by Meyer Levin
Through the long passages, Yankel felt an inattentiveness. From the back tables some were slipping out into the yard. The recitation of the Haggadah became like a separate matter for himself alone and for Ostrov, with Eichelberg also picking up a line here and there.
Didn’t these godless fools understand that every word of the long recitation was as sanctified as the vows in Aramaic that had moved them at the beginning? Why could they not see that they were desecrating the very past that drew them here? One day, because of their failings, everything that was good in what they were doing in this land might be cursed and destroyed. And suddenly Yankel heard the crucial words on his lips.
“Therefore let each man look upon himself as though he, in his own person, went forth out of Egypt—”
The words came hurtling out of the night of the past like the shots they had been expecting from the dark fields. Reuven, Dovidl, each chaver, had been hearing the long, life-long familiar recitation in the back of his mind, some of them following the rabbinical passages, some not; then in this moment each, as though wrenched out of slavery to assume the burden of a freeman’s life, was struck with the words. First, a few arose from their benches, then others stood up—was it an old custom returning or a demand that had come from within? But all were standing, and thus they drank the second cup, each man as though “in his own person going forth.”
Leah hurried to the kitchen to help serve the feast; it was a chance to ask for news, but nothing had been heard, not a cry, not a shot, all was peaceful. Galil was no hothead, nothing would have happened to him, he was surely inquiring cautiously whether the Arab had died. Perhaps he had even ridden to the convent in Kfar Kana to which Arabs sometimes brought their wounded.
From the hall came Yankel’s reading:
“These were the plagues that the Almighty our Lord brought down upon them—”
A number of voices joined in the enumeration of the plagues—Frogs, Lice, Locusts—but Rahel and others did not move their lips, and with each horror, voices fell away.
Yankel continued. As he named each plague, he dipped his finger in his wine and flecked off a drop onto the floor. They need not think, these chalutzim, that the older generations had no pity. From far back this sign had been ordained, to spill the wine of rejoicing. Yet the plagues had been the way of the Above One to free His people.
Reuven, Yankel saw, was silent, and Gidon’s lips had ceased moving. How could his own sons, how could any Jewish son, fail to understand? The plagues were God’s punishment; let God’s punishment fall on all who had tormented, murdered, enslaved and brutalized the Jews since that dread time in Egypt. Behind his own lips, Yankel added the names of all those tormentors, Czar Alexander and his minister Plehve who had ordered the pogroms, the Christians and their popes, with the burnings and tortures they had inflicted on the Jews, the wild Bedouin and the thieves and marauders who waylaid you on the highways, all, all, let God’s rage fall on them!
“Darkness!” he pronounced, his voice sounding loud and alone except for half-murmurs among the guests, and an echo from Ostrov and Yud Eichelberg. Let God sink every enemy in blackness as He did the Egyptians! And then Yankel’s lips came to the final plague, the slaying of the first-born. His own tongue hesitated.
What father could utter this in hatred?—Pity us all, forgive, have pity, a far-distant voice within him seemed to be calling, as though an Abraham sat within the soul of every Jew calling to God in unceasing bewilderment, as at the command for the sacrifice of Isaac. Yankel moved away his eyes from Reuven—not you, not you, was ever meant, despite all our angers.
But all that the Almighty in His justice deemed necessary was necessary.
Still, far back, even in the age of the great sages in Eretz Yisroel, there had been Rabbi Judah who surely must have felt the same hesitation to repeat the ten horrors, for he had solved the command to recall them by using instead only the initial letter of each word. Yankel intoned the awful words of the final dread affliction, and then read out the acrostic of Rabbi Judah, Detsach Ab’ash B’Ahab. In this, more voices joined.
It was during the call to open the door for Elijah, though the door had in fact remained open throughout, that the hooves were heard. Hurrying in, Galil went straight up to Avner and Yehoshua Ostrov, and the three of them put their heads together. Menahem waited by the door among a cluster of chalutzim. But all around the tables the men and women already understood the news; the marauder had died.
