by Meyer Levin
And who of all his children had been the one to come all the way to Tiberias with his tfillim for him in the prison?
And only three weeks ago, when she had marched off with the Herzlia Gymnasia youngsters from Tel Aviv who were going to join Trumpeldor—then she had looked to be a happy young girl. Though all through the night before he had spoken his misgivings to Feigel, when Yaffaleh alev hashalom had marched off happily, Yankel had felt it was for the best.
And who could tell, when a soul has such times of darkness, whether a death at a happy time is not for the best? The death itself is God’s to decide; man cannot dispute. Yet sometimes a man must choose his course, and so must a woman, and Yaffaleh, knowing her danger, had chosen to go, and who could tell what was best?
Yankel at times took a pinch of snuff, and now was such a moment, not to disguise his tears, but simply that the momentary convulsion in his chest and lungs brought him a kind of new breath, a clarity.
In this new breath, his thoughts moved out to the fates of those who had remained in Russia, as Leah had told of them. Feigel’s brother, the rich Kalman Koslovsky, stood against the wall of his sugar mill and shot, and his son cold-bloodedly remaining there in the house, an officer in their service, with the mother a prisoner upstairs—no, he did not feel his revenge on Kalman, yet he had his thoughts. His own sons, Reuven, Gidon, no matter how distant they were from him in his beliefs—no, they would not have served him with such a treachery after his death, no, they were still Jews.
And at least one thing in their Bolshevik land had happened for his daughter Leah: she was finished with “that one.” So the word had come to Yankel from Feigel, “It is finished.”
He peered now at Leah.
In olden times, Jacob, standing amongst his stalwart, tall-grown sons as Yankel imagined them—did Jacob the Patriarch feel himself augmented, more powerful in the surrounding strength of his sons, or as he grew older, did he feel shrunken before them?
Reuven had never stood taller than Yankel, yet now Yankel felt bowed and cramped under the hardships and blows that had befallen him; Gidon was a bit taller and he had such a clear strength over his whole being that Yankel felt diminished; Schmulik was broader of shoulder and as tall as Gidon—yet, however it had been with Jacob of old, Yankel did not feel his own strength expanded through his sons. And with daughters it was even more strange until their children grew about you. When Leah had been young, a girl, her largeness had seemed even pitiful to him, for to his mind there had always come the image of a man leading away a large acquiescent cow. But now here she sat, a huge, powerful woman, and even before her Yankel felt diminished.
What would become of Leah? Their eldest girl, unwed. True, among the chalutzim and in their kibbutzim an old maid was not so ended a matter; yet sometimes, talking with Feigel, a great pity came over him that for their daughter the new ways had had to happen, and that matters could not have been arranged, a passable marriage perhaps in the simpler ways at home.
Leah’s eyes had the pained darkness in them, perhaps not only about Yaffaleh, to whom she had been the closest, but surely also because of Trumpeldor. Yankel had not needed Feigel’s few remarks, that time years ago when the hero had visited the house, nor had he needed the mention of Trumpeldor’s name now and again in the war years when Leah had stopped in at home, to know that within the big girl the hope had remained of a possibility. Perhaps indeed she had even been secretly in love with him. And as Feigel had said of poor Leah’s fate, no sooner had she freed herself of “that one” and come home with the possibility alive, than she had found Josef dead.
His daughter’s eyes had met his, and Leah let him gaze into hers until a profound understanding passed between them, as though all his thoughts were acknowledged, the heartaches interchanged from one to the other, as though she even felt for his sense of waning power amongst his offspring. And yet it was Leah who led in the plan to take away the young one, his yingel, Mati; it was she whose ears had been filled with the pressing arguments of the melamed that the boy must be taken to the gymnasia in Tel Aviv to study and “become someone.”
In Yankel this had awakened the whole war of his life. A father’s pride he had, pride that the boy was bright, even gifted in learning; what Jewish father would not be proud, even though it was worldly learning rather than Torah?
