The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  The revolutionists had their gangs, too. Only a few weeks before the Zion company had arrived, indeed perhaps at the very time when Herscheleh and Gidon and the rest of the boys were struggling in the waters before Crete, a gang had appeared at a recruitment meeting called by Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky. Tomatoes and rotten eggs had flown, and rocks too, and the editor of Jabotinsky’s paper, a small, near-sighted Zionist, had had his glasses broken.

  This at least, Tuvia declared, was something for the Zion boys to take care of. The toughies were known as Chicherin’s Boys, after a Russian revolutionist—not even a Jew—in exile here. Chicherin’s Boys came to Zionist meetings, thirty or forty in a gang, hooted, howled, started fights, and prevented speakers from being heard.

  Yet despite their anger at these hooligans, Gidon and Herscheleh were drawn to Whitechapel, to the cafes where you got tea in a glass instead of in a mug with milk, and where you could even get a piece of golden lokshen kugel, or a knish. Just the odor alone of these tea shops evoked a far earlier state of being, a homeyness that reached back to before their life in Eretz, that was in a childhood time of a bobeh, a zaydeh, in Cherezinka.

  Soon enough they got into violent arguments. The schneiders were not too eager to pick up acquaintance with men in uniform, and at first Gidon and Herscheleh felt a ring of avoidance around them. Their Shield of David insignia had been replaced with the patch of the Twentieth London Fusiliers, but once, a tall, red-pocked fellow with glittering, knowing eyes, and a little sneer behind them, remarked, “You’re speaking Hebrew?”

  And so it began. Not that the fellow could speak Hebrew—only, he said, a vestige from cheder, for luckily he had fled from there in time! But half in English, with Yiddish words—complete Yiddish phrases thrown in when the talk became heated—all the usual arguments came pouring upon them. No, chum, he wasn’t wearing any uniform, no, thank you. He was making them, and at good wages, too, but when it came to fighting, he was waiting for the capitalist powers to kill each other off, and preserving his strength for the great day. “On the barricades, I’ll fight! For the people, I’ll fight!” And there were twenty thousand like him here. Not only did they escape conscription, as foreign subjects, but cer- tain taxes they escaped as well, and where, he wanted to know, where did they and the Zion army people get their nerve, coming here and upsetting the applecart?

  At first Gidon heard the words without anger, the way he might have listened to a singsong recitation in cheder—this revolutionist was even swaying back and forth like a yeshiva bocher. All this talk was the same as in Cherezinka, the Bundists with their world revolution against the Poale Zionists.

  All the boys and even the girls had been in one youth movement or the other. And it was the old slogans of the Bundists that now came sputtering forth between forkfuls of kugel; in the years in Eretz, Gidon had forgotten them, so now the slogans had the ring of snatches of song from childhood: imperialism, world struggle, downtrodden masses, chauvinism, militarism, bourgeois bloodsuckers. “At home”—the fellow meant in Russia—“would you fight for the Czar? And here in England is it different? Czar, King, Kaiser, they’re all the same, even if they make war on each other, they’re allies against the common people, and anyway they’re all cousins, the lot of them. The English have to uphold Czar Nicholas and his whole band of parasites, his Rasputin, his Okhrana, his pogromists. You Zionists are a bunch of dupes. Allegiance to His Majesty’s Government! Tfoo! It’s against your royal highnesses, not for them, that we’ll offer our lives—may all of them choke on their own blood!”

  And then the schneider began to fling questions, challenges at them, flinging out the answers as well before they could open their mouths. Who was Herzl? A lackey of the capitalist press, an assimilated bourgeois Jew who had himself escaped his people’s tribulations and who saw the Jews only as miserable scum, as a relief problem. “And even worse are your false socialists, your so-called Labor Zionists, your Borochovs with their mixed-up Marxism …”

  Gidon was no great reader or theorist, but under the incessant outpouring he was becoming red-faced. Let Herscheleh answer, let them throw names of writers and books at each other, Kropotkin, Bucharin, Plekhanov, Das Kapital, Rome and Jerusalem. A circle of hangers-on kept growing behind the Bundist, grinning as he waved his long arms to emphasize each point he scored. “Lackeys, that’s what you are! Fighting the capitalist war against your own brothers in the international working class, bribed and bought because those clever ruling bastards allow a mere Jew to put on a uniform and get himself shot up for them. Jewish fighters! Actually you’re traitors to your class, a bloody bunch of moral cowards!”

