by Meyer Levin
An odd expression passed swiftly over Trumpeldor’s face—an expression of anger, of uncertainty—he didn’t understand such humor. He had not come to Eretz to escape military service, he declared. Actually, in the final analysis, he counted himself a pacifist—
“Except in times of war,” the irrepressible Tibor taunted, and there was a burst of laughter. Trumpeldor reddened, but meanwhile a stern voice broke in, “Chaver, about fighting, about war, men should not make jests!” It was Old Gordon who frowned on Tibor, while he lectured all of them like a teacher before forgetful pupils. “What have we here to do with violence, with slaughter, with conquests and wars? The only revolution we seek is within ourselves. We have come here, renouncing their civilization of murder and massacre and Moloch. Only when man returns to his true relationship with God in the world of nature in which God has placed him, only when man restores the balance …”
To listen to the words of the sage was always entrancing, and Reuven, Leah saw, sat in smiling enjoyment, while Old Gordon’s thin shoulders swayed back and forth as though he were praying in a shul. But from Max Wilner under his breath she heard a scoffing word to Tibor, “Our vegetarians.” And then Max began in his hard-headed manner. All this was well and good, but what were the factors that applied here and now? In his mathematical way he recited: the Turks, even though not officially at war, had already closed the Dardanelles, so the gateway out of Russia was locked. Last year’s flood of chalutzim was shut off. Whatever was to happen here would have to be faced by those who were already here.
“Exactly!” broke in the youthful Eli from Tel Aviv.
And before revolutions and before wars of the great powers, Max went on, came the basic need of the Yishuv to survive. The movement here would have to survive on its own strength alone, and this was the problem—
On all sides arguments broke out. Nahama’s Shimek declared, “Wait. As workers and socialists our fate is bound up with the revolution—”
“Our fate is bound up with our land,” cried young Eli.
“But in the end we must join hands with all our brothers—”
“But chaverim, if Turkey enters the war tomorrow, what measures should we take here and now?” Eli persisted.
The talk spread into confusion. Some said Turkey would never conscript Jews. “No, first they’ll slaughter us!” Others said conscription was certain, and even if not, the men should volunteer.—But then they might find themselves fighting their own brothers from Russia! Nahama declared it was already known that Jews would be conscripted into labor battalions. Reuven said that this would be better than having to go and kill people. Another chaver argued that the Turks might yet even join the British rather than the Germans.
A chavera said it was wrong to take the attitude that there was no difference between one side and the other: The British and the French were more democratic.
A young newcomer scoffed, “Excuse me, chavera, but the social democratic movement is a thousand times further advanced in Germany than in England.”
Side-arguments broke out. Trumpeldor had become silent.
Leah had a longing for the voice of Avner, of Dovidl—they would know what to think. Where were they? And Rahel? Scattered in France, in Constantinople. Would they even be able to come home? What would become of them?
How could Leah sit still by the Jordan? The very next day she took herself up, boarding a wagon that had suddenly appeared from Jaffa—Kalman the Drayman had come to buy wheat, Jaffa’s warehouses were already empty. And banks were already without currency, he recounted. Merchants were accepting only gold, and there wasn’t a napoleon to be had anywhere. Ships were ceasing to sail.
Running back into the yard where Eliza was hanging out the washing, Leah said, “Tell Mama I have been called to an urgent meeting of the Women Workers.” For even as a full grown woman Leah was unable to deceive Feigel to her face. It was not that she was such a moralist—to avoid hurting a person’s feelings, she was ready to tell a small lie—but in her mother there was such an intuition that Leah would blush like a child if she tried even the most innocent deception. “Tell Mama I’ll bring back Gidon from Jaffa for Succoth,” Leah added.
In Jaffa it was as though she had been summoned. For even as the wagon neared the town, Leah could see a vessel arriving in the port, with the little Arab boats going out to meet it. On impulse—there might be news—she hurried directly to the harbor, and so it appeared as though she had come expressly to greet Rahel, who leaped out of the first skiff into her arms.