In the old days it would have been simple; he himself had been judged gifted and sent to a good yeshiva. From the yeshiva a gifted young man made a good match and then engaged in years of study, or became a rabbi in a town better than his own. Except that he himself had been drawn into commerce, and so had wasted much of his life.
But what did it mean today to go away and study and “become somebody?” What “somebodies” were needed here, except good men of the soil to build up the Yishuv? An agronome, then? The yingel was not inclined that way, so much. His gift was in mathematics, they said. A professor somewhere? Was it for this they had returned to the land? In his bones Yankel felt that the boy’s going away would turn out wrong; and yet he had to ask himself, wasn’t it also because he was loath to let the young one go? The one born here. His last. A willing and good-tempered lad. None of them could know what gladness it brought to a father’s heart simply to have the boy walk beside him in the field.
And there was the fierceness with which Mati had defended the field of grain, that time the Arabs had left the mark of the dirk in his back. It was here, here on the land that the son born here belonged.
Before the argument could begin, Yankel betook himself to the shul. While he was away, they all would be feverishly debating their plans and deciding who should approach him. And he—with whom could he talk of his problem? Even were he to go to Tiberias for a talk with his friend and marriage-relative, would he be understood? Binyamin Bagelmacher was after all still a merchant; their family had returned to Eretz, but not to the soil.
In the shul Yankel found Reb Roitschuler with whom, in the last years, he had become friendly. While the rest of their Roumanians had never made him feel he was more than a tenth man for the prayers, Roitschuler often asked news of his sons, his daughters, indeed of late there had been dropped words regarding Schmulik and Reb Roitschuler’s granddaughter Nuta, now seventeen. The girl was, it suddenly struck Yankel, in appearance not unlike poor Yaffaleh, a short girl with a round face and heavy round legs and large breasts. Her beauty was in her long nut-colored braids; as Feigel and the village wives kept saying, Nuta’s hair was so long she could sit on it. The possible match seemed suitable, though of course it would have to seem to happen of itself. Schmulik was known as the best farm worker in the village; Nuta, Feigel noted, had more than once on a Sabbath stroll made some excuse to enter the yard to marvel at Yaffaleh’s flowerbeds, or to ask for a recipe; she had surely cast her eyes on Schmulik, and from his side too—he clearly did not look away from her.
During the prayer Yankel stood aside with Reb Roitschuler, and after his townsman again with heavy sighs had commiserated with him on the tragedy, and spoke of the ways of the Above One, Yankel let out what was troubling him about the plans for his youngest boy.
Reb Meir Roitschuler was nearly ten years older than Yankel; the hair of his beard was wiry, and he held himself erect so that, while of the same height as Yankel, he looked taller. He spoke with a deep slow voice, with the weightiness of a sage, though Yankel in his heart had never felt certain that the Roumanian was a true man of wisdom. Only now, in the tumult, grief, and doubt that engulfed him, the older man’s words carried the solace of practical matters, of thoughts much like his own.
“Wherefore the great haste?” Reb Meir began. “If your boy is to enter the gymnasia, it will not yet be until the holidays in fall.”
“True,” Yankel said, “but they argue that the examinations come soon, and he would have to prepare at once. Our melamed does not even have the books for him.”
“The books can easily be obtained, and the boy could prepare here, and still be of some help to you. You ha
ve now lost your daughter, and but for Schmulik will have to do everything alone. How will you manage? Your fine flock of geese—” Roitschuler spoke almost as one of the family—“isn’t it now Mati who takes care of them?”
Yankel only nodded; of Yaffaleh’s flock of geese he could not bear to calculate.
But Reb Roitschuler continued: Mati was not as yet Bar Mitzvah, he remarked, “and even though we know that in the end he will turn away like his brothers, at least let him learn Torah until his Bar Mitzvah. He can go a year later to the gymnasia.”
True. And yet from the other side it had to be admitted that the Bible in its entirety, his children knew; they might not know the prayerbook, but it was a strange thing how well the unbelievers knew every footprint written of in the Bible.