From one to another the dread word was dropped. The ghoum. The blood feud. Now it must come. Who could tell on whom it would fall? Somewhere in a field, on a road, a Jew would be shot down. Around Pechter the photographer, who had seemed more upset over the loss of his apparatus and at not being able to take the historic pictures he had come for, than over his shooting affray, a dead silence now formed. He cried out, “What did I do? I only defended myself!” but no one turned to him. Didn’t they all know that he, more than anyone else, might fall to the avengers? That as soon as he left this place he might be hunted down? In the silence toward him, it was as though he already were no longer here in this world.
Among the women too a strangeness had fallen, as though they could no longer speak to one another. In each woman, the soul shrank from the forbidden wish that some other man, not hers, might fall, if one must fall.
Unheard, Yankel read the closing lines before the feasting. Only once did there come a response. When he came to the cry, “Pour out the heat of your anger upon the goyim who do not heed your ways!” the voice of Zev the Hotblood rose shouting, “Destroy them!”
After the third cup, there were no voices starting up in song, nor did the children merrily hunt the Afikomen. In the place of Elijah who would one day bring Messiah, evil news had been brought, and for these godless chalutzim, it could only appear as further proof that all creation was devoid of justice, that there was no Above One looking on. Just so, in the old country, the unbelievers had cried out, “An end! See what it brings us!” when, for the devotion of Pesach, the Jews were visited with the accusation of blood in the matzoh. There was the Kishinev libel that had led to the terrible pogrom. And from his youthtime Yankel remembered a tale of a terrible blood accusation from a priest against the leading Jews of Damascus; the whole world had cried out over it. Several had died or gone mad in prison. And the cynical “enlightened” unbelievers had sneered, Where is your God to reward you thus for your devotion?
Ignorant and blind the “enlightened” had been, just as tonight they were ignorant and blind. Precisely because a catastrophe was caused to happen during the Pesach—was that not proof that God was there, that the transgression of the unbelievers was intolerable? For when else should He give His sign, that His people should know His anger?
What then was today’s transgression? Was it something beyond the falling away of this whole generation? Was it not God’s anger that they had had the chutzpah to bring their godlessness even here to Eretz HaKodesh? And was the Above One not telling them that therefore He would not accept their Pesach?
But with whom among the chalutzim could he even talk of these things? Yankel would rather have been sitting at a table with some family in the village than here with his own unbelieving sons and their comrades. The Landbuyer, Yehoshua Ostrov, had sung a beautiful Kiddush, it was true, but now he was so busily conferring with the rest of them—who knew if he would even raise his cup to call out, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
By Arab tribal custom, Ostrov pointed out to Galil, what had happened did not inexorably demand a blood vengeance. It had been a death in a fight, and since it had happened in the course of a highway robbery which even the Turks were sometimes wont to punish, he believed an intervention from one of the Arab notables might arrange things. Still, as Galil knew, a peace payment would have to be made.
“The death is unfortunate, and we may even have to make such a concession to their ways,” Galil said, “but the highway robbery is something else. This we cannot allow to go by. We h
ave to live here.” He proposed that a notable be found to act as an intermediary and that a peace payment be agreed to over the accidental killing, but only on condition that the marauders be turned over to the Turkish police and their robbery dealt with by law. “Even if they only lock them up for a few months, it will make clear that the Shomer will not let such attacks go by.”
It seemed a possible plan by which the Shomer might avoid a blood feud and yet emerge from a bad situation with respect, and it was a stroke of good fortune that the Landbuyer, who was on good terms with every notable in Nazareth, should be present. Early in the morning, Yehoshua Ostrov and Galil would set out. They raised their glasses for the last cup.
“Next Year in Jerusalem” rang out firmly then, by all in unison, with solemnity.
