by Meyer Levin
It was as in the early days, cooking on stones, singing in the sundown, tramping a wild hora far into the night: “If not now, then when, then when!” and in the dawn opening one’s eyes to the breath-taking vista from the springs of Dan down the wide flat vale of the upper Jordan, to the hazy mirror of the Huleh swampland, and beyond to the Kinnereth. Here all lay in peace.
From Dan to Beersheba now, the Shomer reached to guard the land, as they constantly repeated to each other in an elation of wonderment—they were actually making these words come true. And it was toward Beersheba that Leah now was called.
The moment had come when arms could be obtained in considerable quantity.
From the further reaches of the Sinai, Bedouin were appearing with three, four rifles under their cloaks, picked up where deserters had flung them. In the Tel Aviv Gymnasia group with whom Rahel was in contact, Eli, the lad who had spent last summer working in Kvutsa HaKeren, put her in touch with a dashing young man named Dov who, as a paymaster for the Turks, moved freely in the southern region. Dov could act as their eyes in the field, he could deal with the Bedouin. What was needed was a safe place, as far south as possible, to which the weapons could be brought. A girls’ farm in one of the southernmost villages, Gedera perhaps, would serve the purpose. And also serve to gather in the chalutzoth who were out of work in the area, and to grow produce for the Jews of Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
Though older, the village with its facing rows of settlers’ dwellings reminded Leah of Mishkan Yaacov; she and her girls could occupy an abandoned house at the far end, and the house, too, with its pair of rooms, was of the same pattern as at home, and as in most of the settlements. All but a few broken chairs the settler had carted away; behind the house stretched his modest grove, with last season’s oranges still hanging shriveled on the trees.
Soon she had collected her girls, even a few who had stayed with her ever since Tiberias; Zipporah returned—how could Leah refuse to accept her? And presently the dwelling with its rows of cots along the walls and its window sills loaded with flowerpots looked like every one of Leah’s habitations.
Menahem himself had come down to help deal with Dov’s Bedouin, meeting them wherever indicated, driving a wagon filled with straw. At first the price was high—-a camel for a rifle. Where could such sums be obtained? But Rahel hurried busily back and forth approaching notables in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, and Eli and his Herzlia Gymnasia group with their excellent family connections, set themselves to the task of gathering funds. Presently, as various Bedouin tribes began to compete with each other in offering arms, the prices went down, as low even as a few loaves of bread for a gun. Each week Motke the shomer from Petach Tikvah would come for the goods, driving off with a hidden wagon bottom stuffed with rifles, pistols, grenades, and munitions, to be stored in his attic. Sometimes Rahel, sometimes Leah, rode with him, sitting on the straw.
Once at Leah’s kvutsa itself, there appeared a Bedouin who grinningly produced, from under his black abaya, two rifles of an unfamiliar sort. They were British. The Turks had withdrawn from the lower Sinai wastes, and the British had crossed the canal and were slowly extending their line toward El Arish.
Gidon’s regiment, the London Fusiliers, was after all not among those who had crossed, for, with its small contingent of Zion volunteers, the regiment had been ordered home for refurbishment and redeployment.
Gidon Chaimovitch lay on his pallet among the rows of men breathing each other’s breath in the iron hold of the troopship, wearing his lifesaver harness, and feeling a final loss of will; he was being carried, carried further and further from his place and purpose in life.
But Herscheleh still had breath to debate, and argued that this corridor to England might still be the best way to their purpose in Palestine, for, like the Jews who left Egypt with Moshe Rabenu, “we have only forty years of wandering before us.”
Who could fathom the ways of history? A dozen years before, after the death of Theodor Herzl, a young Russian Zionist named Chaim Weizmann, a research chemist by profession, had as though by choice moved himself to Manchester, where chemical dyes, his specialty, were important in the weaving industry. Even in Manchester he had incessantly worked for his cause, explaining Zionism to prominent Englishmen, such as the editor of the newspaper, and among those who had listened, several were now in places of power.