Reb Roitschuler nodded in agreement at the puzzle, and then gazed a moment into Yankel’s eyes. “I do not decry worldly learning,” he said. “When has a Jew decried honest learning? But to go away there is time. There is always time. It is almost,” Reb Roitschuler mused, smiling faintly into his beard with a different kind of commiseration, “as though his brothers and sisters …” he left the thought hanging. But he picked up the thread further on, repeating ponderously, “And Joseph became a great man, in a foreign land.”
With the allusion there came to Yankel a shock of recognition. Was not this his own premonition, his own fear?
The boy was so eager, so avid for knowledge, once he started on the way, would he not go further and further?
What would there be for him to return to here?
As he walked ponderously homeward, Yankel knew they would already have settled it amongst themselves while he was away in shul. And soon, with the Sabbath over, they would all begin going away, dispersing, Reuven and his wife to their kibbutz, and Shula with Nahum and their little ones in their carriage to Tiberias; now with the British at least it could be said the road was safe even at night. Tomorrow morning it would be Dvora and Menahem and their children going off to Gilboa; they had arrived on a wagon of their chaverim on the way to a political meeting in Kinnereth, and to return home they would borrow the farm wagon, all of them together, Gidon and Aviva taking Leah onward to Tel Aviv. And the certainty came to Yankel that Mati, too, they must already have decided, would be carried off with them in the wagon.
Dark had come, but at least in some things they still respected him, they would not light the lamp on the Sabbath until the proper moment. The children were in the yard making a contest of it, Dvoraleh’s little Yechezkiel cried out the first star in the same breath as Mati, and Mati even let him cry out the second, but when it came to the third, the one that counted, Yankel knew Mati would not be so generous. Intently, everyone scanned the skies; Yechezkiel’s little brother Giora at one moment cried, “Look, look!” but it was the same pale second star that had already been counted, and in that very instant Mati cried out, “There!” pointing, and his eyes, so sharp, like a Bedouin’s, had perceived what it took everyone else a full moment to make out, a remote twinkle, a third star almost directly overhead.
Giora for consolation was allowed to strike the match, and then Yechezkiel applied it to the new pressure lamp, which sizzled alight.
Finally the discussion must come. Turned away, Feigel was preparing a hot cup of tea for him, and when she set it down Yankel saw that her hand was not steady. Scanning their faces, he knew it was Nahum that had been selected to make the argument. This already was irksome. They must have decided it should not be Reuven because with Reuven he always quarreled. And why not Menahem? No, already Nahum had begun with his smooth smile, the husband of his favorite daughter, the son of a pious household still himself pretending to a bit of piety—oh, Yankel knew him. At least his own unbelievers made no pretense, but Nahum still wore his yarmulkeh in the house, though Yankel had caught sight of him more than once smoking his cigarette on a Sabbath with the rest of them behind the barn.
Smilingly, Nahum put forward all the arguments, Mati meanwhile keeping his eyes away from his father. As Yankel knew, the boy was so gifted for learning, the melamed himself admitted he had no more to teach him; with his mathematical gift, who could even try to play chess with him any more?