Carrying her armload of plates into the kitchen, Leah found Rahel and Nadina leaning, each on the sill of a rear window, peering into the dark. Each held a large revolver, resting it on the sill. And Nadina was talking of a resolution to be placed on the agenda for tomorrow: women as well as men must be accepted as active members into the Shomer because—
She broke off. Was there a movement out there in the dark? A small distance away was the cemetery of Sejera, with a dozen or more gravestones, deaths mostly from kadahat. Behind the headstones, whose rounded tops could barely be made out, attackers could lurk, slipping from one stone to another as they came closer. They could fire and flee amongst the stones.
From the kitchen doorway a cry broke in on the girls. It was Avner. “What are you doing here? You could be shot at from the cemetery!”
“Exactly,” Nadina said in her caustic tone. “And as you left the windows unguarded, we are here.”
That year Chaye-Pesya’s husband, Mottel the carpenter and mohel, had at long last fulfilled his dream and planted a field of grain. On the holiday Mottel could not resist strolling out to see his crop. Yechezkiel, on an early round, rode past him, and Mottel chattered, “I wasted my life breathing sawdust! Enough, enough! Now I’ll become a man of the soil!” Chortling, Yechezkiel rode on.
At the far end of the fields he noticed something odd. On a small heap of stones such as marked the border of a field something fluttered—a white keffiyah it seemed. As he neared, he saw it was so; the top stone held the cloth from blowing away. What did this mean? It made Yechezkiel uneasy; he swooped low, snatched up the keffiyah, and hurriedly completed his rounds.
At a high point stood an oak where Menahem was to meet him. His friend’s face darkened. “It’s their sign!” Somehow Menahem already knew such things; this was the mark of the ghoum.
Yechezkiel, youngest member of the Shomer, stared at the keffiyah lying so lightly on his palm, as though he too ought to be able to read its message. “Stay out of sight, be careful.” Menahem took the headcloth; he was already galloping back to the compound.
From all but the forward table, the feasting boards had been dismounted, the benches were swung over to make rows, and the front table was now the presidium. There Avner stood, ready to make his report on Constantinople, while Dovidl rose up for a moment beside him, calling earnestly to the chaverim who were chattering in the aisles to take their places, as much had to be accomplished this morning. The sight of the two of them standing together, the diminutive Dovidl and Avner the “langotch,” always drove Leah to mirth, and, despite the general tension, this rose in her, but Dovidl, catching her expression, gave her a stern look. He was wearing a broad, low-slung revolver-belt that could be seen under the table hanging almost to his knees, with a pistol-handle protruding from the holster.
At last the chalutzim were attentive as Avner in his low even voice read his report like a classroom dissertation. Nadina, wearing her pince-nez and taking secretarial notes, often requested him to repeat a statistic.
There was in Constantinople no significant labor or socialist movement to which they could look for understanding or support. It was an error to look on the Young Turks’ revolt as a people’s revolution. It was a movement basically imbedded in national pride, and the triumvirate of leaders, though determined to introduce modernization, had no socialist background or leaning. Since they were intensely Ottoman in their outlook, they were not likely to support or even to tolerate a movement of Hebrew awakening, even in this small part of their empire. He feared the tendency would go in the opposite direction—toward a stress on Ottoman culture, even outside of Turkey proper. However, the basic democratic framework of a parliament existed, and perhaps, because of the vast illiteracy and backwardness of the odd assortment of peoples and tribes that made up the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Persians, the Ethiopians, the Syrians and assorted Arab tribes even as far as Yemen, it was possible that a highly developed sector such as their own, even though a tiny minority, might gain a strong progressive influence.
“The fate of our movement here in the foreseeable future is bound up with the Turkish regime. We are part of the Ottoman Empire, with all its illness and corruption. We must work within that framework.”
What did this mean, then? It meant political work in addition to their pioneering. It meant making an effort to elect as members of the Turkish parliament at least one or two of their own labor party delegates, who could then strive within that parliament for a general broadening of democratic methods that would help every group in the Ottoman Empire, Jews included. It might be possible to make alliances with parliamentary delegates from some of the more developed communities, such as the Armenians. If their party could secure even one representative in parliament, perhaps from the Sanjak of Jerusalem, where Jews, if you counted the religious body, were after all the majority, then their representative could work to begin with for liberalization of the immigration laws. They might also succeed in altering the absurd restrictions on the building of houses. All this was a long slow way around, but it was the only way in sight.
