by Alison Pick
For her father, it had been too late.
“It’s a new life,” she had tried to tell him, and he had answered, “What do old people need with a new life?”
He reminded her that Mashiach had not appeared, as it was written, to lead them back to the Holy Land.
Still, he hadn’t liked the way things were going, being told where a Jew could live, that he needed a permit, that false papers were prudent, and after Kishinev…
Her father had owned a store that was attached to their home. He sold buttons, needles and thimbles, bolts of fabric, nails and screws, jars of peppermint, shoe polish, floor polish, ribbon and string. He had been sitting behind the cash register in the storefront. It was Friday, late morning. Ida sometimes took her reading out to keep him company; they were working in amiable silence when they heard a sound down the street. Shouting. One voice, distinct, then more voices, individual at first and then joining together into a single stream of sound. Her father’s eyes looked over at her from above his white beard. There was a quizzical expression on his face, like he had just heard the call of an animal that belonged in another season. It was that look Ida remembered, the one of innocent confusion. The other looks she tried to forget.
At night now, though, when she tried to fall asleep, the scene replayed on the backs of her eyes. The sound had been a mob of people looting the grocers’. It made its way down the street; everyone knew which were the Jewish stores. Ida saw men; she saw that they had been drinking. She saw, in the middle of the group, the father of Katya from school.
It was he who swung the bat at the window. The lines spread out on the glass and hung there, suspended, like a beautiful design etched into the frost. Time stopped, if only for a moment. Then all at once the whole wall fell, the shattering of the glass making a sound that filled everything, and the front of the building was open and exposed, like a dollhouse.
The men were holding pieces of jagged wood, and broken chairs, and one a rusty saw. There was a moment when they seemed to pause, the place where the glass had been still holding the memory of the barrier. And then it filled with people.
Immediately, her father was knocked to the ground. A ring of men encircled him, kicking with their boots. Katya’s father—Ida knew him as mild mannered and boring—had been at the centre of the group.
“Die, pig!” someone shouted.
Eva, thank God, had been at school.
Ida saw—could still see, despite how she tried not to—the bats rising and falling. Behind the counter, several of the lesser hooligans were sweeping the shelves with the sides of their forearms, pushing goods into open burlap sacks. Her mother must have heard the noise; she came out from the rear room, her hair tied back in a kerchief with wisps of grey escaping around her face. She had been polishing the Sabbath candlesticks, and held one in each hand like a pair of exclamation points. They had belonged to Ida’s great-great-great maternal grandmother, and had been passed down generations of women—all the way back, Ida sometimes imagined, from the Matriarch Sarah in the tent of Abraham.
There was a glass armoire at the back of the store where they kept their Seder plate, their kiddish cup; Ida’s mother had been coming to put the polished candlesticks back in their place beside the other heirlooms. But Ida caught her mother’s eye; they each saw, at the same time, a man with gold rings and a goatee noticing the shelf. While he turned toward it, her mother thrust the candlesticks at Ida, and Ida thrust them into a carton of old rags her father had used to polish his faucets and doorknobs. She shoved the crate under the counter with the toe of her shoe. She looked at her mother, who gestured at Ida with her chin. Ida dropped to her knees, briefly unnoticed in the chaos, and crawled under the counter as well.
When everything was over, she and the candlesticks were the only things that had been spared.
Another knot of men had noticed her mother; Ida watched their boots as they swarmed around her. Her mother had come out to the store through a small door that led to the rest of the house. She was pushed back through that entrance; Ida heard a slam. She never asked what had happened behind those doors. But after, her mother wanted her to go to Eretz Yisrael. Now. As quickly as possible. Theory had turned to reality in her mind too.
She and Eva would join Ida when they were able, her mother said. But even then, Ida knew this might be never. She knew she had to make good on her family’s behalf.
