The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  The author helps prepare a vegetable garden during the siege of Jerusalem, March 1948

  Esther Cailingold, 22 years of age, February 1948

  [2] Sidelocks.

  [1] A long black coat.

  Chapter 3

  Esther

  A few weeks later, through half-closed eyes, I peeped at the clock on my bedside table. It was eleven in the morning, and I winced at the sound of the phone jerking me out of a deep slumber after a sodden night of guard duty and a chilly dawn of trench digging.

  “Who is this?” I croaked.

  “Wake up! There are people I want you to meet.”

  It was Esther Cailingold. Older than me by a few years, I knew Esther from Bnei Akiva in England. She had come to settle in Jerusalem in 1946, to teach English at the then prestigious Evelina de Rothschild School for girls. However, since the advent of the siege she had become a full-time volunteer with the Hagana, but was not at all happy with the duties she was being asked to perform. In the space of a few months she had served as an underground broadcaster, messenger, arms courier, field cook, welfare officer, vetter of volunteers; in short, a general dogsbody.

  “Where are you?” I shouted through the static.

  “Schneller.”

  Schneller was a disused German Templar orphanage which the Hagana had taken over and converted into its main Jerusalem base.

  “You’ll like them,” she teased. “They’re characters.”

  “Who?”

  “The people I want you to meet.”

  “Who are they?” I was in no mood for larks.

  “Meet me at Café Atara in an hour, and you’ll see.”

  “Café Atara? They’ve nothing to serve. I’ve hardly eaten in two days. I’m famished.”

  “Don’t fret. I’ll scrape together some leftovers from the Schneller mess. See you in an hour.”

  It was April 1948. The one narrow road that linked Jerusalem with Tel Aviv was by this point totally sealed off. It meandered down hairpin bends and through steep gorges. Arab irregulars were laying ambush to Jewish traffic at every twist and turn. As the British prepared to pull out of Palestine, the bloody battle for control of the strategically important road was escalating by the day. If that road could not be cleared of Arab fire, Jewish Jerusalem’s hundred thousand inhabitants were doomed.

  Britain’s deadline for its final pullout was midnight, May 14. Until that hour, avowed British policy remained one of non-involvement and strict neutrality, standing aside while Jews and Arabs slogged it out.

  Doomsayers claimed it was all a plot hatched in Whitehall. The British had no intention of evacuating Palestine, they said. Palestine was too strategically precious for the defense of the Suez Canal. Whitehall was actually conspiring to keep the Palestine pot boiling by pitting Arab against Jew, letting them kill each other off, until midnight May 14 when the surrounding Arab armies would invade Palestine to drive the outnumbered and outgunned Jews into the sea. And then, at that twelfth hour, the United Nations would adopt a British-instigated emergency resolution calling upon Britain to stay put in Palestine and restore the peace. Thus would England – perfidious Albion, as Napoleon had called the British – continue to rule Palestine with international consent, and scotch any prospect of a Jewish State.

  So the doomsayers predicted.

  In a city frequently pounded by shells, constantly hungry, and totally isolated, rumors like these fed feverish imaginations. Fewer and fewer food convoys were getting through. Meat, fish, milk, and eggs had disappeared. Streets, shops, classrooms and cinemas were empty. Fuel was in desperately short supply. Buses scarcely ran, all taxis had vanished, and private vehicles had been commandeered. There was no electricity, and the Arabs had cut the city’s water pipeline. Whatever water there was was largely drawn from underground cisterns, some centuries old; in downtown Jerusalem a reservoir dug by the Romans was repaired and the winter rains stored.

  The Hagana, much larger than the Irgun, had long since joined the offensive to fight the fight for independence, but there were pitifully few weapons to go round. And as the battle spread from neighborhood to neighborhood, the Old City’s Jewish Quarter was cut off from the rest of Jewish Jerusalem, its inhabitants beleaguered in a siege within a siege. And all the while the British stood by, neutral, aloof, waiting.