  At this, Gidon leaped up. “Shut your bloody trap!” he shouted, and got off one hard slap at the fellow’s mouth. For a second the fellow teetered in his chair, his arms flailing for balance. Herscheleh too had leaped up. It was no band of revolutionary toughs such as Chicherin’s Boys that they faced, but a circle of startled Jews, many with eyeglasses, a few fat-faced, but most with the thin-lipped look of the half-tubercular shop worker, the skeptic, the self-educated reader of books, the listener to discussions.

  “Stop! Boys, please! Not by me! Not in my place!” the proprietress was begging, in Yiddish. To the Bundists she cried, “I begged you a thousand times, don’t quarrel with soldiers!” And to the muleteers, “I beg you, leave.”

  Gidon and Herschel shouldered their way out, while imprecations rose behind them, “Catspaws! Traitors to the working class!” And then a surmounting shriek in Yiddish, “Shlemiels!”

  From somewhere within himself a long unused reply spat out of Gidon. “Vantzen!”

  Once outdoors, he agreed with Herscheleh, those vermin weren’t worth a bruised knuckle.—It was a long, long time, Gidon reflected, since he had been completely disgusted with Jews.

  When they reached the barracks, a peculiar feeling came over him of returning to his own world, with the foul civilian world shut out. The smell of metal, oil, men, weapons and gear. The solid clean foulness of the soldiers’ own language, the familiar eternal cardplayers, and even the narrow cot. You knew where you were.

  Tonight there was to be a big meeting in the hall above Goldwasser’s restaurant in the heart of Whitechapel, and, with a few dozen other muleteers, Gidon would attend in mufti.

  Over the stairway entrance was a huge banner in English and Yiddish, with the name of Jabotinsky in high flame-tailed letters. The sidewalk was crowded; Jews were arriving, most of them on the elderly side, accompanied by their corpulent, corseted wives, hurrying eagerly as to a free show. “You’ve never heard Jabotinsky speak?” Gidon caught a lip-smacking voice. “Oho! A tongue of gold! If he wanted to sing in the opera he would become another Caruso!”

  But already at the entrance disputes seethed. The stairs were half-blocked. Young men from the revolutionists’ table at Goldwasser’s, and a number of their girls—who, with their eyeglasses, all seemed to resemble Nadina of Gilboa—were pushing leaflets into everybody’s hand. “Militarists! Murderers!” he read. An arm yanked at him. “What do you want to go in there for, comrade?” Behind, a squat, middle-aged Yidl with a pointed beard cried in Yiddish, “Let me through! Hooligans!” “You can go, who stops you!” they laughed at him. “Such as you can join Trumpeldor’s army.”

  All those pushing their way inside seemed to be above military age, good-hearted little shopkeepers, loyal Zionists, each of whom doubtless had the Keren Kayemeth’s blue collection box in his kitchen. But once in the hall, Gidon saw a scattering of younger faces, some looking serious. Perhaps there would be a number of undecided and from them perhaps a few would come forward to enlist. But there were other young men, with their smirk of impatient belligerence, sitting in twos and threes. Wherever these were clustered, Gidon and Tuvia placed a few of their own boys on the aisle. A reserve they kept in the rear.

  Josef Trumpeldor spoke first, after an introduction by an important British Jew, a member of Parliament, who called him “The Modern Maccabee.” In his mili
tary jacket, with an odd assortment of Russian and British insignia and decorations on his chest, and the Shield of David of the Zion Mule Corps on his cap, his artificial arm straight at his side and the other arm held just as stiffly, Josef was like a statue of himself. And just as nobly statuesque were the things he said, in English phrases he had memorized, delivered with a heavy Russian accent that brought sympathetic chuckles from the middle-aged. The good Jews gazed at him proudly, and here and there Gidon saw a girl with that moist, rapt look that Josef evoked in young women. Even the revolutionists sat quietly, as though their strategy was to let this one pass. Among them, Gidon’s eye caught sight of the tall talker of a few Fridays ago, the one he had given a good smack in the mouth. The glitter of recognition was returned to him, not marked with any promise of vengeance but with a pitying scorn.

