Mitla Pass (29 page)

What Nathan Zadok saw was Jews walled in to defend themselves, roads impassable by night, and heat of unbearable intensity by day. Tel Aviv was a sorry town with little cultural life or entertainment. The hatred shown to Jews by the Pole, Cossack, Russian, and Ukrainian was amply replaced by that of the Arab. There was neither land to go to nor a living to be made.

“I’
VE GOT A JOB
as a guard,” Misha told Nathan a month after their arrival. “Bertha is coming along with me as a cook. There’s an opening for you as well.”

“What are you guarding?”

“ A Jewish-owned orange grove during the picking and crating season. We’re protecting against Arab theft in the fields and marauders from the outside.”

“So what do I know from guns? I’ll go with you if they’ll let me at least pick oranges.”

“The pickers are all Arab.”

“No Jewish pickers on a Jewish farm?”

“There were Jews last year, but the Labor Federation tried to organize them.”

Nathan shook his head. “For this we came to Palestine, to be exploited by Jews?”

“We’ve only been here a month, Nathan. Conditions are going to change. We knew it would be rough at first.”

“I don’t need from you a Zionist lecture,” Nathan answered. “Palestine is filled with Jewish exploiters, Arab exploiters, and British reactionaries. None of them give a damn for us. They’re sucking our blood to line their pockets.”

“So don’t you give me a Bolshevik lecture,” Misha shot back.

“And even if a union comes, does that mean we will automatically start having a love affair with the Arabs?”

“We can’t go back, Nathan. Poland, White Russia, and the Ukraine are covered with Jewish blood. The pogroms are worse than 1880, worse than 1905.”

“No, we can’t go back. You take the guard job, Misha.”

“And you?”

“I have relatives here somewhere. Ill
shnorr
them and see what happens.”

Nathan had the addresses of his first cousins, the Borokov brothers from Mariupol, who had made the Second Aliyah to Palestine before the war. Cousin Sidney was a teacher at the highly regarded Herzlia Gymnasium in Jaffa, where some of the more affluent Jews of the
shtetl
sent their children. Like everything in Palestine, the gymnasium was struggling for funds.

Sidney Borokov was a decent sort, with a houseful of kids, a low wage, and no authority. Nathan had no qualifications to work at such an institution, which was already overstaffed with underpaid scholars and intellectuals. After a week of listening to Nathan’s recounting of the tragic affair with Rosie Gittleman, Sidney took him to see his brother, Morris.

Morris Borokov was one of a small number of Jewish businessmen who had succeeded. He owned a villa in the upper-middle-class German colony on the edge of Tel Aviv. The coolness between Sidney and Morris and Morris and Nathan was mutual. Morris’s main operation was importing coal.
Gevalt!
Nathan thought. It was Mariupol all over again, only worse.

Being first cousins imposed certain obligations, so Morris housed Nathan, in the servants’ quarters with the Arabs, and complained constantly about how bad business was. He had all the unpleasant characteristics of his father, Boris, and was a notorious exploiter of his workers. After a few uncomfortable days, Nathan came to a decision. Cousin Morris was only too glad to pay for a train ticket for Nathan to go to Jerusalem and toss in a few pounds of living money.

A
S THE TRAIN WENDED
through the great ravines and vales of the Judean hills, Nathan’s spirits lifted as the sense of Jerusalem and its mystical powers began to overtake him.

Jerusalem! Jerusalem of gold! Why had it taken him so long to come to it? He wondered. A lot of Yiddish was spoken in the city and there was certain to be work.

But Nathan’s euphoria was short-lived. Jerusalem was a line of barren hills swept by ominous winds, a city of glaring stones and dust. It had not recovered from losing a third of its population to hunger and disease during the war. It was the poorest of cities, lonely and remote, a place reserved for only those with the most powerful faith.

Jerusalem of gold was tarnished from too many sackings over too many centuries and its resurrection was a long way off, if ever. Nathan found a cot at a hostel in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. This square mile within Ottoman walls contained the wildest potpourri of religious ferment on earth. It was a short walk to the Walling Wall, but the route was safe because it was traveled by sufficient numbers.