—
She thought of her mother as she walked beside Levi. Had her own mother strolled beside Ida’s father like this when they had met as children in the synagogue? Had her mother felt, as a teenager, what Ida was feeling now? The dizzying certainty that her life was about to change? The day grew, impossibly, hotter, the clouds of mosquitoes thicker. She arranged the brim of her hat to try and keep the bugs away. Some of the halutzim had netting over their faces, and pieces of cloth at their necks to protect them from the sun. Ida had nothing in her backpack save for a clean pair of underwear, a sweater that she would clearly never need in this blistering heat, and her mother’s beloved Sabbath candlesticks. They had been a parting gift, laden with love and crippling responsibility. Eva had watched wide-eyed as their mother gave them to Ida, like she was witnessing a Torah scroll being passed from one great Rabbi to another.
The dusty earth gave way to marshes, and the stink of mud filled her nostrils. The pioneers’ sandals squelched; every few steps someone lost one altogether and the procession had to halt while the shoe was fished out of the muck. Soon the sandals were abandoned, and the halutzim with long trousers pulled the fabric up over their knees. Some of the men took their trousers off entirely and navigated the marsh in their bare legs and underclothes. Ida tried not to look at the curved backsides ahead of her, the buttocks visible through the thin white cotton underthings.
Levi kept his pants on, for which she was grateful.
The men jostled each other.
“Better here than frozen Siberia,” she heard one say to another.
“Or Uganda,” someone else laughed. “Can you believe they tried to give us Uganda?”
“At least the Turks let us land!”
“My cousins have gone to America. They say it’s the future.”
Someone coughed. “Wherever a Jew goes, he is on his way to the Holy Land.”
“Rabbi Nachman was just an old Hassid.”
Ida knew there was no greater insult among the Jews of tomorrow.
The slope of the hill grew steeper and returned from marsh back to parched earth, a thousand tiny lines criss-crossing its back. Again, the line slowed and stopped: first the skinny donkeys; then the wagons loaded down with hoes and rakes, burlap, jars of seed, scythes. Then the halutzim themselves.
“The foot of Mount Gilboa,” Levi said, gesturing at what lay ahead. “The Spring of Harod.”
The light in the sky was blinding, no clouds, no shadows. A terrifying clarity, Ida thought.
“And now, we will lap,” she answered.
She was referring to the Biblical passage in Judges where Gideon’s men were chosen by a divinely prescribed test.
As those around her set down packs and baskets, removed shoes and rubbed sore feet, Ida took off her glasses and wiped the sweat from her face with the back of her arm. She unbuckled her sandal and pushed tentatively with her fingertip at a blister bulging on her heel. The liquid moved around inside it.
Some of the pioneers moved toward the stream to drink but David called out to them, “Wait.”
As though they were one collective body—as though this great goal had already been accomplished—the young people turned their heads in unison. Their leader climbed onto the back of one of the wagons, onto a heap of folded canvas. His hair was black with tight curls. Ida could see how fair his skin was, imagined how it would burn and peel and burn again. He stood, unmoving, his hands loose at his sides, waiting until the group was silent. When they were all facing him, he lifted his palms to the heavens. “Today is yom ha aliya ha karka. The day of the ascent to the l
and.”
David did not raise his voice. His tone was calm and measured. As though he was their host—as though the standoff with the Arabs had never happened—he welcomed them with his blessing. “Beruchim haba’im.”
And then he said, “I don’t believe we are God’s chosen people.”
Someone behind Ida whispered, “I’ve been reading Klatzkin too.”
“On nationalism,” she heard someone else reply. “Land and language are the critical ingredients of nationhood. Forget religion!”
But Ida felt the blasphemy implicit in David’s words, felt her body tighten against them. What else was a Jew if not chosen?
She imagined she could feel Levi tense beside her, too.
“I don’t believe we are God’s chosen ones,” David said. “But I do believe we have been called here. It is up to us to make the dream of Zionist Socialism a reality. We have been summoned to create a new world based on justice, equality, and action.”
