by Meyer Levin
And what about Josef Trumpeldor? Shouldn’t Josef be asked to come? Leah suggested.
The Russian war hero, to join the Turks? In Dovidl’s shrewd eyes she could almost read the lightning of his reasoning. Trumpeldor to head an all-Jewish fighting unit for the Turks! What a stroke it would be! But wait, Dovidl decided, first there must be a conference only for the party leaders. Then—
To become an Ottoman. There was something absurd in it. To be a Russian Jew seemed natural; even here in Eretz as part of the Yishuv, Leah had thought of herself as Russian. Tolstoy and Dostoievsky and Chekhov were somehow like Jewish writers, and the Russian revolutionary movement also was like something Jewish. But the Turks—with their indolence and cruelty—she felt a kind of revulsion in her flesh, as though pressed to lie down with a man who was repulsive to her. And suddenly the notion came, if she should one day have a child—a little Turk with a tarboosh on his head! And then it even came to Leah that in taking the Turkish nationality she would in some peculiar way be still further separated from Moshe.
But as Avner explained, it would not really be the Turks but the Germans they would be joining, and even in Herzl’s time, Avner pointed out, this same German Kaiser had been in favor of Zionism. On a diplomatic visit to Palestine, Kaiser Wilhelm had met Herzl in Mikveh Israel and spoken good words for the Zionist movement, though at the time nothing had come of it.
Still, Leah felt, the Jewish masses were in Russia—no, it was all like some complicated chess game, and she had never had a head for chess, there were too many things to take into account, and at least one of the possible moves you were sure not to see. A world of brotherhood … perhaps it would indeed come after the war, and then it wouldn’t matter what the government was named, so long as you lived your life. Just as here, even with the Turks, they had managed to restore Hebrew and build their own way of life in spite of all.
Turkey entered the war. Already there was a proclamation: enemy nationals must become Ottomans or face deportation. From Rahel in Jerusalem, Leah received a heavy package of forms that the chevreh had at once printed up. Though who knew what sort of papers the Turks would require, these forms were to be signed at once to show the desire for Ottomanization. Leah was to go to every house in Mishkan Yaacov and also in Tiberias. Every man must sign an application.
Her Roumanian neighbors balked. Roumania was still neutral, why should they sign? Once Ottomans, their sons would be taken for the army. Bronescu himself spread the word, don’t sign any papers. Wait. There is always time to sign. Nor were the two other Russian Jewish families in the village in a hurry to sign; they accepted the papers and said they would see—none had sons of military age.
In Tiberias, Leah even penetrated the narrow byways to the courtyards of the pious, who had thin, pallid sons with long payess, as in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. Never had she been in these houses. With his head turned so as not to be looking at a strange woman, a Talmud sage explained to her—already he knew every twist. The best was to arrange for Austrian nationality; with a small payment it could be arranged with the Austrian consul in Safed, and then your son was safe. Others said a conscript could be bought out for a thousand francs, a vast sum, but money must be found; rather than go about with papers to sign, she must go about collecting funds. Leah even found herself at the gate of a yeshiva where the master, unusually young-looking, again keeping his eyes turned away, rapidly inundated her with examples from the Talmud and the commentaries; at the end of his dissertation, she realized that, although he pronounced himself in agreement with her, he had proved that while Jews must everywhere follow the law of the land, even the Ottomans could not seize rabbinical students as conscripts. He snatched a bundle of her applications, as though to throw them away, yet carried them inside.
In the south, trouble had already begun. On the Sabbath, the chief shomer of the region, Motke, brought back tales to Gilboa: a new Kaymakam had appeared in Jaffa and at once issued a ukase forbidding Jews to be watchmen. No Jew could carry arms. Some of the planters were listing their Jewish watchmen under Arab names. Turks were commandeering horses, mules, wagons from the settlements. Sometimes they took drivers with their carts, saying they would be paid a day-rate—shukra, it was called. It appeared that all sorts of supplies were being hauled to Beersheba, surely for an assault on the British canal. In Rehovot, a German and a Turkish commander had appeared together in an automobile, stopping only to order the mukhtar to deliver ten thousand sacks in twenty-four hours! Sacks? Of what? Of nothing! Empty sacks! At least, a blessing from heaven, it was only empty sacks they demanded! They intended to fill them with sand in the desert and throw them into the canal, to block it up! A clever plan of a Turkish general! Where would you find ten thousand empty sacks overnight? Galloping from barn to barn, the mukhtar of Rehovot had made everyone empty out their sacks. He had sent a wagon to Jaffa to buy up all that were available. In the town hall children were set to counting; they became befuddled, but in the end it didn’t matter, as the Turks never returned to collect the sacks, but instead, Motke the shomer told them bitterly, a band of Arab laborers came and began to tear away irrigation pipes, hauling them off on camels toward Beersheba—for a water-supply into the Sinai, it was said, though later the pipes were seen rusting alongside a camel-track.
