by Meyer Levin
It was a season of marriages. Even Rahel’s! For at last, from their long waiting in Egypt, there arrived the third battalion of the Brigade, with Dovidl and Avner. At once the two of them summoned a sitting in the party’s cabin by the sea, arriving late, as they had received no pass and had had to sneak out. So many problems were on the agenda there was hardly time for a proper greeting.
Dovidl was married! He had married a girl in New York, a nurse, and already a baby had been born, a girl he had not yet seen.
Here Dovidl stood before Leah at last, and the same old impulse returned between them: they both burst out laughing. “Nu?” Dovidl said. “And you, Leah?”
And she? What could she say to him? That she was still a big fool, secretly dreaming of the day her Handsome Moshe might appear, as a few Russian Jews had begun to appear, after walking the whole way from the Caucasus?
—What a sight he was in uniform, she laughed, and Avner even worse, his leggings loose, his belt awry. Dovidl gave his comical shrug, and the sitting began—so many problems—who knew where to start? Avner had come with an agenda and a whole prepared plan. Unity must be achieved first of all, a single workers’ party; an assembly of workers must be prepared, for they, and not the merchants and notables of Tel Aviv, must become the leading force in the National Home. Behind them they would have the whole force of the Poale Zion in America, and they must send a powerful delegation to the next Zionist Congress and be sure to capture places on the crucial committees. They must also send delegates to the World Socialist Congress and not become isolated; they must be a part of the world movement and have the movement behind them. Here at home there was the whole question of security. The Shomer was broken, half the men had returned with their health forever impaired. Besides, a new, broader organization was needed, one that would include the Herzlia Gymnasia group of Dov and Eli. And also the men of the Brigade—
A whole side-discussion began. The Jewish battalions must not disband! There was Jabotinsky’s plan for them to be turned into a militia—
—But at least, leaders like Avner and Dovidl must be got out of the service! It was absurd that they hadn’t even been able to obtain a pass to come here!
—Yes, and if the meeting didn’t soon end, they wouldn’t be able to get back to Sarafend tonight and would be thrown into the brig in the morning.
“Wait!” Leah interposed. There was perhaps a way. Her brother Gidon had got married and it was true this had helped, as Gidon was about to be given his discharge!
Misha, the secretary, who had lost his voice in the Damascus imprisonment, called out in his hoarse whisper, “Chavera Leah, is this a proposal that Avner should get married?”
To everyone’s astonishment, Avner, in the midst of the laughter, announced from the chair, “If it helps, I am ready here and now.”
What was happening here! Suddenly the sitting had become a wedding! Young Avram from Gilboa arose to suggest they be married under the Jewish law of two witnesses. It turned out that Avner even carried with him a wedding ring bought in America and inscribed with Rahel’s name and his own. Standing with Rahel before Dovidl and Shimshoni, Avner declared he took Rahel unto him for his wife. In recognition of equality of the sexes, Rahel in her turn declared that she took Avner to her for her husband. Leah was the first to embrace Rahel, engulfing her. Rahel clung to her and sniffled.
And Leah herself? She was truly now the last.
It was Menahem who, at the next sitting, proposed the mission to Russia. From those who had managed to come through, one or two at a time, little could be learned. They told of small groups of chalutzim meeting here and there. One of them had heard of a conference that had been organized, was it in Kovno? by Josef Trumpeldor. But where Trumpeldor was now, he had no idea. All Russia was tohu v’bohu.
There was no doubt someone had to go there to make contact, and to start a new stream of chalutzim flowing.
Then Leah rose. —What about chalutzoth? Women were desperately needed. The experience of their own generation had shown that with such a shortage of women, many of the men did not stay. A woman should be sent there, too.
Both she and Menahem were selected. But how should they go? With what papers? Russian ports were blockaded by the capitalist powers.
In Constantinople, Menahem was confident, he could find a way. Constantinople was occupied by the French, and just now they also held Odessa. Perhaps by that route? But how should Menahem and Leah even get to Constantinople? “Combinations” must be found.