His speech sounded polished, practised; his head was bare under God’s judgment. He touched the slight bump at the top of his nose.
Ida craned her neck. To David’s left, sitting with her legs dangling off the back of the wagon, was a woman. Brown wavy hair and freckles; thin arms and small, apple-like breasts. There was a child on her lap, a black-haired girl, younger than Eva but with something about her that reminded Ida of her sister. The child clutched a doll that was nothing more than a pillow with eyes drawn on it and a scrap of black material attached to the head. She whispered into the place where the doll’s ear would have been, holding it up to her own ear to hear its answer. She made a face of astonishment, then held it up again so the doll could whisper the same thing into her mother’s ear. Her mother smiled, and put a finger up to her lips. She would keep the girl’s secret, and the doll’s.
Ida looked around at the barren rockscape, the vast sky. To have a doll in this emptiness must feel like a miracle to the girl. Something rare and precious in a place where they had almost nothing.
David was rhapsodizing about Gideon’s spring, gesturing to it expansively, sweeping his hand like he was casting a spell. The spring looked small to Ida, and muddy. A large rock blocked the place where it exited the mountain. But David extracted a bent and creased leather-bound notebook from his back pocket, and a stubby pencil from over his ear.
“You know this passage,” he said to the group, magnanimous. He raised the book in front of his face, cleared his throat, and began to read from Judges. When he finished, he said, “You are the three hundred who will accomplish this task. We are the three hundred.”
Ida knew that there were, in fact, seventy-five of them. Two companies of the Work Brigade: one had come from Judea where they had built railway tracks from Petah Tikva, the first Jewish moshava in Ottoman Palestine, the other from the Galilee where they had been paving a road. But she took David’s point. Her new life was coming into view, in the same way that Eretz Yisrael itself had appeared to her from the boat on the horizon, bit by bit, vague and clouded, then suddenly, all at once, there: the beach, the silhouette of the new city of Tel Aviv, the Gymnasia Herzlia, the wide-trousered boatman swarming over the deck of the ship—speaking Turkish? Arabic?—grabbing bags indiscriminately and ferrying them to shore.
She once again had the almost violent feeling that life as she had known it was over.
She saw, in her mind’s eye, the settlement they would build. She saw workers in the field and cooks in the kitchen and mechanics in the machine shed. She saw a nursery full of babies. Perhaps even one of her own.
She looked at Levi, trying to catch his eye, but he had replaced his workers’ cap and was watching David, rapt. There was a confidence to David that she could see Levi wanted to get close to. He, like her and all of the others, had grown up with blue tin boxes to raise the kopeks needed to buy this land. They had grown up with framed portraits of Theodor Herzl in their dining rooms, his great beard and moustache presiding over every Sabbath meal. They had grown up at clandestine Youth Movement gatherings in the back rooms of grocery stores and gymnasiums, quoting Tolstoy and A.D. Gordon, debating the best way to take Eretz Yisrael. But while they had dreams, David had done it. He had immigrated to this land in the Second Aliyah, in 1910; he had helped establish the moshava at Kinneret, planting eucalyptus trees along the muddy banks, negotiating with the fellaheen. Ida heard he had travelled the entire length of Eretz Yisrael on horseback, meeting the Arabs in every tent and marketplace, learning their various customs so as to help in the purchase of land.
While the rest of this group had been back in Poland and Russia, debating and discussing, David had claimed this place as his home.
“In a year from now,” David was saying, “we will eat bread we baked here ourselves, and vegetables grown in our own fields. We will celebrate May Day, the holiday of the worker, together under the roof of our community house.”
He pulled at his chin, a gesture a man with a beard might make, although David had none.
“The work will be gruelling,” he continued. “But with each small task you will be completing something larger. We will be completing something larger,” he corrected himself. “Something unprecedented in the history of the Jews.”
Behind Ida, someone whispered, “Either that or we’ll starve.”