  Esther’s call on that cheerless, dank April morning, with her promise of leftovers from the Schneller mess, was a bit of a tonic to the abiding Jerusalem misery. To get to Café Atara I had to pick my way around a tortured tangle of wires, steel shreds, stone blocks and concrete hulks that had once been a six-story residential and commercial building on Ben-Yehuda Street. Shattered armchairs, desks, filing cabinets, beds, china, clothing, and potted plants lay scattered amid the rubble. Cars that had flipped and burst into flames lay blackened and crumbled. This had been the third truck-bombing in downtown Jerusalem in a month – the first target was the Palestine Post building, then the Jewish Agency building, and now this – it seemed the Holy City was blowing itself to Kingdom Come.

  Outside the Atara café three bone-skin lads were feeding a bonfire of twigs, trying to heat up a blackened pan of something called khubeiza, a plentiful weed which, when boiled, tasted like stringy spinach.

  Atara’s blasted windows were sealed with corrugated iron sheets on which a defiant “Business as Usual” sign was splashed in fresh white paint. Inside, candles and hurricane lamps cast a yellow glow that pushed back the dimness, diffusing the shapes and shades of the café’s art deco charm.

  “Over here. We’re in the corner,” Esther’s voice came ringing out from the shadows.

  She was dressed for war in a man’s battledress two sizes too big for her, her slim figure seeming ridiculously vulnerable in the heavy khaki cloth. Under the tunic, she wore an enormous British Army sweater, and on her feet were clunky regulation three-quarter boots. Her neck was wrapped in a short khaki woolen scarf that could be rolled up into a forage cap. The only whisper of the old Esther was in her smart white gloves and black leather shoulder bag, gifts from her younger sister, Mimi, in London, about whom she often spoke.

  The faint light of the café could not totally conceal the fatigue under Esther’s eyes which, when turned on you, held a gleam no makeup could improve. Her quiet, heart-shaped face was as serene and unaffected as ever, and her petite physique and softness of voice offered no suggestion of the grit and guts she was soon to display in staggering measure in the hopeless battle for the Old City.

  So preoccupied was I with the sight of her that I paid scant attention to the man at her side, his features backlit by the dim light. When he rose to introduce himself I saw he was in his mid-thirties, thickset, in a kilt, and a Harris Tweed jacket. He had a wind-beaten face and a mop of curly hair that was the color of corn.

  “Bonnie laddie!” he boomed, pumping my hand. “The name’s Jock McAdam, from the Highlands. It’s thanks to this here lassie that the divine whirlwind has swept us together. Pleased to meet you.”

  Next to him sat another man, as glum as the other was jolly. Esther introduced him as Leopold Mahler, a violinist, a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra before the war, and grand-nephew of the famous composer Gustav Mahler. He was cuddling a gray knapsack from which the neck of a violin case protruded.

  Mahler half rose and offered me a limp hand. He was tall, with a scholarly stoop and thinning blond hair. He could have been anywhere between forty and fifty; it was hard to tell because his face was craggy and lean, and it had a haunted look, as did his shabby brown coat, fastened in front with a wooden toggle. Nothing about him fitted, yet everything about him spoke of refinement.

  Esther explained that Mr. McAdam was a sheep farmer from the Scottish Highlands on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and was stranded because of the siege. Both he and Mahler were lodging at the YMCA opposite the bomb-damaged King David Hotel.

  McAdam trumpeted in his rich Gaelic timbre, “You should know laddie, I’ve been trying my level best to get i
nto Mr. Begin’s army, the Irgun.” He pronounced it Eer-goon, like some remote Highland loch. “But it seems they don’t take Goyim like me. So I went to Schneller to try my luck with the Hagana – anything for the war effort – and this here lassie interviewed me. She put me through the meat grinder, I can tell you, and said you might have some useful job for me. Is that right?”

  Esther interrupted to suggest I take him along to join our volunteer brigade of diggers and hackers, working on trenches and other fortifications on the city’s western edge.