In London now, strategists weighed and planned the fate of various lands, including Palestine, after the war. One member of the War Cabinet, indeed, had concluded with a sigh that the only way to protect the canal on the Palestine side was “to take Palestine ourselves.” And then what should be done with it?
Annexation was too bald. And already secret schemes of partition of vast Middle East areas had been made with the French, with the Russians, agreements for areas of control, areas of influence, in the cutting up of the Ottoman Empire. Only the question of the Holy Land had not really yet been settled. Its allocation was vague. Now that the moment for its conquest was come, why not, after all, help the Jews to return to their ancient homeland, and through them, keep a hand on the area? The new Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was a lover of the Bible. Words of the ancient Hebrew prophets rolled from his tongue. The names of villages in Judea were as familiar to him as those of villages in Wales. And Lord Balfour, newly appointed Secretary of State, was one of the earliest to have been fascinated by the chemist Chaim Weizmann and his messianic dreams. And the adventurous Winston Churchill, too. All of them were taken with the sense of being as fingers on God’s hand, in the final mystery of this Biblical cause. And it could be a highly useful maneuver, too. Why not set the Jews on the other side of Suez? What other people could be as energetic, resourceful, and loyal to the power that brought them back to their land?
There was also a Russian-Jewish firebrand, Vladimir Jabotinsky, come to London with his proposition for a Jewish fighting force; there was much to be said for that idea—Jews from all over the world would volunteer for it, thus binding themselves to the cause of England. And even Jews in enemy lands would be moved. Further, the millions of Jews of Russia and America would be so stirred, they would turn all their energy and influence to the cause, those in Russia to keep their country from falling out of the war, and those in America to bring their country into it. And just now, when the situation was strained and every ounce of help was needed!
Suddenly, in London, the campaign for a Jewish Palestine was making progress. An even greater vision appeared to the Middle East expert whose name was on the secret agreements with the French for dividing up the entire Levant. Sir Mark Sykes saw how not one but three submerged peoples could be awakened to help the Allies in a grand design of eventual self-rule: Judea for the Jews, Arabia for the Arabs, and Armenia for the Armenians—-whatever remained of them after the massacres. Urging this inspiring plan, Mark Sykes was everywhere, bringing people together, tugging at the powerful.
When the torpedo struck their troopship, Gidon knew he would live because they were in sight of the shore of Crete and he could swim it. But Herscheleh had disappeared and, rushing down into the hold to look for him, Gidon found his chaver clutching his diary of Gallipoli, which he had gone back to rescue. But like that time under shellfire in Gallipoli, a paralyzing fear had overtaken Herscheleh. Dragging him up on deck, Gidon found the ship immersed in British calm. A troop of nurses, in perfect order, was entering the first lifeboat. Men were at their gun stations firing at the sea. Others were drawn up at their boats. Herscheleh recovered. Yet, entering their lifeboat, he again was seized by panic, and lost his balance, his diary jumping out of his hands into the water. With a wail, he would have leaped after it. “Let it be the diary instead of you!” Tuvia cried, and tumbled Herscheleh into their boat.
That was the one adventure of the voyage; the last troop of the Zion Mule Corps arrived intact, merged into the London Twentieth Fusiliers, in England.
Though hardly more than a company, they were at least together in their own barrack, and anyhow the
long brick building was better than a row of tents, or stinking holes in Gallipoli. But to be far away now in England, under the name of a London they had not even seen, sometimes made Gidon feel as though his true being had sunk like Herscheleh’s diary somewhere in the sea.
Not even Josef Trumpeldor had been there at the ship’s arrival, and Tuvia and Herscheleh had resumed their predictions, begun in Alexandria when Trumpeldor had departed for England, that they would never find Josef again; they would melt into the vast substance of the British army and find themselves shipped off to France to be gassed or blown apart as numerals in a foreign regiment.
The inured shrugged: what did it matter? And Gidon too at times sank into this peculiar soldierly indifference, this sense that you withdrew to a degree from living, from the exercise of will, in order to preserve yourself for the time when you might yet live. Perhaps it was something like the enduring of a long prison sentence.
