The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  He flung the words at her as though to accuse her of having expected gossip of a lingering romance, a broken heart. “You’re afraid they’ll do to us as to the Armenians. The whole Yishuv sits trembling. And exactly because of our fear, Bahad-ad-Din will take whatever he wants from us, and when they have squeezed all they want out of us and are ready to repeat the Armenian slaughter on us, they’ll do it. And no one will interfere, not even their cultured German allies.”

  She could not speak.

  “Would the Armenians be any worse off if they fought back?” Avshalom demanded. It was said that in one city on the Russian border they had fought, and held off a whole Turkish army until the Russians came. “And that is what we Jews must prepare to do while there is still time.”

  —With his band of twenty Sons of Nimrod he would hold off the Turks?—

  “Don’t laugh.” And by now Avshalom was altogether another man, flaming, fanatic. “Perhaps not twenty, but a few hundred could carry out a great deed. Seize a stronghold on the coast—the beach at Tantura, or better, the Crusader port at Athlit. “The whole area there is virtually unguarded. In half a day the British fleet could reach us. With their landing secured by the Jews of Palestine, the British could cut straight across to Damascus—”

  She could not help reminding him, had not he and his band even given up their guns when the Bahad-ad-Din demanded them? At least the men of the Shomer had managed to hang onto their weapons.

  Avshalom glared at her. “You know well enough why we had to give up our guns. They had me and Alexander Aaronson, they had already beaten the soles off our feet. Then they gave us three hours before they would seize our sisters and turn them over to a barrackful of their officers.”

  In Gilboa the story had been told as a mere tale. But from Avshalom it had a different ring. And why else had Alexander Aaronson at once taken his sister Rifka off to safety in America? “I saw my Smith and Wesson in the hands of an Arab in Nablus the day after I turned it in.” Then with a fine Arab curse, Avshalom laughed. “Never mind, I bought it back, I have it.”

  Now he turned his face to her, serious, fiery. “Leah, this is no time for the Shomer to despise us, and we them. You are a woman of sense and everyone respects you. I plead with you, bring us together into one united organization to defend the Yishuv.”

  Perhaps indeed there was far more to him than she had known, perhaps because of old hatreds between the planters and the chalutzim, someone like Avshalom had been misunderstood. “Twice already the Turks have had me in their hands,” Avshalom said, “and I vowed if I got away with my life, I would pledge that life to fight them.”

  Of one of his arrests she had heard only vaguely; it seemed to have been over a prank, for on an outing, a number of the sons and daughters of the orange growers had galloped down to the beach at Caesarea. Couples had wandered off, with only an occasional flicker of a lantern as they strolled. Near the ruins of Caesarea the Circassians had a village, and from there someone had spun a tale about Jews making lantern-signals to British boats. This tale had been embellished with further tales about camel caravans bringing sacks of Jewish wheat to the shore to be sold and taken off at night to enemy vessels. As a result of the wild story, the Kaymakam of Nablus had raided Chedera, arresting a dozen young men, Avshalom among them, and it had needed the influence of Aaron Aaronson with Djemal Pasha himself to keep them from being hanged.

  And now Avshalom declared, “Leah, when we lay in their dungeon waiting to be hanged, something came over me like a vision. After their lashing I had a malarial attack. I lay on a stone bench and I saw everything clearly as it could and must happen. The story about us that they invented—what is a story, Leah, but the inspiration for truth? The flickering lights on the beach, the signals to the ships—yes, that is exactly what we should do!” He would make contact with the British, with the French. Not at Caesarea, where too many Circassians wandered about, but at the ruins of Athlit. “Aaron’s experimental farm covers the whole shore behind the ruins. Look, Leah, if the Shomer works with us, we can prepare, and plan with the British, and on the appointed day, seize the ruins and raise our flag. It is an impregnable position—a hundred men could hold it against an army. And the Turks have no real army here—Djemal Pasha emptied Palestine for Gallipoli. While the main Turkish army is still held up in Gallipoli where your brother is fighting them, it needs only a small British force to land where we hold the shore. They could cut the Turks in two.” Then he quoted Herzl, “‘If you will it, it need not remain but a dream.’ ”

  Now she felt she understood Avshalom Feinberg. He was a poet aflame with a vision. “You have a great imagination, Avshalom,” Leah said. “It would make a wonderful poem. Why don’t you write it?”