Returning home with all the news from Gilboa, Leah, with Schmuel and Mati, helped Tateh dig a large pit under the barn, where they hid all the grain that remained. And then she was on the way again, to Jerusalem. There, Rahel had a whole new stack of naturalization forms; this time they were official, and Leah must go back and have them filled out. But now there was a tax on each head, and each day the price was being raised. If not—deportation!
Dovidl and Avner already had fifty volunteers for a special Jewish militia in the Turkish Army, and for this too Leah must find candidates in Galilee, pointing out to them that in this way the Jews would fight as a unit. That was of greatest importance. Already the plan was being proposed to Djemal Pasha, the new commander in Damascus—a whole Jewish brigade in the Turkish Army.
But also from Rahel, Leah heard a terrifying story. When Rahel had gone with the papers into the Old City, where the narrow lanes of the Jewish quarter were twisted up with the lanes of the Armenian quarter, she had been told of frightful whispers among the Armenians. How the news came one hardly knew—there were no letters any more—some said that word had been brought by a priest. But in the Armenian area that lay between Russia and Turkey, ghastly massacres were taking place. The Turks had always hated the Armenians, Moslems hating Christians. Now they were destroying entire villages. Worse than pogroms. They took away all the men except the old ones—who knew where to? nothing was heard—then they hanged the elders, burned and looted the houses, raped the women, and finally drove women and children out onto the roads to the desert to die. It was a barbarity not to be believed. If this was what was meant by deportation, then at once, every Jew must sign and become Ottomanized!
In Tel Aviv an emergency council had been formed by the mayor and other town notables; they had taken over all the stocks of flour, they were printing a kind of scrip to be guaranteed by the banks, they had sent cables to important American Jews for emergency help. By good fortune the American Ambassador to Turkey was a Jew, a millionaire named Morgenthau who had only a few months before himself visited the Yishuv; he had even been in HaKeren and had complimented Reuven on his Garden of Eden. This American Jew would intervene with the Turks not to deal harshly with the Jews.
14
TO STAY by himself in peace, Gidon would have been satisfied to fix a bed in a corner of the stable, near the soft-eyed, silver-coated mare that was boarded there by a Tel Aviv merchant; he almost envied the Arab stableboy who slept untroubled in the hayloft. But Frau Doktor Mintz, as she called herself—she spoke of her husband as Herr Doktor—did not consider the stable fitting for a Jewish “assistant.” Nor, luckily, Gidon thought, did the woman find room for him in her house. She spoke only German; on the
very first day she had made Gidon an angry speech about the striking teachers who insisted on introducing Hebrew into the Realschule in Haifa—fanatics! There were not even any Hebrew words for what was studied there! Her husband, who had studied in Heidelberg, ought to know!
With the husband, fortunately, Gidon felt at ease, even though Mintz wore a high collar and tie, and rode out in a fine carriage with a doctor’s bag. Doubtless all this was because of his wife. For at work Herr Doktor Mintz would take off his collar and roll up his sleeves. When he had to deal with a bad-tempered animal, Gustav Mintz poured forth choice curses in German and Arabic. With Gidon he conversed in a sort of Hebrew; with the fine riding horses he boarded, it could be recognized by his cluckings and nose noises that Mintz knew the language of animals as well.
As for a sleeping place, Leah had taken Gidon over to the Zuckermans’ hotel where they had all stayed on the first night of their arrival. Here Leah was embraced by the early members of her kvutsa, Araleh and Saraleh, the Zuckermans’ daughter. On every visit Leah twitted them, “Well, haven’t you had enough of city life? When are you coming back to the kvutsa?” Araleh always said he longed for nothing better, only just now he was building a new pension for the Zuckermans on the sands of Tel Aviv. A builder he had become!