  A notion passed through Gidon’s mind. What if Josef, the real Josef, suddenly let go at them, the Josef of shellfire and the trenches, roaring a foul pschakreff and flinging a cannonade of soldiers’ curses at the fearful and cowardly, blasting them out, the way he had landed a good kick on Herscheleh the day he was frozen in fright? The thought made Gidon grin, and Herscheleh, beside him, demanded what was the joke.

  Josef soon concluded, calling every man to arms, straight, soldierly, direct. “Jews, we have fought for every cause but our own! Numbers of our best men have died and are dying every day in every army in the world. At this moment they fire at each other from French and German trenches. But at last we can fight as Jews, for our own cause, for our own land! Can any man find anything worthier in life on this earth?”

  There was applause, many of the older Jews gazing around with indignation at the young radicals who sat unresponding. Then a single, jeering voice rose up, “Go give them your other arm, chum!”

  A shocked hall-wide gasp, a young woman’s voice crying “For shame!” a rumbling, and trouble might have broken out. Trumpeldor remained standing, rigid, livid, but Jabotinsky had leaped forward, his words chopping down in scathing strokes on such contemptible, worm-soft cowardice, like the flying strokes of a chopping knife on a noodle board, ripping the dough into slivers, and plop goes the lot into boiling water.

  From all around the hall came sighs of pleasure as he gave it to them, the hooligans, the troublemakers, a disgrace to their people. Suddenly the orator pulled from his pocket a crumpled leaflet—theirs. Loudly, he read out their own slogan and argument, “‘Jews! Why Fight to Create a New Ghetto? At last, we Jews in democratic lands have attained equality, justice, an equal vote, an equal place in the schools. Why again separate ourselves as Jews? If fight we must, let us fight in the English Army as Englishmen, in the French Army as Frenchmen, yes, even in the German Army as loyal Germans.’ ” And then, without a shred of emphasis, the orator read out the signature, “‘The Society of Jewish Trade Un- ionists.’ ” As though startled, he read it again, “‘Jewish Trade Unionists.’ ” And in mock puzzlement, Jabotinsky reread a previous line, “‘Why again separate ourselves as Jews?’ ”

  Oh, he had caught them! The hall rocked with glee over the master stroke.

  “Perhaps,” the orator remarked when the laughter had at last gone down to a bubble, “perhaps this splendidly logical leaflet was written while standing on his head by that renowned upside-down philosopher, Moishe Kapayer!”

  This set them off again.

  And now in all solemnity Jabotinsky repeated, “Why separate ourselves as Jews?” and began to give the answer.

  In Egypt a year ago when Gidon had crowded with the rest of the fellows from the deportation ship into an unused stable in the refugee compound to hear the famous journalist, he had listened to much of this same oration, but it was like music to hear it again. It swelled, it vibrated, it pierced. The devoted elderly Jews who had come to hear the great orator wept tears as he described Kishinev with the slaughtered laid out in rows in their shrouds, and they sighed with pride as he told how Jewish boys had revolted against the supine ways of the older generations, and secured weapons, and mounted guard in Homel, in Odessa, even in Kishinev itself. The listeners breathed deeply with naches as he told how Jewish members of the Shomer rode on their steeds, guarding the settlements in Palestine, and they sat erect with wonder and admiration as he declared how he himself had made a wrong judgment, how, in Egypt last year, he had refused to join Josef Trumpeldor when Jews were offered acceptance into the British army only as muleteers. But those very muleteers of Zion had become a symbol of valor in Gallipoli! Among your famous Scottish regiments and your famous Australians, and your famous Gurkhas—none of whom feared to ghettoize themselves in their national pride—there had arisen the name of the sons of Zion. The Shield of David on their caps had become among the most respected of emblems amongst the toughest of fighting men in the hardest of campaigns. And many were the men of Zion who had given more than their arm, their two arms—they had given their lives. And because of this, Jews were now to become a fighting brigade. Only by fighting and winning back their own land from the Turks would they overcome the age-old stigma of the ghetto. For what was a ghetto? A tolerated corner in a city that belonged to another people, in a foreign land. A land of your own, a city of your own, was no ghetto. Was London a ghetto to the Englishman? Simply this, then, was the object of Zionism, of the Jewish Brigade. Already the Jews were building their own city—Tel Aviv—in what would one day, by the grace of the remaining, mighty right arm of Josef Trumpeldor and of the men who joined with him in the coming battle—be their own land. By such courage would their own city one day stand in their own land.

