imposing girth, now raised the Kiddush cup and sang the blessing like a veritable cantor. The whole room was affected. A deep quietude fell, then Yankel raised aloft the matzoh plate and recited the Aramaic words. By their very closeness to, yet difference from, Hebrew the words made everyone feel carried back to an archaic timelessness.
“This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in Egypt. All who are hungry, come and eat—”
The words were of today. To have arrived here after walking all the way from Jaffa with only a few olives and dry pittah in the shoulder-bag, to have arrived here amongst the chevreh with their kitchen open—come and eat!
Now Schmuel was embarked on the Four Questions, but as he began to singsong the words in the dutiful rapid way he had recited them in previous years at home, he suddenly heard these words in their meaning, and spoke more slowly. From the long table of chalutzim and chalutzoth, a tense awareness reached to Schmulik. This was no longer a rigmarole like in Cherezinka, where he had once had to do it in the house of his rich uncle; now Schmulik heard himself asking: what makes this night different from all other nights, and halted as though expecting to be given a new real answer, here in Sejera. Then he recited the rest, about the bitter herbs, and the dipping of the greens, and the sitting and leaning, and the singsong came back into his voice, and his father embarked on the readings.