Then on only the second day Josef found them. On both sides there was hearty, bluff rejoicing. So they’d had a spill in the water! Oh, yes, he had known, even though the movement of their troopship was of course a military secret and he was still outside the military—never mind—the efforts to establish the Jewish unit were progressing, and he would soon be with them again. He and Jabotinsky had secured an absolute promise from certain very high persons in the government that if they could present a list of a thousand Jews ready to volunteer for the Jewish regiment, the unit would be officially established. The campaign for volunteers had begun. So far, however, only a few hundred signatures had been obtained. Things were complicated. Interference and opposition came from strange, unexpected sources. From Jews themselves! Never mind. Jabotinsky had high connections and Chaim Weizmann was helping him with even higher connections. Now that the Zion men were here, as a nucleus, the campaign would really get under way.
At times, the peacefulness of the English countryside, even now, when Britain was deep in the war, aroused in Gidon a great swollen-hearted longing. When would his real life ever begin? This longing that came over him could even feel physically painful, as during moments when he might be walking with Herscheleh down one of the country lanes, between autumnal fields on which sheep were grazing, and not far off a farmer plowed behind a thick-necked Belgian percheron with heavy hocks—ah, what an animal, benign and powerful, a solid part of their clean British world with its compact moist soil. So painful was his longing then that Gidon would grow glum and cross at anything Herscheleh said, until they went less and less together on their walks.
Nor did they go often to the pubs. Gidon somehow could not find a link to the British in their pubs, and would mostly remain sitting in a corner with Herscheleh, Tuvia pulling hairs from his nose. Drinkers they had never become. Even in Gallipoli the Zion men’s alcohol had been traded off by Araleh for good things to eat.
The English villagers were friendly, as by some rule they had made for themselves to be friendly to foreign soldiers, but they were so careful not to intrude on you with personal questions that all human contact died out in games of darts or observations on the weather; “a bit of bad luck,” they would say if the war news was disastrous, or “jolly good” for a victory.
Here in England as in Egypt, Jewish families, learning of the presence of a group from Palestine, issued invitations for Sabbath Eve. But the feeling was not like in Alexandria. There, the Jews after all were not Egyptians but Jews. A wealthy Sephardi with his silent-footed black servitors was, in his home, still like a sojourner in Egypt. Here the British Jews were British; Gidon hardly felt a Jewishness among them. They had sons in the service, and intelligent well-educated daughters; those who invited the Zion boys were British Zionists, it was true, and they all devotedly read their weekly Jewish Chronicle, and they never failed to remind you that Theodor Herzl had received his very first public support from British Jewry when he arrived from Paris to lecture about his plan for a Jewish state. Yet Gidon somehow could not imagine these people or their children living in Eretz.
They were good Jews and most of them were observant, though still one did not feel it was the real thing like in Mea Shearim. They began their Sabbath Eve properly with a Kiddush and the blessing over the chaleh, and managed with their war rations to provide a Sabbath-like meal, mostly fish and boiled potatoes, yet a British Jew’s Friday evening display of Jewishness almost made Gidon feel a little surprised.
As Tuvia was a belligerent unbeliever, Gidon and Herscheleh usually went together, and they would dutifully recount their stories of Gallipoli; the Charge of the Zion Mule Brigade that stopped a Turkish surprise attack was their best. There was also the pathetic tale of the frightened Yitzik who in the end was posthumously awarded the D.S.O. for hanging onto the lead-rope even after two bullets had gone through his arm. (He had died of dysentery.)
Yet it was always still fairly early when they departed with a “Good Sabbath to you.” Sometimes they walked from the West End to Whitechapel, to the hangabouts of the other Jews, the ones the British Hebrews called “those fellows.” Thousands of young Russian Jews had got to England to escape the Czar’s armies.
Usually their British hosts would refer to “those fellows” in crisp but self-mastered disapproval, “They are beginning to present quite a problem to us.” But on one particular night their host had broken out in cold anger, for these “Russian draft-dodgers” (they were not referred to as Jews) had had the audacity to organize themselves into a society and had issued a broadside openly opposing induction into His Majesty’s armed forces! Inevitably, the public had reacted against all Jews, despite the above-average presence of British Jewish sons in the various services. In Leeds, the window of a kosher butcher shop had been smashed. “Really now, I believe we should confront these Russian immigrants with a plain choice: Join up or go back where you came from! The Czar would have them in uniform one, two, three—you can count on that.”