“Have you heard anything of Dovidl? of Avner?” each blurted to the other, and then Rahel cried, “How did you know I was coming on this ship—not a soul knows! I didn’t even telegraph my family. Have you seen them?”
“I went to Gilboa last week especially to ask for news of you. Everyone is well.”
“But, Leachka, how did you know I was coming on this ship?”
“You see I knew!” Leah laughed. “In my heart something told me!”
And they hugged each other, and in blurts and both talking at the same time, each told and asked what had happened, what would happen, would the war be short or long.
Rahel had not forgotten to bring a gift for Leah, and then and there she opened her valise to find it, a most wonderful book of drawings of the dancer Isadora Duncan, “She reminded me of you!” And in the midst of the port, as Leah studied the pictures, oblivious to pushing and jostling, Rahel gave her an account of the dancer’s recital she had seen in Paris. “Oh, Paris, such theater, such culture, such art!” And the socialist spirit! On their Fourteenth-of-July holiday, Rahel had followed the great Socialist leader Jaurès, and in the vast mass of people she had heard him call out for the workers of the world to stage a universal strike for peace!
“This is exactly what Reuven was saying!” Leah cried.
But Rahel went on, “And now Jaurès is assassinated, and they have started their war!” Rahel clutched Leah’s arm. “Leah, it’s a world of assassins we live in!”
Rahel had to go at once to Jerusalem, perhaps there was word there from Avner. Her thesis was accepted, and she now held a degree in agronomy, but she was still ignorant, she confided—she still couldn’t grow a tomato.
“We will have to begin to grow things, in time of war it is necessary. Leah, I thought it all out on the boat: If the war comes here, we women must grow vegetables—you will have to take charge and show everyone how!”
She would go to Jerusalem by the first train—she had just enough money left for a ticket, for Leah as well—Leah must come with her to Jerusalem.
Just as they were climbing the stone stairway to the abode of Misha, the party secretary, over by the Old City wall, Leah heard the news shouted by Misha to a chaver who was just starting down: a telegram at last from Avner and Dovidl! The pair of them were on the way back from Constantinople. In a few days they should arrive.
But a week went by without a sign. German submarines, it was said, were already sinking ships in the Mediterranean. Rumors came that, although the Turks had not yet declared war, in Constantinople they were arresting Russian subjects. Who first? Russian Jews. In Jerusalem flour was to be had only in secret, and sugar was ten times its former price. Then one afternoon, when Rahel and Leah had gone to Misha’s place to help him put out an emergency issue of the paper, there, climbing the outside stairway, the pair of lost travelers suddenly appeared, carrying huge roped-up suitcases. For once Rahel fell so completely into Avner’s arms that Leah’s heart choked up. As though her own Moshe had walked in from Siberia. After all, between Rahel and Avner too perhaps something had gone wrong—they had been separated for nearly two years. But see—once in each other’s presence, everything was swept away.
In the midst of the first rush of questions, Leah and Dovidl paused to share a good laugh at the “unsentimental” reunited couple. Then Dovidl was demanding: How bad was unemployment? What was the situation in the grape harvest? How quickly could a sitting be called? And in Galilee, L
eah? What was the situation in Galilee? But he looked so haggard and half-starved, she rushed first to Misha’s larder to fix him some food. Two weeks the pair had been on the sea, for a three-day journey. Only by half-words could the events be dragged out of them.
“Nu, what does it matter what happened, we got here!” Dovidl said. It had been a Russian ship, and first it had made a stop in Smyrna. “Listen, we must hold a unity conference. At once, of all the workers’ parties. Try to get Max Wilner to come to Jerusalem—”
“A Russian ship?” Rahel repeated, alarmed. “But Germany is sinking Russian ships!”
“We sailed the day they declared war,” Avner remarked. “It was also the Ninth of Ab.”
“We had two hundred Hasidim from Bessarabia, and from their howling you would have thought the Temple had fallen for a third time!” Dovidl said.