  The orator paused to allow the wild, joyous response free rein. Then he resumed: And who were these very British patriots who disdained to fight as Jews? There were two kinds: the social revolutionists, and the sons of the big capitalists. Strange bedfellows. What did they have in common?

  First, let it not be imagined that all social revolutionaries were against the idea of a Jewish fighting force. On the contrary—the very originator of the fighting force was a social revolutionist, and he was present here on the platform—Josef Trumpeldor, Zionist and Communist, for such was his declared philosophy. The nucleus of the Jewish fighters in the Zion Corps were stalwart settlers from the kvutsoth and the cooperatives of Palestine, the only place in the world where true communism was being lived and practiced.

  What then was the difference between pro-Zionist social revolutionaries, and anti-Zionist social revolutionaries? He didn’t have to tell them. Both kinds were here in the hall. One kind wanted to remain Jewish, right through and on after the world revolution, just as French revolutionaries wanted to remain French, Germans, German, and British, British. But the Jews, and perhaps only the Jews, had another type amongst them—those who wanted to disappear as what they were. They wanted to disappear as Jews. Internationalism for the sake of the world revolution was their excuse. All other nationals of course understood that internationalism was a union of nationalisms. What else? Only the Jews who hated being Jews wanted to disappear into the international revolution. They were, quite simply, ultra-assimilationists. Their argument really had nothing to do with the social revolution. This was simply an excuse. To their twisted souls, the cry that there would be a ghetto in Zion was, under the guise of idealism, a way out of being a Jew.

  Oh, it was nothing new, even in social revolutionary circles this argument had been put forward at the very beginning, seventy-odd years ago. Karl Marx was a Jew who didn’t want to be a Jew, who hated it. He had been born into a converted family, yet found himself known as a Jew. And so, as a substitute for the Jewish Messiah, he invented the internationalist utopia. Virtually a co-founder with Marx and Engels of the whole Communist theory and theology was another Jew, Moses Hess. But in the midst of it all, this one had discovered for himself that he remained deeply a Jew, and had turned to the idea of the return of the Jews to Jerusalem—without ceasing to believe in socialism. Socialism was in no way contrary to national peoplehood. So much for the first grou
p, the revolutionists.

  And what of the second, the sons of high capitalism, likewise opposed to Zionism and the Jewish army? As with the socialists, so with the capitalists; this opposition hardly embraced all of them and it had nothing to do with their economic status or philosophy. Here in London you had one Rothschild who was a supporter of the Jewish army, and another Rothschild who put in its way every obstacle he could muster. It was not their capitalism that made such men anti-Zionist. It was, exactly as in their socialist enemies, the craving to disappear as Jews, to assimilate. The same hatred of their origin—an old, old phenomenon among us—Jewish anti-Semitism.

  Let them assimilate, let them disappear. It could be done. Even with comparative ease. Human beings were amazingly adaptable. They could live without a sense of smell, they could lose their eyesight and live, they could live after half their internal organs were removed, and they could live without their souls. But as for him—he respected a thousand times more a man who honestly lost his limbs in battle than a poor wretch who wanted to cut out his own soul because in this brutal world he encountered imbeciles and wretched bullies who spat on Jews.

  Oh, those sick souls! There was Lionel Rothschild using all his wealth and high connections to block the cause of the Jewish army. There was Sir Edwin Montagu screaming with rage against Zionism! Why, such goyim as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, Lord Balfour and General Smuts were better Zionists than these soul-sick Jews, nor did they need to have the reason for the creation of a Jewish army explained to them. “Our worst ene- mies come from amongst ourselves, those who are unknowingly victims of anti-Semitism, those Jews who want to cease to be Jews, who are fearful of being what they were created to be. They are so sick that like miauling infants they thrust away, they go into a fit of rage at the cure that is brought to them.”