Within the walled city lived the poorest of the poor, existing from hand to mouth. Streams of Hasidim and ultra-Orthodox men pounded the stone pavements to and from the Wall in their severe long black coats, bobbing in prayerful motions as they went, their earlocks flopping beneath black broad-brimmed beaver hats. Supported largely by world Jewish charities, they spent their lives in study and prayer.

It was a tight, suspicious place, where one trod cautiously on the filthy streets, always aware of the dark, hostile eyes probing the back of one’s neck.

Beyond the wall were cliques: scores of Jews from different lands, Bukharians, Yemenites, Moroccans, Syrians, Poles, each in their own fortress neighborhood.

Nathan found no comfort in his wanderings. It was a place where one could exist if one wanted to drown in false religious promises, Nathan thought. At best, it was a place to come to die.

Obviously, there was no work for him. The religious groups were impenetrable, their schools staffed with their own, their living conditions dismal.

He beat a retreat from Jerusalem after a fortnight of disenchantment.

In the next months he worked as a common laborer on rail and road gangs, carrying sand to mix with mortar for public buildings, whitewashing houses, laying water pipe, and splitting rocks with a sledgehammer. Workers were underfed and underpaid and labor trouble was always brewing.

Seven months after their aliyah to Eretz Israel, Misha found Nathan digging ditches near Hadera.

Misha related that his sister, Bertha, had fallen in love with a
Kibbutznik
and joined his settlement. Miracle of miracles, a place for both Misha and Nathan had been found at the kibbutz.

“You didn’t bring this news a minute too soon. Where are we off to?”

“The northern Galilee. A kibbutz called Hermon.”

“Hermon!” Nathan cried. “My God, Misha, that’s only a few kilometers from the Tel Hai massacre,” he continued in reference to a recent battle between Jew and Arab. “I think we’d better wait until some new land opens. Hermon is in the jaws of the tiger.”

“Maybe we’d better wait for the messiah,” Misha retorted. “I’m tired of all this shit here. At least at Hermon we can begin to be Zionists and do what we came here to do.”

Outside Nathan’s tent was an endless ditch to be dug. “Include me in,” he said at last. “I will go with you to Hermon.”

T
HE
Z
IONIST SETTLEMENT
Department provided Nathan and Misha each with a bedroll and a rucksack of rations and essentials. The way north was from kibbutz to kibbutz. What Nathan and Misha saw, for the most part, was a group of new settlements popping up in the Jezreel Valley. Pioneers were battling centuries of swampland resulting from Arab neglect. The settlers existed on thin man’s diets in primitive conditions. A few of the older kibbutzim had made marked progress and there was some greenery to contrast with the naked brown of the landscape.

At the northern end of the Sea of Galilee they came to a kibbutz named Degania, which was lush and filled with date palms and banana groves. Degania lay below sea level in a natural hothouse. This was the “mother” of Palestine’s kibbutzim, now thriving in its twelfth year. Here was the Garden of Eden, the kind of settlement the pioneers had fantasized about back in the
shtetl
one of the few tangible fruits of Zionism thus far.

North of Degania was wild country, a dangerous place. A convoy formed to take Misha and Nathan and supplies to the last settlement, known as Kibbutz Hermon. Past Huleh Lake and a nasty swamp, Kibbutz Hermon was the end of the line.

M
OUNT
H
ERMON
, a small but mighty mountain of nine thousand feet, laid her skirts down at a convergence of three separate districts, Palestine, the Lebanon, and Syria. Mount Hermon’s foothills held an assortment of impoverished Shi’ite Moslem and Druze villages, built into the steep terrain for protection. After the turn of the century the Jews had established an elite mounted guard called the Shomer, or Watchmen, who protected the distant settlements. They traveled by horseback, spoke Arabic, and dressed in Bedouin robes. Their skills in dealing with raiders and marauders became legendary. A group of Watchmen established Zionist settlements at Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi. These outposts came under heavy Arab attack and after sustaining severe casualties, the Watchmen were forced to abandon them.

A few miles beyond Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi sat Kibbutz Hermon, which had successfully fought off the attacks and remained the farthermost Jewish settlement in Palestine. Beyond its perimeters lay Baniyas, a magnificent grotto and oasis where mountain streams flowed down to form one of the headwaters of the Jordan River. Once the land of the biblical tribe of Dan, this was now a no-man’s-land. Ruins of Dan and Baniyas and an ancient mountainside fortress that had held against the Romans were all within walking distance of the kibbutz.

