by Meyer Levin
Not only did she plant early-ripening tomatoes and carrots, peas, cucumbers, cabbages, radishes, lettuce and her faithful eggplant, but also, in front of the house as well as in window-pots and even in an ancient hollowed-out black stone that Reuven brought down one Sabbath from his place of ruins, Leah planted an endless assortment of flowers, so that there would always be some in bloom. From everywhere she brought seeds and bulbs and cuttings; even when Yankel drove with the whole family to Tiberias to buy the furniture, Leah managed to encounter an eccentric Englishwoman who had come to live in Christ’s Galilee and was delighted to give the big Jewish girl plants and seeds from her heavenly garden of roses and lilies.
Little Yaffaleh caught her sister’s flower-planting fever, and together the giantess and the chunky small girl would wander the shore of the Kinnereth for rare wildflowers to transplant, or, while alone, watching her growing flock of geese, Yaffaleh would suddenly perceive a blossom half-hidden beneath a rock and carefully dig it out to take home to Leah. Once in the middle of a burning hot day Yaffaleh even left her geese, to rush breathless to her big sister, her hands cupped around a wild orchid of such hues that Leah seized her and hugged and kissed her. By every law of horticulture the plant should not have lived, but twenty times a day the big and little sister knelt over it and petted the earth around it, and Schmulik even jeered that he saw Yaffaleh kissing the flower and whispering to it, until the fragile roots took hold.
A grape arbor too was put in, and from Yavneh, Kalman the Drayman brought a young fig tree, the gift of Yona Kolodnitzer from whom Yankel had bought, at last, a true Holland calf. Then Gidon carried down from the Arab village the seedling of a carob tree, that in a future year would spread wide branches to give them shade, and sweet pods to chew on.
Meanwhile Feigel herself made a demand and even declared that, like the chalutzoth of Sejera, she would stop cooking and conduct a strike, unless once and for all, now that Yankel’s first crop was in and the grain was sold and they had a house, she was provided with a true oven to bake in, instead of an earthen taboon that choked her with smoke, and in a strong winter rain melted away in the yard.
There was in Mescha a settler who had built for himself a true Russian oven inside his house, the sort that one slept atop of, in the old country. No use to tell her that in the heat of this place the entire house would become a sweat bath. Good, then Tateh would have his sweat bath! Feigel retorted.
In the end, Josef Idelson, brother of Shlomo Idelson from whom Yankel had bought his mules, came from Mescha with a wagonload of tiles, and remained with them for a week while Gidon helped him build the oven. Half of the back wall was removed and the room extended outward to accommodate the structure. The oven was even given a facing of decorative tiles made in Nazareth, that glowed with yellow and green intricacies. And the cholent that issued from this real stove on a Sabbath, when they sat on their real chairs around a proper table, a cholent made with sweet carrots already from their own garden, eaten with chaleh baked from the grain of their own fields, made Feigel declare, “Now we have become human beings again.”
But a change of some kind was coming over her Big Leah, the mother saw. Though the girl was cheerful and full of song as ever, Feigel sensed that Leah in some way was letting go of herself as a young woman. She had always eaten with good appetite, but now she ate enormously; she was always clumping back into the house and was even careless about dirtying the floor while she took herself a thick slice of bread and butter, like some growing boy, like Schmulik before going out to help Gidon in the field.
The waistbands on Leah’s skirts had to be let out, and the tie-cords on her petticoats were hardly long enough now, so that the knotted ends were hard to undo, and sometimes, because of her thick fingers, Leah had to ask Eliza to unfasten her. She was still such a young girl, hardly twenty, so lively with her comrades—it pained Feigel to watch Leah sitting in the evenings with Schmulik over the endless games of dominoes that the boy liked to play until he was half-asleep at the table.
Surely it would be livelier for her at the kvutsa: the communa was growing in numbers and there were still three men for every girl. Another communa was starting too, farther along by the lake. But Leah lingered at home.