Several kinds of identity papers were prepared by Young Avram. Leah even found her old Russian documents; she would be returning to seek her family. No, better—to take part in the revolution.
Finally, through Avner’s political maneuvering in the Zionist Commission, urgent requests were made by the Commission to the military government for a safe-conduct for a pair of delegates to a labor conference in Constantinople.
36
IN CONSTANTINOPLE, Menahem soon managed. A busy black-market traffic to Odessa was being carried on by small vessels, and in one of these, chartered by a Jewish lawyer from Moscow, who had escaped to Odessa and was trafficking in dried figs, bolts of cloth, olives, whatever he could find, they sailed. Menahem passed from the ship as a sailor. A woman—who noticed a woman, even such a large one? Leah walked ashore in the company of the Moscow lawyer who had just completed his arrangements with the customs inspector. What did it matter how much you paid, he laughed—in Odessa there were no price limits. Anything you could bring in you could sell for any price you named. Indeed he had noticed that Menahem was a clever man, and if perchance he wanted to go into business—fortunes could be made on a single trip. Fortunes.
There they were, before the great broad stairs that led from the harbor up to the city. Down these stairs, fourteen years ago, she had hurried with Reuven, in their departure for Eretz! Menahem too was filled with memories of the harbor, from his sailor days.
He walked swiftly, he knew just where he was going. Before the courtyard entrance of a large gray building, neither impoverished nor affluent looking, a pair of young men lounged, distinctly chevreh, on watch! It couldn’t be—but it was true. In the old headquarters of the Jewish Self-Defense League—they were still here in the same back-rooms! Young Jews. Defenders. Zionists.
The emissaries from Eretz were surrounded, hugged, deluged with talk, questions, inquiries, names. Was it true—a Jewish nation? And could they really get in? How could they go? What were the conditions in the land?
Here, things were in a turmoil. The French had come a few months before, but it was believed they would leave. Perhaps soon. No, they interfered little, and at least they kept off the roving bands of murderous Ukrainians. The Ukrainian nationalists were everywhere, killing Jews, seizing entire areas from the Bolsheviki, from each other. The Whites too were said to be on the march from their stronghold in the Caucasus. But here in Odessa, the Jewish Defense was holding fast. In this place, they had a garrison, a kitchen; many slept here. In the city, turmoil. Jews had fled here from Moscow, from Petrograd—starvation in the cities. Money had no value. Speculation, madness. Some lived like kings. The old Zionist leaders were still here, they would meet them. Trumpeldor? Not here in Odessa. It was rumored that he had come with a kvutsa as far as the Crimea and was on the way to Eretz.
Even before they had half-adjusted themselves and begun to make lists of contacts in various towns, the event came—overnight the French evacuated. Boarded their ships and sailed away. The next day the Red Army was in the city. It was better, it was worse. The Jewish camp remained unmolested. A red flag went up. Black marketeers were being arrested, shot. Many of the speculators were Jews, but who could defend them? The best was to sit quietly until there was a semblance of order.
Leah could not sit quietly, now that the way was open. What of their mission? They must go to the centers of Jewish life, they must find what remained of the movement.
Menahem could not leave; he was already involved
in complex, secret negotiations to charter a ship. In the end he agreed that Leah should go. A lad named Meier, who knew his way about, was going to Kiev, just now freed from the Ukrainian separatists.
To wait in the station for a train was hopeless, Meier said. Among the thousands besieging the station, it would take a week to pass through. However, he knew the place where the engine stopped for water.
Even there, the ground was covered with those who waited. Peasants with bundles and wicker crates, townsfolk with suit- cases. Why did people move about, where were they going, did they all have a purpose as she had? A day and a night on the ground, but at last they were successful. As the train approached, they pushed themselves so close to the tracks that they might well have been pushed under the wheels. Meier would wiggle his way between elbows and legs, and into the crack he made, Leah would press with all her bulk. Now the lad scrambled to the roof of a boxcar and she climbed up on his heels. To make room, Leah took a peasant woman’s huge basket onto her lap.