  For some reason the Highlander was tickled pink at this idea, and he doubled over with laughter, rubbing his palms in delight, and slamming me hard on the shoulder. Mr. Mahler, on the other hand, looked at me with somber eyes and muttered morosely, “Since I’m stuck in Jerusalem, I might as well pitch in too.” Then, with a wan smile, he explained how and why he had come to be stuck.

  He told us that when the Nazis came to power in 1933 he had been heading the second violin section of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Ousted because he was a Jew, he was recruited by the newly formed Palestine Symphony Orchestra. However, one year of violence – this was at the start of the Arab 1936 riots – convinced him that Palestine was not for him, so he left to join the Paris Opera Orchestra. His next stop was the Drancy concentration camp, and after that Auschwitz. He arrived back in Palestine illegally in 1946, and now planned to go on to Australia where an opening with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was reserved for him. However, by the time he had gotten his papers together and approved, the road out of Jerusalem was blocked. In desperation, he managed to get a place on an armored convoy intending to blast its way through to Tel Aviv. The convoy successfully crashed three roadblocks and was almost out of the mountains and into the safety of the coastal plain when it fell headlong into an ambush. The midsection of the convoy was smashed, blocking the road. So the front vehicles pressed on to Tel Aviv, while vehicles in the rear limped back to Jerusalem. He was in the rear. And that’s why he was stuck in Jerusalem.

  A waitress in a red cardigan waddled through the gloom with a menu. The fare was truly foul. Café Atara, known for its savory broths, egg medleys, sumptuous salads, sugar-encrusted chocolate cakes, and honeyed tortes, offered that day a menu of a slice of gray bread smeared with a yellowish paste, a half-omelet of powdered eggs, and the khubeiza weed.

  Esther suggested the khubeiza, and then bent down to open a brown leather suitcase standing at her feet. From it she eased a shoe box and tipped its contents onto the table.

  “With the compliments of the Schneller mess,” she bubbled.

  Out tumbled a chunk of black bread, a slab of margarine, triangles of cheese, olives, and sprigs of green onion. Greedily, I pounced.

  As she was shutting her case I glimpsed at what else it contained, and saw it was crammed with her personal belongings. So, I asked her where on earth she hoped to be traveling to in the middle of the siege, to which she gave me a sharp nudge and told me not to be a nosy parker. But then, in Hebrew, she added that she had just been given a new posting for which she had volunteered, but could not talk about it in front of the others.

  I didn’t press her because the waitress came back with the boiled khubeiza, which we all tucked into, with the exception of Leopold Mahler. He speared one morsel of the gluey and stringy stuff on his fork, looked at it suspiciously, gave it a sniff and, after one chew, spat it out.

  Jock McAdam was shocked. “Now, now, Mahler,” he rebuked, “there’s no better greenery than God’s vegetables, however humble. Moses led the Children of Israel through the wilderness for forty years, away from the fleshpots of Egypt. Note, the ‘flesh-pots’ of Egypt! And what did they eat in the wilderness? – Manna from heaven. Now, you can’t get more vegetarian than that. And what did Our Lord say? He said, ‘Bread be my body.’ Bread, not flesh.”

  With no trace of humor, Mahler cautioned, “You’re digesting timebombs, the lot of you. Swallow this now and you’ll blow up at midnight.”

  McAdam exploded into laughter, but just as quickly his face darkened. He gave a short discreet cough, the kind that servants make when wishing to attract the attention of their masters, and his eyes flashed a “be careful” signal.

  Standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the fading daylight, were two British soldiers, a corporal and a private. They peered into the dim interior of the café, hands in their pockets, Sten guns slung over their shoulders. Their eyes wandered toward Esther, but they walked past us to a nearby table. The waitress padded over to them with the menu which they didn’t bother to look at. They just wanted raspberry water. When she returned with the glasses, the corporal dropped a few coins on the table and rummaged in his haversack, bringing out a black leather flask. Rotating his chair so that his back was toward us, he unscrewed the flask and knocked back a swig of liquor. He wiped his chin with the flat of his hand, lit a cigarette from the butt of his mate’s, and curtly called the waitress to turn on the radio. A tinny baritone crooned Brother, can you spare a dime? The corporal reached once more into his haversack for the flask, and drank.