For Dvoraleh, Feigel would still not have thought about a man—a length of time had first to pass; yet the bereaved girl from day to day seemed in better equilibrium than her sister. It was Dvora rather than Leah now who tended to little Mati, with his weaning and his diapers, though Big Leah at every free moment would fondle him and cluck over him. Dvora also was seriously learning to cook, to bake bread and strudel, for with the new oven baking was a pleasure. From Sejera she had brought chicks hatched in the incubator, and already she had a fine new flock, which she was feeding according to a book from America; she had actually, by herself, puzzled out how to read English. Between all these tasks with which she occupied herself, Dvora seemed to Feigel much like a young housewife in the old country whose husband has gone to America, and who tends her baby and her home, waiting; it would be unseemly as yet, Feigel felt, for Dvora to be exposed to young men, to go visiting the kvutsoth. But Feigel did not fear for the girl. The time would come when a man would take his place in her life. Only for Leah was she troubled, and one evening, when Schmulik had fallen asleep over their game, and Leah had gone out into the yard to breathe in the night for a moment, as she said, Feigel went out to her.
“Leahleh,” she asked softly, “are you still longing for that one?” Let his name be erased from eternity, let him sit there in Siberia until ice froze over him!
“No, Mama,” Leah said.
It was the truth and not the truth. If he were to appear, perhaps despite everything she would go to him. But what she truly feared was that somehow the femaleness in her might make her give way to another, since not to him. Some nights, and sometimes even in the midst of the day, there came over her body such a longing, such a hunger for a counterpart, that she feared if she were among men, she would become like a certain chavera who was talked of, who went about lying with one man or another, no matter who—to give the chaverim surcease she pretended, but perhaps really to give herself surcease.
“Why don’t you go sometimes on a Friday evening to the kvutsa?” Feigel said. “On Erev Shabbat they have liveliness there, it would be good for you.”
“You needn’t worry so for me, Mama,” Leah said. “Perhaps I’ll soon go back to the kvutsa.” And then she added, “A family is a little kvutsa too.”
* * * *
Then the settlement itself became livelier. One fine day, a whole group of Roumanian settlers arrived, with their leader, the same Issachar Bronescu who had last winter inspected the site. Leading a long caravan, he brought three wagonloads of possessions of his own, topped by his richly dressed plump wife, and four children, the eldest a boy of thirteen—who could tell, perhaps even a prospective groom for Eliza!
Behind the three wagons of Issachar Bronescu came a dozen others, each loaded high with bedding, trunks, and articles of furniture, truly an exciting sight. All Jaffa was empty of wagons, declared Kalman the Drayman; never before in the land had such a huge caravan been organized.
At the entrance to the settlement stood Kramer with Jacques Samuelson himself to welcome the newcomers, but it was Yankel Chaimovitch who had been designated to come forward with bread and salt, and Feigel and her daughters had laden a long outdoor table with a veritable feast, offering milk to the children, and cool, refreshing lebeniyah to everyone, while the men were offered a l’chayim; on the table were herrings and cheeses, including the salty goat-cheese that Feigel had learned to make from the Arabs, and pickles and radishes, sliced onions, slabs of her own butter, loaves of fresh bread, and plates of sesame cookies that she and Dvoraleh had baked in the oven.
These were the first ten families: others were coming in a week, in time for the holidays. All the householders were of a younger age than Yankel and Feigel, with children ranging up to fourteen, but most
of them only just ready to begin cheder. They had indeed brought their own melamed, a youngish one with a clipped beard, and he was a shochet too. Before a week was over, Issachar Bronescu had got the melamed to start the cheder going, and had also opened his general shop with household supplies, having fetched more wagonloads of goods from Tiberias—pails and farming tools and whole kegs of nails, oil lamps and extra glass chimneys, kerosene, and all manner of things that a settler or his wife might have forgotten to bring from Roumania.