  He flung her an angry look. “In times like this one does not write poems,” he said. “One lives them.” And he walked ahead quickly, as though to rid himself, in disgust, of her lumpish lack of understanding. Then all at once he halted. Before them was the little lemon grove that her father had saved from the locusts. In their rows, the trees stood still attired in all their raiment, the patched sheets, the striped pillow cases, but more than anything, the white petticoats.

  A gale of laughter burst from Avshalom. All his angry wild plans seemed forgotten. In delight he cried out something in English. “Petticoat Lane!”

  When at last he stopped laughing, he explained to her; Petticoat Lane—it was a famous street in London. —And this that they had done, she and her father and the whole family, this was not a wild thing of the imagination? he demanded. This was not poetry? This was not impossible?

  But it had saved the trees, she explained.

  “Against a vast army of locusts that covered the earth, and against which nothing could stand. Except only a bit of human imagination, a bit of daring, Leah!” And he was changed again. Now his words poured forth not as a grandiose vision but in simplest reasonableness, as though there could be no other way of thinking. What future lay before the Yishuv with the Turks? Only famine, disaster, massacre. If the Turks won they would destroy every minority, impose Ottoman culture completely, as they had already shown was their intention. The beginning was already here, with Hebrew virtually outlawed, with even a Keren Kayemeth stamp a crime. But even aside from the Jewish fate, what kind of world could there be? All that was alive in the world, all that was new and fresh in the arts, the whole modern awakening as he had seen it in Europe—in painting, in literature and in freedom of thought—all was in the spirit of the French. It flowed out from Paris. To such a world their strength must go, win or lose, live or die.

  She thought him a poet, he knew, an impractical man—but was such a man as Aaron Aaronson impractical? A scientist, a man of sober judgment. “He too has decided, Leah.”

  What was he leading to? What had they decided? What did he want of her?

  “Our fate is with the Allies. In whatever way possible we must help the Allies.” Perhaps it would not yet lead to a landing on the Palestine shore, but was not Palestine a battlefield nevertheless? Had not the Turks and the Germans already attempted to sweep down and capture the Suez Canal? “They will try again, you can be certain. The war is here, and we can be of great value, regardless of our numbers.”

  Had she not heard, in wars, of work carried out behind enemy lines?

  The word for it came from within herself—spying. Leah did not repeat it to him; it was abhorrent. Even the clever look in his eyes now seemed to her to have become somehow besmirching, as Avshalom measured her response to his revelation. Oddly, he did not even seem to notice her immediate aversion.

  —Why did she think they had come here, he and Aaronson? he asked her. True, to help the farmers against the plague—this, Aaron would have undertaken in any case. But it fell well for their greater purpose. From Djemal Pasha, Aaron Aaronson had received authority to go everywhere, he and his helpers, even to enter military areas. The disposition of the army, the fortifications, the condition of the food supply both for the soldi
ers and the civilian population, all this information must be gathered and sent to the other side. This was the great task—

  Now Leah made herself say it. “You mean to spy?” She tried to keep out of her tone any shock, any revulsion over the word itself. When a human being opened his secret before you, when he was ready to put his whole life into the most terrible danger, because of his deepest beliefs, how could you shame him?

  “In today’s wars,” Avshalom said, “it is called Intelligence. It is the way one person can serve with the weight of many. It is even a way to save the lives of many soldiers, when the battle comes.”

  She did not want to say it was wrong. But her head was shaking slowly from side to side. “It is something I could never know how to do.”