“We will seize the moment,” David said.
To what end remained to be seen.
—
The first task was to dig security trenches and put up barbed wire. They wouldn’t sleep before it was done; the Arab village was close and there could be no taking chances.
Ida had heard a rumour that this first camp would be temporary. They would start here, but later they would seize the Arab houses and move up higher on the hill. The Agency, she had heard, had purchased this land from a mortgage holder in Beirut, who had promised that when it was time the Arabs would go easily. But Ida wondered about this. Why would they go? Wasn’t this their home too?
The halutzim fell asleep, finally, when the barbed wire had been erected, in a haphazard pile of bodies, their bedrolls laid directly on the earth. No roof above them. A thousand stars sparkling in welcome. Or so it seemed to those who wanted to see it that way.
In the morning, before dawn, Ida gathered with the others at the base of the mountain, rubbing her eyes. Everyone’s clothes, which they had slept in, were crusted in dirt and sweat. Ida was glad when she recognized someone from home, a girl she knew from the meetings, just a little. A beautiful outspoken girl with wide eyes and a body bent toward a fight. Sarah. Her hair was even curlier than Ida remembered, as though already the new land had lifted her, shaken her, and put her back down in a different form.
Sarah nodded to Ida, a brief acknowledgement. Her eyes were still half closed in sleep.
“I can’t stop yawning,” she said, covering her mouth with her fist.
Ida, too, had slept as though she was dead.
“Hello to you too,” Ida said, smiling.
“We made it,” Sarah said, conspiratorially.
“It feels like we’ve always been here,” Ida replied.
The sun was rising over the peak of the mountain. A dart of gold pierced the grey clouds, and the next moment the field was bathed in light, the tips of the marshy grasses shining with a dewy glow.
“Look,” Ida said, gesturing with her elbow.
Sarah nodded, only mildly impressed. Already, Ida thought, they were beginning to take the beauty for granted.
Breakfast was gruel. There was no other word for it. Some unlucky schmuck had been awake for hours, building a fire, boiling water, muscling a wooden spoon through a massive vat. There was no honey to go with it, only a few figs. Ida ate hers hurriedly, as though someone else might take her portion, someone more deserving. It was true that the men were bigger and required more calories to sustain them. But here equality reigned.
From the direction of the cooking fire came snippets of talk.
“The Baron Rothschild…” someone began
, but was interrupted. “Where is the good baron now?”
After breakfast, shovels were passed out, and the group set to work clearing the earth. Before they could plough, or plant their crops, they needed to remove a million stones. Stones of all sizes, from pebbles to massive boulders. This would take days, Ida saw. Weeks. She didn’t let herself think beyond that.
Without speaking, Ida and Sarah formed a team and worked beside each other for several hours, until the mist had burned away entirely and the sun baked the last of the dew into dryness. Heat rose in waves off the earth. For lunch there was a tiny ration of pita and a handful of olives they devoured instantly, without tasting them. Ida shook the pits in her palm like dice.
In the evening, it was not David but his wife Hannah who climbed up onto the back of the wagon. She bent at the waist to hoist herself up, showing her ample behind, but there were no murmurs from the men; women would not be objectified in the new society. Hannah, like David, had arrived in the Second Aliyah, which meant the halutzim instantly respected her.
In the group behind Ida, somebody began to recite one of Bialik’s poems.
“All the word is a slaughtering-block / And I’m just one more Jew.”
Somebody else corrected the first speaker’s Hebrew.
Hannah smiled at the young halutzim; one by one they smiled back, like a row of lamps being lit along a city avenue. The things Hannah told them were about the proper way to scrape one’s tin plate before depositing it at the washing basin; where to put food scraps so the jackals wouldn’t get at them. She and David had been at Kinneret, she said, the precursor to this new big kibbutz, and knew how daily details of communal life could inform the greater project. The historic speeches fell to David; Hannah was left with the logistics.