The settlers were mainly from the region of Kluj; some had been merchants of the smaller variety, no better off than Yankel himself, as he reasoned it; one had dealt in hides, another had helped his father who sold spirits to the peasants—decent Jews, each with enough savings to get him through the first year, and perhaps even the second. Everything had been carefully planned and prepared, but none of them had ever been a farmer. A hundred times a day the men came to Yankel with their questions, put as though in truth they really knew quite a bit but were only inquiring about local conditions: what was best to plant first, and was it advisable to buy a calf or a cow, and how much should a farmhand be paid—a chalutz, naturally, not an Arab—though if an Arab was hired to do a little additional labor, how much for example? And their women flew in and out of Feigel’s kitchen from morning to night, with half of them borrowing the use of her oven to bake in.
Yet, except for all such contacts as these, in which the older family of the community was glad to help the newcomers, there soon came a separateness between the Chaimovitches and the Roumanians. Yankel had always distrusted Roumanians, and here it was his fate to have fallen among them. They borrowed implements which they did not return until four times reminded. The women, Feigel said, ran in to borrow a cup of flour, a few onions, and to bring anything back seemed unknown to them. How could you ask back a cup of flour? Some of the householders came to Yankel for advice and then went off and did the opposite. So why did they have to bother him? Also the newcomers would stroll around his parcel of land and study his house as though he had stolen in before them and seized all that was best. Or else it was as though they, having organized the entire affair of the settlement and applied for the land and arranged with the Baron’s office and the Zionist office for everything, had done him a favor in letting him slip in and benefit from all their efforts!
Of the malaria that the whole Chaimovitch family had got into their blood here, of the year of kadahat and death they had suffered while planting eucalyptus trees to protect the whole settlement, these fine Roumanians seemed to understand nothing. Besides, devotedly observant Jews though they professed to be, Yankel caught sight of one and another of them smoking on the Sabbath. “Let the kadahat take the lot of them!” Yankel grumbled.
“Nu, nu,” Feigel soothed him, “they have just arrived. It is hard for them, even though they have it so much easier than it was for us. And here they see that you already have a fine meshek and harvested fields, while their land is covered with stones. So it is only natural for them to be envious. Still, for the children, for all of us, it is better now, it is livelier to be living among people. You have a shul to go to, and the children a school.”
It was true; he had long ago fallen off from praying with the Yemenites; that had been only a curiosity, for their ways were too strange for him, and now the synagogue at the end of the open street, with the schoolroom attached to it, made a man feel at home, even if there was a Roumanian twang in the prayers. For the children too it was better, though Schmulik, while there was no cheder to go to, had done many things around the farm.
It was better, though Schmulik did not agree, having now to be shut up every day again, like in Cherezinka. Not only boys were in the schoolroom, but girls as well, since the melamed considered himself “enlightened,” and the Roumanians too had an “enlightened” outlook. So Yaffaleh had to pen up her geese every morning while she went off with Schmulik and Eliza to the study-house. The melamed would teach not only the Torah, Issachar Bronescu had declared, but such emancipated subjects as geography and arithmetic and even physiology. And he would teach in Hebrew, certainly in Hebrew, for were they not true Zionists!
Before a week had passed, Leah caught sight of Schmulik one morning running toward the river. She called to him; he ran faster, but at last halted for her to reach him. In a rage, he held out his palm for her to see the rising welt. The melamed!—But for what?
For what? In a sputtering mockery, Schmulik imitated a singsong recitation in their foreign-sounding Ashkenazic Hebrew. “That’s how we are supposed to learn. He doesn’t even know how to talk our own Hebrew here in Eretz!”
True, the accent was the old-country Hebrew such as Tateh used in his prayers. That could soon change. But the rod was something else! Leah marched back with Schmuel to the school. Already she had been upset to find that the girls were sent home two hours earlier than the boys. Girls needed less education, it appeared, according to this enlightened instructor who used the rod of the old-country cheder! Somehow Leah’s irritation increased on the way, as they passed yard after yard, and she saw that not a spade had been turned, though she had urged the Roumanian women to start to raise their own vegetables. Since Arab women came down every day with their baskets of eggs and greens, this seemed enough for the newcomers. Leah could already see that it was not a new life they would make here, but the old one, with peasant women coming to the door to sell all that was needed. As she neared the school, she could hear the singsong recitation. What Schmulik said was true—it sounded just like in the cheder in Cherezinka.