His plan was to establish a massive united workers’ organization while allowing each group to retain its own membership; because of the crisis, even the stubborn Max and his followers might now join. But before the unity conference, they must hold a caucus of their own leaders to decide how far such autonomy should go. What he had in mind was an overall central committee with two from each party and perhaps one independent, perhaps Josef Trumpeldor—
“He is at HaKeren,” Leah offered. “But then, from Smyrna why did it take you so long to get here? What happened?”
“The Russian captain refused to move out from the Smyrna harbor—there were two German battleships running around there somewhere—”
“We heard, even on my boat we heard about them, the Goeben and the Breslin, oh, they were terribly dangerous!” Rahel cried as though the men were still in danger.
“Ach!” Dovidl made his contemptuous little lip movement, like someone who would spit except that it is beneath him. So their terrified Russian captain, nothing but a drunken Ivan, had locked himself into his cabin with a whole wicker basket of vodka bottles, and the ship lay at anchor in Smyrna. At night the vessel was black as the sea, not a match could be struck. The Hasidim in the hold kept crying out their lamentation like at the Wailing Wall.
“I told them, Yidden, why do you need to go to Jerusalem? You carry your own wall with you!”
And in another human heap in the hold were Moslems from Turkestan on their way to pray at their black stone in Mecca, and all they did night and day was to repeat “Ya Allah Il Allah.” Finally Dovidl and Avner had got together with a few Syrian students who were hurrying home from Constantinople to Beirut. One of them had a revolver—a nationalist, with this he was going to raise a revolt against Turkish rule—but meanwhile they had used it to persuade their Captain Ivan Ivanovitch that the Smyrna harbor was the most dangerous place of all for a Russian ship, since the Turks were entering the war against the Czar and would therefore at any moment come and seize his vessel. “Nu—” as if that was the whole of it—“on the third day we got him to sail on.”
“But why did it take so long from Beirut, then?”
Oh, the captain hadn’t at once put in at Beirut. They had given the simpleton such a scare that he was afraid he would be seized in the Beirut harbor as well, and so he had sailed straight down to Port Said. There, with the Czar’s allies, the Royal British Navy, all around him, Ivan felt his ship was safe, and he went back to his vodka.
“Then how did you get home?”
Making his little shrugging movement, Dovidl absorbed himself in the printer’s proofs for the emergency issue they were getting out. The leading article must be changed, there should be a unity proclamation …
But Leah knew Dovidl, he would tell his story, it amused him to tell it this way. How good she felt here with her old friends again, in Misha’s room, the headquarters. How she loved them all, how much better was such love than the tormenting love that was liebe. “So what did you do then, Dovidl?”
“Do?” They held a unity conference on the ship, the pair of them with an orange grower from Rishon Le Zion who was also on the boat. “That bandit Zukofsky, he never hired a Jewish worker in his life, he used to bring in Arabs even from Syria.” And there were still the Syrian students who had to get back to Beirut. Everyone gave up his last grosh for bribe money, and with a considerable sum they had managed to rouse the captain from his drunken stupor. “He went around the port and found us a small Greek cargo ship.” It flew a Persian flag and seemed safe from German attack, so the Russian had chartered it and crowded everyone aboard, Hasidim and all. Since it was only a short trip from Port Said to Jaffa, he had taken on no food or water, and having no money left, they themselves had made no provision, either. But the moujik of a captain had not forgotten his basket of vodka bottles, and thus he had lingered for three days along the Sinai shore, while they starved. The Russian was in terror that if he approached the Jaffa port, the Turks would take him prisoner. Suddenly he had decided to sail them back to Egypt.
To make the story shorter than the trip, Dovidl concluded, he and Avner, together with the Syrian students, had staged a little revolutzia, and at pistol point the captain had finally brought the ship to Beirut.
“But Jaffa is on the way …”
“The Syrians had the pistol. Let that be a lesson to us.”
The Arab students disembarked; they were home. But as for the Jews, being Russian subjects none were permitted to land.