And to do this, Avner went on, even to embark on the long way around, required certain preparations. “Who among us in our own movement can read and write freely in Turkish? What do we know of Turkish customs and of Ottoman law?”
The idea came as a shock. The chaverim looked one to another. This, too? A new load to be borne? Yet Avner carried on his exposition, and it seemed incontrovertible. They must move their eyes from Europe to the Levant. They must turn from European culture and absorb Ottoman culture before they could hope to introduce European ideas. They must start at the very beginning, literally to learn the ABC’s of the Turkish alphabet. While some of the older communities here, the Sephardim particularly, had cultivated a knowledge of Turkish, the leadership of those groups could hardly be counted on to further the socialist workers’ movement. Therefore competent chaverim must be detached from their labors here, and sent for one or two years to Constantinople to study intensely and to prepare to enter politics. Only then could a real beginning be made. Only then could they hope to cease depending on the fragile system of bribes and connivances, on connections and influence with petty government officials and with notables, a system not only abhorrent and immoral, but also precarious in the extreme. Only through entering politics and pressing forward on the democratic front could they broaden their base, and build the Yishuv as of right, rather than through quixotic spurts of tolerance from one kaymakam or another.
At each point Reuven nodded his head in agreement, and Leah sat erect, feeling awakened, feeling brought back from her wanderings in personal, selfish problems, love problems and the desires of her body. She felt recalled to the task, now looming greater than ever before. Under the Sublime Porte one had seen no opportunity for change; now with the Young Turks one could see an opportunity. It was as though all of the chaverim listening to Avner here were like the Jews come out of Egypt, free of the Pharaoh, listening to a Moshe, to Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher—and momentarily the name did not awaken a pang in her—telling them what they must do along the hard but yet hopeful course that lay before them.
A gaunt, complaining woman, yet o
ne who always made them laugh with her unabashed frankness, Bracha Zeira, wife of Shabbatai, was holding forth in the kitchen on the sorrows of being the spouse of a shomer. As always, no matter where one encountered her, her babies hung about Bracha, dangling from her breast, or tucked under an arm, or hanging onto her skirt, while she went ferociously about her tasks.
Now Dvora felt herself included in the wives’ talk as though she were already married; some of the remarks addressed to the whole kitchen even seemed directed at her.
—To be the wife of a shomer, Bracha grumbled—a great honor and distinction indeed! In Mescha, now called Tabor, where her Shabbatai had been assigned after Zev the Hotblood was moved to Yavniel, the farmers provided you with a hut attached to the stable, large enough to serve as a privy and smelling the same, and in their generosity—for who could feed a family on a shomer’s wage?—they brought you a few turnips and cabbages that even a Christian Arab would feed only to his pigs. But since these fine Yehudim in Tabor didn’t have pigs, they gave their garbage to the watchmen! “As for your man,” she grumbled on, “at night he rides the rounds, so what use is he to you! You might as well take a cucumber to bed!”
A shocked hoot arose from the chaveroth, while Bracha gazed pityingly at Dvoraleh who was washing cucumbers at that moment and held a large specimen in her hand.
“From cucumbers you got all those babies, Bracha?” one of the women cried out, and the hoots turned to shrieks. Dvora was grateful that their attention had been diverted from herself; her hands were burning so from embarrassment that she held them in the dishpan to cool them. In these last days, she felt a ripeness as though she were indeed a plant; her insides ached and cried out for the swollen male part of Yechezkiel, and indeed Bracha must have understood what was taking place in her, and have spoken not in offense but in a kind of sympathy. No matter where or how they lived, whatever time of night or dawn her Yechezkiel returned, she would be stirring, waiting for him.