Pulling open the door, Leah cried, “Here we speak the Sephardic Hebrew.”
The melamed turned and saw her form filling the doorway. Reb Hirsch was an immaculate man; he wore a silken yarmulkeh and, even in the heat, his long alpaca coat. With his clipped beard uptilted, he had an air of self-esteem.
“Do you want to teach them yourself, Miss Chaimovitch?” He held out his pointer to her, the same one surely that had come down on Schmulik’s palm.
“This is exactly what we don’t need!” she cried. “We in Eretz don’t teach by beating!”
“Nor do I,” the melamed replied quite calmly, still using the odd Ashkenazi diction. He turned to the class. The room was quite orderly, the boys sitting in the front rows, the girls in back. Most of the children had been his pupils in the old country; they were looking on with enjoyment. “Nor do I,” Reb Hirsch repeated, “except when it comes to savages who unfortunately don’t understand anything else.” Now came a burst of laughter from the class.
All at once, it came over Leah that Schmulik had indeed been running wild. His only friends had been two Arab boys from Dja’adi, who tended a small flock of goats, and with them he swam, wrestled, climbed, explored caves.
“A quiet word, perhaps?” Reb Hirsch approached, and feeling herself awkward in the doorway, Leah retreated to give him room; in the entry, the teacher revealed to her that Schmulik had mocked him, and hurled a book at his back. As to the melamed’s brand of Hebrew, “I am aware, gveret, that the Sephardic accent has been adopted in Eretz; as in all things, it will take a little time to change our ways. I am, as you see, attached to tradition, but also somewhat emancipated; I have not come here to impose the old ways on the new.”
He really was not bad at all. Indeed he had cultural ideas. A great event was coming to their village at the end of the holidays, with the visit of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik to the new settlement—could she not do something cultural, perhaps with a group of girls? the melamed asked. Somehow Reb Hirsch had heard of her harvest dance at Sejera.
Though Leah had barely more than a week to prepare, she enlisted six of the Roumanian girls, besides Eliza, and in secrecy rehearsed a surprise. The idea had come to her from watching Yaffaleh with her geese. Eliza would be the proud mother floating with her neck arched, and the other girls her brood. All in white. And then at the end they would all chant a famous poem by Chaim Nachman Bialik, “To a Bird,” and there would be
a presentation of flowers.
The girls were as excited indeed as a flock of birds, but when the movements had already been learned, it was clear that Eliza was too small to represent the mother-goose. Eliza herself saw it—she would look ridiculous, she declared to Leah. And as by a single thought, all the girls together cried out that Leah herself must be the mother. Leah demurred. How would she look, a big fat cow among the slender little girls? People would laugh. But the girls clung to her and insisted; she looked so beautiful when she showed them the movements, they said. After Leah had tried to get Dvora to do it, and Dvora had proven absolutely unable to manage the little stretching movements with the neck, she at last gave in and took the role.
Arriving with a whole party of dignitaries in a fleet of three carriages, the poet, a portly man of serious appearance, with a large imposing head, apologized that he had only a brief time to spend at their settlement, as he had yet to move onward to the kvutsoth. Then as Issachar Bronescu’s welcoming speech went on and on, it seemed there would be no time for the “cultural program.” Except for the disappointment this would be to her girls, Leah was almost glad. But the speech ended in time after all, and Bronescu’s eldest son, Tsutsig, who played Mendelssohn on the harmonica, began their accompaniment.
Leah, in a full white robe made from an abaya, which she feared would bring laughter, moved forward, with the little girls in their floating white tulle costumes moving behind her.
No one had yet laughed. Then when Leah turned her head this way and that, stretching it in the movements that were meant to make them laugh, the laughter came. She could have hugged the whole crowd! Now moving sedately, she chanted the poem’s first line, and the soft voices of the girls rose behind her in response.
Singing, singing, O my birdling,
Sing the wonders of the land