There at the Zuckermans’, Gidon indeed felt at home, though Saraleh—probably on Leah’s instructions—was constantly trying to find a chavera for him. Her younger sister Aviva was already “taken,” she sighed. In the evenings the pension was lively with the comings and goings of chalutzim from the settlements, bringing bits of news. And what with their constant discussions, he hardly had time to sit in his room and study the large book on cattle diseases that Mintz had loaned him. Besides, it was in German.
Not all the chalutzim were eager to become Ottomanized. The Poale Zion were mostly for it, as their party demanded, but among the non-party chalutzim there was considerable doubt. Some were even slipping out from the land, trying to reach America. All sorts of rumors were exchanged about ships that might be sailing to Spain or Egypt. And when it came to the Jewish Brigade proposed by Avner and Dovidl to fight for the Turks, terrible disputes broke out. Naturally if the Poale Zion was for it, the members of the Poël Hatzaïr were against it, some were pacifists, and several times the arguments became so violent that they fell to blows, pacifists leaping in rage on their taunters, who quoted bitter, angry verses from Bialik’s “The City of Slaughter” at them and mocked them as being no better than the timid yeshiva bocher of old whom the poet excoriated. Mama Zuckerman would scream Shame! and Araleh and Gidon had all they could do to pull the fellows apart.
Gidon himself, when it came to signing the Ottomanization papers, felt something holding back his hand. He would wait until Leah came again. As to the Jewish Brigade—if one could fight simply as a Jew, not for the Germans, the Turks, or even as some wild ones wanted to do, for the British or the Russians—ah! … Nevertheless, when he read the arguments for the Brigade in the Poale Zion’s Achdut, the plan seemed sensible. If Jews fought here under the Turks, it would give them a claim to the land. Suppose the British should try to invade from the sea—if the Jewish fighters held the land, that would count for something! All the graduates and the students in the last class in the Herzlia Gymnasia were ready to join the Turks as a body, it was said.
“And you think the Turks will let us fight as a unit, after they forbade Jewish watchmen to carry arms?”
Things were different now. They had even sent an enlistment officer to the Herzlia Gymnasia to find men who knew Turkish, to train as officers, “They desperately need men who can read and write.”
“Exactly. A few officers here and there. They’d scatter us. They’d never let us have our own unit.”
The new Kaymakam appeared in the streets of Jaffa. Gidon caught sight of him clattering past in his carriage, inspecting everything. A dark wooden face with a hawked beak and button eyes, a Turk of Turks, Bahad-ad-Din he was called, and leaning half-out, he gleamed at every woman, as though making notes for future use. Before noon, Herschel the Newspaper, an out-of-work chalutz who came to pass time at the stable, had much to tell. The Kaymakam came straight from the Armenian region, it was said. In Jaffa too there was a small Armenian colony, and the dread whispers of what Bahad-ad-Din had done to their people had already been heard.
No sooner had Bahad-ad-Din turned into Herzl Street to acquaint himself with freshly built Tel Aviv, than he halted his carriage, leaped out, summoned two military police who rode behind him, and ordered them to tear down the Hebrew street sign. A crowd gathered, watching in silence. All down the street the Kaymakam continued, stopping before each sign to watch it torn down. That same night, Mayor Dizingoff was summoned to the Kaymakam’s fortress in Jaffa. The Jews were trying to set up a nation within a nation—this must end! Street signs would be only in Turkish! Nor must the blue and white flag be shown!
Each day, new edicts. On the backs of letters the postal authorities suddenly discovered extra stamps, with Hebrew writing. What was this! A postal system of their own? a nation within a nation? At once, police appeared in the offices of the Keren Kayemeth and seized all the sheets of stamps. Go explain to the Turk that for years such donation-stamps had been sold to raise money to buy land! Whoever was henceforth found with such stamps in his possession, decreed Bahad-ad-Din, would be subject to arrest and even hanging. Go, laugh at the thick-headed Turk!