  I whispered that the radio must be battery-powered, since electricity had long ago been cut off. But Esther barely listened. She was looking at the soldiers, her expression a combination of defiance and wariness. Scathingly, she hissed, “Their discipline has gone to rack and ruin. Thank God, we’ll be rid of them soon, and then we’ll declare independence.”

  Mahler, his tone acid, said she was talking rubbish. Did she not realize that at midnight on May 14, Arab armies would invade and make mincemeat of us all? And besides, how on earth could a few miserably-trained Jewish patriots like her, armed with popguns and peashooters, hope to sway the rulers of the mightiest empire on earth, Great Britain?

  “Because it is preordained,” intoned McAdam. “If God is for us who can be against us? The good Lord has given Begin the fortitude to drive them out of Palestine.”

  “Begin my foot!” raged the musician. “Even if the British do leave, Begin will just plunge the Jews into civil war. Ben-Gurion is right to fear he’ll try to mount an armed putsch and establish a dictatorship.”

  McAdam looked at the violinist benignly, and said, “Fiddlesticks! Begin is God’s anointed. And as Scripture notes, ‘He that bless Israel, I will bless.’ The day you understand that, Mahler, you’ll be a wiser and happier man.”

  “Will I? You are completely insane. Keeping company with a messianic saint like you is even worse than being one.”

  Esther and I exchanged glances. Clearly this was not their first duel on matters of theology and politics, sharing lodgings as they did at the YMCA.

  McAdam, blazing with sincerity and injured rectitude, responded by saying that, true, he may well be insane; he would not deny that. After all, insanity was a relative thing and, in his case, it was madness put to good use. But by that same logic Mahler, too, was insane. For were they not both zealots, each in pursuit of perfection, on a quest for transcendence? And was there ever zealotry free from madness? Did not he, Mahler, worship his violin, just as he, McAdam, worshipped his God? When Mahler played did not his strings respond, just as when he, McAdam, prayed, did not God answer?

  Never in my life had I heard such vainglory. No one could accuse Jock McAdam of lacking in self-belief. Or spirit. Or certitude. Or pontification. And as if to illustrate this disposition, the Scotsman sat back and drove a clenched fist into his palm, his eyes like fire, and added, “And I pray to God, Mahler, that you will never go to Australia, that you will never leave this Holy Land.”

  The musician, at a loss for words, sat there, a picture of tired, haggard dignity, looking into empty space. Finally, he asked, “Why do you pray I shall never leave this place? What’s it to you?”

  “To speed his coming,” replied McAdam, calm as a rock.

  “Who’s coming?”

  “Christ’s.”

  Mahler shook his head in the deepest exasperation. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

 
; “Then let me spell it out. You are a Jew. Your place is here. This is where you belong. This is where all Jews belong. All Jews should live in Palestine. There can be no Second Coming until all Jews leave Gentile lands and return to Jerusalem.”

  “Utter rot!”

  “Shut your trap, Yid!” snapped the British corporal, swinging about to face us. “Can’t you see we’re trying to listen to the radio?”

  Nelson Eddie was singing, There’s a song in the air. The corporal’s speech was warped with whisky.

  Leopold Mahler cringed.

  Jock McAdam rose, flicked a crumb of khubeiza from his jacket sleeve, smoothed his kilt, and walked over to the servicemen. Reaching their table, he stood and gazed pensively at them. Then he smiled at the corporal. “I’m Jock McAdam from the Scottish Highlands. You didn’t mean what you just said, did you? It was a slip of the tongue.”

  The soldier took a swig of his courage, shook a cigarette from the pack, lit it and, rosetting his lips, blew a smoke-ring into McAdam’s face.

  McAdam closed his eyes for a flutter of a moment, coughed, and said: “I turn the other cheek. Just tell me you didn’t mean it.”

  “Sorry Mister,” said the corporal, taking another puff. “Too late. Already said it.”

  “Yes, but you can take it back.”

  “Can’t take it back.”