Before Kiev was Cherezinka.
And yet, in the early morning, as the train bumped on uneven rails through the region of her childhood and from the cartop she saw the endless vista of the fields of wheat swaying in a broad slow movement as though the great skirt of heaven had brushed over the land, it was hard to keep thinking of all the dreadful things that had happened and were still happening here in the Ukraine, and instead Leah’s heart rose in anticipation of her childhood home.
On the roads she could see the peasants driving their long dray-wagons, the same sort as were used in Eretz after all, and in the fields she could see the squat women in their many broad skirts and cover-aprons, with their kerchiefs on their heads, bent over as before, as always, and the squat moujiks trudging in their boots. Then how could it really all be changed?
At last the train made the halt at Cherezinka, and the station hut looked the same, unpainted, mean and small, but even more dilapidated, the windows half-boarded up or stuffed with rags where panes were missing. But once she had scrambled down to the earth and turned her head to look this way and that, Leah saw that war had passed through—many times, as she had already heard. Petlura and his pogromists, and the Reds, and again Ukrainian bands, and now it was once more the Reds; they had seized everything, they arrested, they shot, but at least they put an end to pogroms.
A militiaman examined the travel pass that the lads in Odessa had arranged for her. He screwed up his eyes for a moment, then shrugged and waved her by. On her first steps along the familiar central street, Leah half-expected at once to recognize people she had known, but not a face seemed familiar. Red flags hung from various buildings; she recognized the apothecary’s shop, but the Jewish name on the sign was gone. Here and there lines of women stood, with market bags, and that air of long patience—they didn’t even seem to be gossiping. A few faces she almost knew—but she wasn’t sure. Now she turned into a Jewish lane, her heartbeat quickening. Surely here she would see old school friends, neighbors—and she’d hurry to the big house of her uncle, where she would find everyone.
First, here was the courtyard where she and the family had lived. This house too had been owned by Uncle Kalman the Rich; considered an excellent building, it had four stairways spaced around the courtyard, and dwellings for some thirty families, all told. As Leah passed through the wagon gate, she felt relieved—the yard was the same. There in the center stood the low-branched apple tree over whose fruits everyone used to quarrel, and two small boys sat on a branch swinging their heels over the heads of four little girls who were playing, just below. Such pretty children! Leah could have swept them up in her arms to carry them straight back to Eretz!
“Who are you?” one boy called out in Russian, not Yiddish, and already a young woman was running from a washtub—still in the same place by the pump—calling incredulously, “Leah!”
It was Marusha, the daughter of a neighbor from her own stairway. Two of the little girls were hers, and a life-story tumbled forth, even as Marusha spirited Leah into her flat “before everyone seized her.” She lived with her mother and father, the glazier—no, he no longer had the shop opening into the yard, but at least he had been accepted into the glaziers’ artel; Marusha’s husband had been killed in the war fighting for the Czar, she said with a bitterness that seemed to embrace both the Czar and her dead spouse.
“You remember Pinya the Philosopher, as everyone called him —he was always with your brother Reuven, he too was a young Zionist—if he had only gone with Reuven he would be alive today—I married Pinya. How is Reuven—is he married, and you, Leah?”
But swiftly engulfing Leah’s answer, Marusha’s words tumbled on, not even giving Leah a chance to ask about her own cousins, her Uncle Kalman; the Germans had been here, yet somehow everyone here in the house had got through the time of the Germans; then the revolution—but then came Petlura, savages, the foulest of scum—the whole yard was a gehenna, blood, dead Jews.
“They raped me, too, they found me and dragged me out and raped me here on the stairs—” Marusha sucked in her lip just like when they were little girls and did something naughty. “I was lucky, only one of them, and then he took me for his—I begged him, if it must happen, then not on the stairs. But we never speak of those things and now things are better.”
Yes, she now had a good friend, a comrade, a Red Army man, and he was very fond of her children, and they were very fond of him, though—and this time with an intimate whisper, a secret between them as in the old days, her mother must not know, “Leah, he’s a goy!”