Next, letters written in Hebrew were forbidden altogether. The military censors could not read them. And now the postal services through foreign consulates were ended. The Young Turks suddenly decreed void the “capitulations” of the old regime, which, because of vast debts, had made a whole system of concessions to European governments allowing their subjects to conduct their own affairs through their consulates. No longer could foreigners hold their own courts in Ottoman lands, no longer were foreigners immune from Turkish demands. Finished! The Ottoman Empire must be restored to glory. Teaching in all schools must be conducted in Turkish.
Very well, one put in a few more classes in Turkish, in any case useful to know. But the jokes about the Turk’s stupidity turned more and more to gall.
It began to seem as though the whole effort of the Yishuv would be erased. And the people as well. Starvation loomed; there was hardly a week’s supply of flour in the warehouses. Then a miraculous sight appeared. Frau Doktor Mintz herself came running into the stable one day to call her husband, he must come and behold the sight! Without rolling down his sleeves, the veterinary hurried out behind her, and Gidon too, and there in the Jaffa harbor they saw an enormous battleship, and from its bow waved an American flag. Tons of wheat were being unloaded for the Jewish community—sent by American Jews. Fifty thousand dollars too, it was said, had been sent by the banker Jacob Schiff and other rich American Jews. After all, many were originally from Germany, and so they still had influence with the master-ally of Turkey.
And there also were packets of letters from America. One of these reached the Chaimovitch farm, for Feigel’s sister had read in the Yiddish press of the dreadful fate, who even knew what, deportation, starvation, that hung over the Jews of Palestine. The whole family must come at once to America, she said. Her husband would provide ship tickets. At the very least Feigel must send the young girls!
Though most of the wheat sent for Jewish relief had promptly been seized by Bahad-ad-Din for the Turkish Army, a new aura, almost of respect, was visible among the Turkish officialdom. For the time one heard no more threats of Jews being driven out like the Armenians; new “rapid” forms for Ottomanization were distributed, though with a still higher tax on each head … As yet it seemed the rulers had not decided just what to do about the Jews. One day the entire population of Rehovot was commanded to present itself at a government office in Jaffa with applications filled in for immediate Ottomanization. The elders hurried all night from house to house, and before dawn the whole of Rehovot, on donkeys, in droshkies, on foot, hanging from crowded di
ligences, poured down to Jaffa. Until noon they waited in the street before closed doors. At last a functionary arrived and opened the building. After an hour he closed it, sending everyone home. The usual jokes were made. The way of the Turk. But uneasiness grew.
Then on a drizzly December day a troop of militiamen, emerging from the fort, suddenly began arresting Jews on the streets of Jaffa, while others with lists in their hands went into the houses.
Herr Doktor Mintz had ridden off to attend to an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in Rishon le Zion, brought by diseased cattle the Bedouin had driven in for slaughter for the army. Gidon was alone in the whitewashed stable at the rear of the courtyard, when two soldiers appeared carrying long bayoneted rifles. “Russki! Russki!” they shouted, amidst a stream of filth as they poked at him, and then, with a burst of joyous laughter, one of them stood his rifle against the wall—the bayonet reached higher than his head—while he ran to the stall of the silvery mare and unloosed her. “Not Russki!” Gidon burst out, and at this the Turk doubled over with laughter, even slapping him on the back as he repeated Gidon’s cry and pointed to the horse, “No Russki? Turki!”
But as Gidon tried to pull the mare back, the other soldier instantly leveled his bayonet at his face.
From the house, hysterically repeating “Deutsch! Allemand!” as she pointed to herself, Frau Doktor Mintz came running, with her two little boys bravely trying to push themselves between their mother and the soldiers. A third Turk, with some sort of officer’s marking, perhaps a sergeant, appeared from the street. In Arabic, in bits of Turkish, in a flow of German, Frau Doktor Mintz was trying to explain that her husband had already paid for Ottomanization papers, the papers were coming any day, her husband the professor was educated in Germany and had high connections. Without listening to her, the sergeant gleefully leaped onto the silver mare. She reared, but the fellow knew how to sit a horse. His two soldiers were repeating the great joke to him—not Russki, the horse, Turki. And he shouted out, “Ho, ho, now she is Turkish for sure!” and galloped into the street, with Gidon and Frau Mintz and her children flocking in despair behind him.