  Would she arrange, he suddenly asked, for him to speak with Menahem? “Don’t fear—not about Intelligence, Leah.” The sparkle had returned in his eyes. “Who knows, we and the Shomer might still lead a British invasion into the land, together.”

  Only Nadina and Galil could have decided whether even to bring such a question before the committee. And if it went before the committee, Menahem reflected, how long could the secret remain a secret? That was the great danger of the whole plan. It could not long remain unknown to the Turks. Such a one as Avshalom would himself give the secret away; he was impetuous.

  Of the cause, Menahem did not need to be convinced; he had already calculated in his mind on which side lay the best hope for the Jews. Certain ideas had come to him, even of the sort Avshalom spoke about. At the Samekh station, how simple it would be for a wagon-driver to keep count of the war materiel coming into the land. Even at the Fuleh station, someone in a cigarette kiosk could see what army units, what officers, were arriving. Such information would be valuable to the Allies. And simply here at Gilboa, the number of German fliers.

  Avshalom’s wilder plans, such as raising the flag at Athlit—that was a poet playing at war. True, such landings had been made. Yet aside from all this, even at a minimum, the need for some kind of cooperation between the different Jewish defense groups for procuring arms, for readiness and a united resistance in case of another Armenia—surely for this purpose alone it was necessary to bring Avshalom’s request before a meeting. The question was, how far should the shomer go?

  He would have put it first before Shimshoni, who commanded in place of Galil, but Shimshoni’s answer he knew in advance. Straightforward, plain, Shimshoni detested the sons of the planters and would never agree to work with them. Perhaps better, if they went first to the Herzlia Gymnasia group in Tel Aviv with whom Rahel was in contact?

  But meanwhile, as Avshalom had put it, suppose he himself—suppose some knowledge came to him that would be of importance to pass on? What should he do?

  Troubled, Menahem came late to his cot. It was often so, from late sittings, or from night duty, that even when he was at home in Gilboa, he had hardly a word with Dvora. Yet this night he sensed Dvora lay awake.

  She too was troubled. Where was she to find feed for the poultry flock? It might even come to the point where the chickens would have to be slaughtered, and the communa would have to feast on them.

  Of the secret problem he did not tell her, but of the problem of unity they talked a long while. It was a long time since they had had such a good talk together, and after a while Dvora came over to his cot and into his arms.

  After the thrumming had ended, and the plague of locusts had risen from the fields, hovered like a low cloud, and at last floated away, all had lain barren and still. Not a shoot, not a leaf on a vine, not a speck of green was to be seen except for the patch where Yankel and the boys removed the coverings that had saved the lemon trees. They returned home with the wagon heaped with petticoats, and Feigel and Shula set themselves to washing and ironing, first those that had been borrowed, tubful after tubful.

  In the vegetable garden behind the house, a patch too narrow for the plow, Yaffaleh worked, squatting low to the ground as she dug out egg-pouches and dropped them into a bucket. A few of her geese had discovered the delicacy and their long necks bent into the pail as they gobbled the eggs. In the larger garden, Leah plowed, burying the eggs the way Aaronson had instructed. She must plant at once, quick-growing beans, squash, carrots. Schmulik came, impatient for the mule and the plow. Abba with the good pair of mules was already back in the fields. Into the dark they labored and every day without halt, to leave no earth unturned, to bury the egg sacs.

  Already the famine was acute in the cities. Wagons came from Jaffa, from Jerusalem, merchants searching to buy the few sacks of grain hoarded away from last year. Wheat was worth its weight in gold. Potatoes, turnips, anything, they begged.