Although it was a mere fifteen miles from the Sea of Galilee to the foothills of Mount Hermon, the climate underwent a drastic change, going from the below sea level semitropical to the moderate climate of the mountains, with cool nights and a snowfall in the winter.

Nathan had heard of the leader of Kibbutz Hermon, a heroic figure named Ami Dan who had arrived during the World War, had become a roving Watchman for a short time, and then established the kibbutz in 1917 with ten men and two women. Kibbutz Hermon was able to hang on because of Ami Dan’s personal leadership after Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi had been abandoned.

Ami Dan, it appeared, had earned his reputation when he gathered a group of Watchmen and crossed into the Lebanon just before the harvest and torched the entire Arab Marjioun Valley, then afterward went back and discussed peace with the local mukhtars and chieftains. His message had gotten through loud and clear. Kibbutz Hermon was never attacked in force again, but was constantly being sniped at and raided by small parties of marauding Bedouins. Although it was relatively safe, precautions were always in effect.

Kibbutz Hermon had grown to sixty members, a third of them women who now included Bertha Polokov. Their greatest pride was the children’s house where a half-dozen babies had been born.

Despite the abundance of water, the variety of crops was limited because the ground was of porous limestone. Because of the altitude and coolness, apple and fruit orchards flourished and bore standard crops along with a centuries-old olive grove.

The convoy stopped at an outer stockade wall rimmed with guard towers. They entered a compact village center built of native black basalt rock that held a men’s and women’s barracks, a building of private rooms for married couples, the children’s house, farm buildings and offices, and an all-purpose recreation/dining hall, library, and clinic.

“Misha! Nathan!” Bertha Polokov cried, racing over the compound to welcome them. Kibbutz members surrounded the convoy to greet the newcomers and bombard them with questions.

The crowd suddenly opened an aisle as they felt a presence. The kibbutz leader, Ami Dan, came toward them. He was not all that large a man, but his unkempt beard gave him a look of power and he had the unmistakable manner of a leader.

Ami Dan embraced Misha. “Welcome to Hermon, comrade.” He turned to Nathan who stared at him for ever so long and then came remembrance.

“Yossi Dubnow?” Nathan asked.

“That is right. I was once Yossi Dubnow. The last time I saw you was in Poland, at an abandoned brick factory outside Siedlce. We’ll talk about it later.”

Ami Dan turned to the others. “All right, comrades, your questions will have to wait. We will have a meeting after dinner and get caught up on the news of the outside.”

As they were shown around this roughhewn stockade, Nathan suddenly realized there were no electricity, phone, or telegraph wires entering the kibbutz, and he did not share Misha’s elation.

T
HE KIBBUTZ OFFICE
was a spartan room attached to the end of the men’s barracks. As Nathan entered, Ami Dan was seated at a crystal radio set writing down dots and dashes of an incoming message. When the transmission ended, he doffed his earphones and waved to Nathan to take a chair.

“When Bertha Polokov submitted your name, I was really taken by surprise,” Ami Dan said. “I could have sworn I’d never see you in Palestine.”

Nathan Zadok had, over the years, developed a near total capacity to forget any past incident in which he had been at fault, or tuck away into a far corner in his mind an unpleasantness. Ami Dan’s opening remark passed over him without striking a chord.

“Bertha assures me that you have changed and you’ll be an asset to the kibbutz. I understand you’ve paid your dues here in Palestine. Well, I’m willing to forget what happened between us.”

Nathan was unresponsive. “You’ll be so kind to tell me,” he said, “what’s by this Ami Dan?”

“My Hebrew name,” Ami Dan answered. “Yossi Dubnow was left in the
shtetl.
Most of us here have chosen to take new names.”

“I am aware of this business of changing names,” Nathan said.

“You might want to take a Hebrew name as well.”

“Never,” Nathan shot back. “My father would never understand such a thing. Something is wrong with Zadok? Zadok was one of our most revered Jewish dynasties.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Nathan Zadok,” Ami Dan said.

“It’s a Jewish name, a true Jewish name.”

Ami Dan smiled and changed the subject. “Misha and Bertha told me that the three of you have had a difficult time.”

“An understatement.”