Therefore they had de—Nahum nearly said decided, but changed in mid-word—they had discussed a plan. The cost would be as nothing, since Mati could stay with Leah at her girls’ school at the edge of Tel Aviv; it would not be too far for him to walk to the gymnasia. As to the fees, Nahum himself was ready to advance the cost. For it would amount to a wrongdoing to fail to provide opportunity for a child who had such capacities …
Already Yankel inwardly flamed. Was this an allusion to Reuven? If Reuven had been able to study at a university, he might even have become another Aaronson, everyone was always saying. And what had become of Aaronson with all his learning and achievement? He had sunk half the Yishuv into torture through his brilliant ideas! Suddenly a storm of words broke out of Yankel —words that he would not have intended. “Mathematica! Calculations!” he cried. “All that is for commerce! For schemes and combinations! For merchants!” He flung out the words recklessly, at Nahum with his land-parcels to be sold in America, at his murdered brother-in-law Koslovsky with his sugar mill and his rent-collecting, at the whole Jewish past of moneylending and conniving. “What is the life of the brain-twister, the merchant? I lived it in bitterness! Our Jews lived it in bitterness for centuries! For the best but the worst years of my life, I had to be a merchant, and I say to you that a man cannot be a successful merchant without being a cheat and a thief. I came here and made a new life; even though I was no Gordon with all his philosophies and learning, I have built up this farm, we have a good meshek, and what was it all for? My family, my sons. In this, in the knowledge of the land we were at least one. My beliefs my sons don’t follow and our God you don’t worship, but in this, that we must restore ourselves to our land, that we must bind ourselves to the soil, in this—”
“But, Tateh,” cried Reuven’s wife, “who speaks of deserting the land? We need scholars, we need learned men in every field, we need experts—by the time Mati is finished at the gymnasia, our University will be open in Jerusalem—”
Yes, yes, he knew, he had heard it all, Gidon had even stood guard with the Brigade at the ceremony when Chaim Weizmann had placed there the twelve foundation stones for the twelve tribes of Israel. Yet some powerful force within Yankel still cried “No!”
“The Yishuv will need educated men,” they were insisting.
“The Yishuv is here! Right here!” he shouted. “I need him right here!”
Even Schmulik cried out, “What do you want, Tateh, to make another ox of him, like me?”
At this, Yankel could not bear the torment. The anger, the Chaimovitch anger, unreasoning, uncontrollable, was upon him. He leaped up from the table. “The boy stays here, and an end!” he shouted, and stormed from the house.
He had not wanted to come to such anger. He had wanted only to say, “Perhaps after the holidays. Perhaps in another year.” But because it was all of them, all of them together against him, the anger had broken out …
In the barn, Yankel lighted a lamp, tended to the cattle. Doubtless in the house they were packing the boy’s things if they had not already done so. They would pay no heed to him. They had decided. Feigel too had let them decide.
Presently he heard Nahum driving away in his carriage.
A plan seized hold of Yankel. It was perhaps foolish, futile, but he could not keep from doing it. Crawling under the wagon, he propped up the axles. Laboriously, in the dark, he took off the wheels, one by one, rolling them into the kerosene shed, locking it with the padlock.
When he lay down in the bed, Feigel did not stir. “You’re asleep?” he asked.
After a moment, she said, “We could get one of the girls in the village to watch the geese. Even Roitschuler’s girl, Nuta.”
Suddenly Yankel found himself saying, half-choked, “I don’t want to see the geese. Let the kvu
tsa take them all away and join them to their own flock.”
So deeply was he stricken. Feigel let her hand fall over his, a rare tenderness between them, and he did not move his hand away.
Then she spoke of one thing that had not come to him. It was for Leah, she said, that Mati ought to go now. Had he seen into Leah’s eyes, seen her despair? If Mati would go with her and stay with her for a time—with the yingel, her spirit always lifted. Otherwise, there was such a darkness in Leah, Feigel feared for her. She couldn’t tell what, but she had a dreadful fear.
“Leah can come home. She can stay here.”
“You know she won’t do it. No, it would be as if everything was over for her. There, at least, she has the new girls she brought. And with Mati—” It was Leah after all who had received him onto her hands when he was born. “It would be good for her, Yankel. It would help her through the worst.”
Yankel did not reply.
So it must have been for Jacob when his big sons returned from Egypt and declared that his Benjamin, the child of his heart, his youngest, was demanded.
When he returned from the early Kaddish at the shul, they were all of them gathered around the propped-up wagon. His sons and daughters looked at him with such eyes—as such strangers—was this what his life really deserved of them? The yingel, Mati, even worse, did not look at him but turned with angry tears in his eyes and ran from the yard.
No one spoke. Yankel went toward the house. “Yankel—” Feigel was by the pump. “Yankel, you will not change anything. They will take him in any case. Don’t create hatred in your son.”
Never had he felt such a total weeping within him. On the ledge of the pump, Yankel set down the padlock key.