Just then, Avner interrupted with a whole discussion about the Arab students. The two nationalists were intelligent young men, from his own law classes in Constantinople. Their movement was small and secret, but serious. They saw the war as their opportunity to win Syrian autonomy from the Turks—
“But we had one on our boat as well!” Rahel broke in. “From Damascus. A doctor who had studied in Paris, from one of the high Arab families, Nuri el Khouri was his name. We can work with them, in the end I am convinced they will understand our movement. The Arabs will have all of Arabia. The first thing is for all of us to work together against the Turks, to win autonomy.”
—But how could this be done? asked Misha, with the blinking puzzled look he had when anything was not in order. When Turkey entered the war—all of them here were surely not about to become traitors?
“Ach! We are speaking as socialists! In the long run—”
“But you just said the first thing,” Misha repeated.
“It is a historic necessity,” Rahel explained impatiently.
“But then how did you get here from Beirut?” Leah persisted.
“What does a Jew do? He looks for another Jew,” said Avner. Zukofsky the pardessan—even such a bandit can have his uses—paid an Arab to get a message to the leader of Beirut’s Jewish community, a wealthy importer belonging to an ancient family there, and this Jew had found a French vessel in the port and got them transferred to it, Hasidim and all, and thus, on the twelfth day of their voyage, they had come to Jaffa. The Beirut Jew through his connections with the Turks had already opened the way so that they were allowed to debark.
Already, word of the arrival of Avner and Dovidl had spread, and the door kept opening every second. Soon Misha left it open altogether, and chevreh halfway down the stairs were calling up greetings and relaying questions. Constantinople, Avner said, was swarming with German officers; Turkey would unquestionably enter the war at any moment now on the German side. And at that moment, every Russian Jew here in the Yishuv would be regarded as an enemy. “They will round us up. They may deport us. Who can tell what the Turk will do?”
There was only one solution that would enable them to stay in the land and protect what had been built up. “All those who still hold Russian nationality—” and this meant the great majority of the chalutzim—“must at once become Ottoman subjects.” There was not a day to lose. The announcement must be proclaimed in this very issue of the paper.
A tumult began. Why—then a man could be conscripted to fight for the Turks! Was there no other way?
“That is exactly the point,” Dovidl called out. “We should not even wait to be con
scripted. We should volunteer. We should begin at once to organize a Jewish volunteer corps.”
Had he gone mad on that ship? Did he perhaps want to become another Shabbatai Zevi and turn himself into a Moslem as well?
But on the boat the pair of them had thought it all out and come to this decision. Even before leaving Constantinople, they had examined the possibilities with the head of the Zionist bureau there. The reasoning was plain. Not Turkey but Germany was the power. Through Syria and down through Palestine was the way for Kaiser Wilhelm to Suez. Already his generals were planning to strike down, through the Sinai. The chances of victory in the war were with the Germans; if the Jews in Palestine supported their side, the Zionist position would be strengthened. After all, wasn’t the World Zionist headquarters just now in Berlin?
Murmurs and doubts arose. The Germans had already been halted, they had not reached Paris, and if their first thrust failed, they might not succeed at all. And what of the British fleet? And Russia’s unlimited manpower? Suppose Germany and Turkey should lose the war? Why let the Zionist fate hinge on the victory of one side or the other? There must be a full discussion. There must be instructions from abroad—
“Chevreh, we have no choice!” The moment Turkey entered the war, Avner pointed out, they became either enemies or patriots. What the Jews in the rest of the world did, did not matter so much. “Even if the Kaiser should lose the war, the Russians and the British and French could not blame us for having fought on the side of the country we live in, just as their own Jews will fight on their side. But if we hold back from fighting, both sides will despise us. And meanwhile the Turks would be capable of destroying the entire Yishuv.”
There was not a day to lose. Dovidl caught hold of Leah. “Leahleh, it’s a good thing you’re here. You must go back at once to Gilboa and explain the program.” She must go to Nadina and Galil—best that Galil himself should come at once to Jerusalem, or even better—they should all meet in Tel Aviv for a sitting, in the little house on the sand; she must leave word also in Yavniel.