  To HaKeren came representatives from all the kvutsoth in the region, now numbering nearly a dozen, some dominated by the Poale Zion, some by the Poël Hatzaïr. No matter, in this they must act together. The real famine was yet to come, Max Wilner reminded the delegates, and in the wild speculation that had already started, who would suffer more than the workers, the unemployed, the poor in the cities, and the low-salaried teachers? They must take certain things on themselves. All that they produced must be distributed under their own control. First they must supply those who were most needed in the Yishuv. Workers’ kitchens, before any other consideration, must be assured of supplies. They themselves must ration their sale of milk, for children, for hospitals. He proposed a central cooperative to which they would all send their produce, eggs, milk, vegetables, grain when they had it, and from there the food would be sold according to their own priorities, without going through the hands of speculators.

  For once, the two groups were in agreement. But what produce was there to distribute? The grubs were appearing, devouring all.

  Mati saw them first, small white wormlike things dotting the compost heap. He called Schmulik. Under their very eyes the crawling dots were drawing together, forming a little mass, like ants forming an army. And the mass began to move.

  This must be the danger Aaron Aaronson had spoken of. They had not thought of searching the dungheap for egg-sacs.

  Hurriedly they began digging a trench. By full morning it was a frightening thing to behold—like a creeping white lava, the living, devouring, pulsing blanket smeared itself onward. Despite all that had been done to destroy the eggs, the grubs oozed upward out of the garden patches and began a creeping devastation of the new plantings. From yard to yard the outcry was heard. With brooms, the women tried to sweep the pestilence into hastily dug troughs, but even from those, unless they were full ditches, the white lava swelled outward.

  On Leah’s plowed field, they had not come up, but the neighboring vegetable garden, once the Kleinmans’, was covered with the milky horror, and as Tsutsig Bronescu ran from one side to another with his mattock, his wife screamed that the flood was invading the kitchen, the house. And Leah saw one edge of that flow slowly extending, like spilled milk, in her own direction. With armfuls of straw, she hurriedly laid a barrier of fire, but unbelievably, as though commanded, the devouring wave divided itself as it neared the barrier into two prongs reaching out to encircle the line of flame. On one end, Leah ran, flinging down straw to extend the fire, on the other end Mati furiously chopped open a ditch, while Feigel came with a broom to sweep the worms into it.

  In the field, Schmulik and Abba labored a second time to save the grove. From the hillside of Dja’adi, which had never been plowed after the locust plague, the white phlegm was rolling inexorably downward. No wrapping, no cloth could this time protect the young trees; at once they had understood this. The grubs de- voured even the bark. Only a deep trench could stop the flow. Abba plowed as deeply as he could, while Schmulik labored with the mattock to dig the furrows deeper, pausing only to glance at the creeping whiteness—how long would it take? a day? Given a day they could dig their moat all around the grove.

  19

  AFTER THE second wave of destruction there came pitiful, emaciated Jews on the road from Tiberias, Jews whose
alms from abroad had long ceased, begging for something to eat, anything. In Mishkan Yaacov and in Yavniel they came to each door, begging for a crust to carry back, or their daughters would be lost, they said, and they told lurid tales of Jewish girls bringing home bars of Swiss chocolate, and crying out defiantly that they could not watch their little sisters and brothers go hungry. To the Chaimovitches there even came Noach Abulafia the stonecutter who in the first days had helped them to settle into their hovel. He did not come to beg—he still had money—if they would but sell him food. From their last stores, they helped him, but he too told tales of Jewish girls … the shamefulness was not to be believed. Something must be done, but what could be done? He seemed to be speaking directly to Leah. A plan was rising in her mind, but how to go about it was still unclear to her. She must come to Tiberias and see for herself, she told him. And later she was to blame herself for not having gone at once. Perhaps in some way she might have prevented what happened.

  She blamed herself; the comrades in HaKeren blamed themselves and held a long sitting with bitter self-accusations. How could they not have seen, how could they have shut their eyes to the misery only a stone’s throw away in the cluster of Yemenite huts?

  The little employment the Yemenites had had to provide their meager living had vanished; their own garden-patches had been devastated, and now they sat with their families and starved. Had they only come to the kvutsa and asked for help—but it was not their way.