They had reached Marusha’s door. From her mother, in a long singsong interspersed with sighs, Leah heard that very few Jews were left in the building, the Russians had sent them all away during the war and few had managed to come back; as to Leah’s uncle, he was no longer the landlord, the building was appropriated, and she didn’t know what had become of him—though she said it with an intake of breath that left Leah uncertain what she meant. This was no longer a Jewish courtyard. “Others” had taken over the flats.
Then the mother gazed on Leah with watery, compassionate eyes and whispered, “They killed him.”
Her huge powerful uncle, the house-owner, the mill-owner, the loud Kalman before whom the entire family trembled? Who had killed him? the Germans? the Petlurists? No, no, even with those bandits he had managed, he contributed gold. “But when the Red Army men came, they shot him.” The woman said it without comment in her voice; so it was, and Marusha again uttered her little giggle.
After a moment Leah asked—her cousins?
Oh no, not them. Nor her aunt.
—Where were they, then? Again, Marusha’s mother sucked in her breath.
—And her school-day friends? Leah recalled several names from their youth group, the Tzirai Zion Club, had Marusha heard from any of them? In those days Marusha had come now and again to the meetings, it was there that girls met boys.
Oh, she had long ago forgotten those things, Marusha said. Now there was the revolution!
But perhaps some of their old friends were to be found? Perhaps some of them still dreamed of coming to Eretz Yisroel? “Now all can come! The doors are open! We have a Declaration—it will be a Jewish land!”
The mother seized Leah’s arm. “Truly? Is it all true?” It had been whispered, but no one believed it. And now she wanted Leah to tell her how it was with them there, and at each detail, of the farm, of their cattle, of the cooperativa and Reuven’s Garden of Eden, she clucked her tongue and sighed, “And Eretz Yisroel will really become a Jewish land?”
Suddenly Marusha rattled out, “The British imperialists have seized Palestina, and Jews are helping them to protect their Suez Canal and their colonial empire!” Then again she giggled.
It was necessary at once to register her presence in Cherezinka, and as Leah inquired for the commandatura, she was given a familiar address. But—it was her uncle’s mansion!
Naturally enough, since they had liquidated the capitalist cou
nterrevolutionary, they had taken over his big house. And there in the grand entrance hall Leah found, sitting behind the broad mahogany table with carved legs that she remembered from her uncle’s library, a comrade secretary to whom she addressed herself. On the walls there still hung several huge gilt-framed paintings of which her uncle had been proud, a portrait of himself in a frock coat, and opposite it a painting of the prophet Elijah with a tangled gray beard, wearing an animal skin. There was also a vast painting of Moses on a thunderous mountaintop, with a streak of lightning illuminating the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments that he held aloft over his head. Strange that they hadn’t taken down these pictures. Indeed the house looked undisturbed, even cared for with respect, yes, a possession now of the people. And this gave her a feeling of approval, even of kinship to the revolutionists, though surely it might not have been really necessary to shoot her big, loud uncle. It was Kalman Koslovsky, people said, her mother’s brother, that she resembled in her great size. But perhaps Uncle Kalman had done something foolish. A provocation.
The comrade secretary, studying her ancient Russian document, suddenly arose and disappeared down the broad dim hall. Would there be difficulties now? Leah scarcely had time to speculate before she saw the comrade returning, followed by an officer who stepped quickly around the table and came to her. But it was her cousin Tolya! Fine-looking, erect, with steady half-narrowed eyes as analytical as ever, and on his face, even while he was smiling there remained his characteristic look betokening the seriousness of life.
“Leah! What brings you here!”
He took her at once into the library, which was his office. The Hebrew volumes had disappeared from the glass-doored cases, which now held official-looking publications and dossiers. Extending his pack of cigarettes, then lighting one for himself, Tolya settled back and gazed at her, his examination speedily measuring many things—his eyes first showed an objective approval of a strong-looking female, then they were the eyes of a thinker cataloging the forces of history, and then, as if the analytical part was concluded, they were even the remembering eyes of a cousin with whom she had grown up.