“What I don’t understand,” said the wife, “is how they can brazen it out in public. How can any man with an ounce of self-respect walk about in mufti while the sons of this land are fighting for him—that I can’t understand! And mind you, perhaps they have reasons to have no love of country where they came from—after all, they fled the land of pogroms, and I can understand that they might not want to fight for the Czar even though he happens to be our ally. But England has given them refuge, and for them to refuse to join up is disgraceful.”
“The worst of it is that most of them look like the common idea of the Jews, the unfortunate ghetto type, and that makes the problem all the more conspicuous.”
“I don’t blame those that hate them,” said the daughter. “I find it difficult to keep from hating them myself.” Her husband was at the front in France. Two sons of the family were also in the service; one of them had been gassed and was in hospital. “It’s a pity we Jews are judged by the example of such as them, and not by such as you,” the daughter said to Gidon and Herscheleh.
Yet, perversely enough, it was when he found himself among “them” that Gidon felt more at ease, more with his own kind. Not his own kind as he was today—these men were familiar to him from long ago, from before, from when he was a boy; they were still arguing in the same hotheaded way in Yiddish as when he had listened in Cherezinka, to Reuven and his friends in their endless dispute about the revolutzia. Whitechapel was filled with them, the street was in a constant turmoil of movement, of clusters forming and dissolving; the tea shops were packed with them, and everywhere you heard Yiddish and saw Yiddish papers.
When his own family had gone to Eretz, and other Jews had gone to America, large numbers had come here too. They were the schneiders, tailors working in clothing manufacture, and it was from among these immigrants that Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky expected to recruit their Jewish army. Only, as Herscheleh the Newspaper had at once sniffed out, everything in this respect was topsy-turvy—as could always be expected where Jews were involved. It was, Herscheleh said, like when they themselves had come to l
abor in Eretz only to find that the Jewish planters refused to use Jewish workers. The schneiders among whom recruits were being sought were exactly the ones who refused to fight.
To begin with, the schneiders of London answered you, had they wanted to fight for Zionism they would originally have gone to Palestine and not come here. “Why should we kill ourselves to make a Jewish nation if we are going to be like all other nations, with an army and capitalism and downtrodden workers?” If you answered that what the Jewish nation was going to be like was up to those who came there, and that your own brother and sister were part of a communa, they sneered at “Fourieristic idealism and romanticism that led nowhere.” Others, a bit less hostile to Zionism, declared themselves to be followers of Ahad Ha’am, who had come from Odessa and was right here in London preaching against nationhood.
First, the philosopher declared, came the creation of a center for Jewish life, of Jewish culture, of Jewish ideas. But the revolutionary schneiders went further. Nationhood was already a thing of the past. The triumph of the world proletariat would do away with nationalism, so there was no need for Jews belatedly to embrace it! But all these arguments were as nothing when you came to the anarchists, the pacifists, the Mensheviki and the Bolsheviki. They could talk even Herscheleh under the table. Many of them were followers of the firebrand of the great revolt in St. Petersburg in 1905, a Jew named Trotsky. Even Gidon remembered about him —how, after the uprising was crushed, Trotsky was put on trial by the Czar’s police, and the whole of Cherezinka had worried for this Jewish revolutionist—even the older, pious Jews who cursed him for an apicoiras, a godless renegade, had worried for him. Gidon remembered how all the boys in his Talmud Torah had cheered and rushed out into the street in their excitement when word came that Trotsky had escaped from Siberia. This same Trotsky was here in London, or he had just been here, who the devil knew, but he had many passionate followers among the schneiders, only waiting for him to give the signal for the international workers’ revolution. According to them, on one great day all soldiers everywhere on both sides of the war would drop their arms, refuse to kill their fellow-toilers, and that would be the end of it! So why, of all things, start a Jewish army?
