The Source

by James A. Michener

  Tabari sat on the stairs with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped on his knuckles. He said to Cullinane: “Have I ever told you about the defense of Acre? You know, as Sir Tewfik Tabari’s son I was handed the job of defending the old city, and I certainly had the men and the machines to do it. I was particularly pleased about the fact that in the caravanserai of the old Venetian fonduk we had ammunition enough to blow up all of Falastin. In particular, we had two million rounds of British ammunition. Two thousand ammo cases of a thousand rounds per case. And other goodies to match.”

  “I fought at Acre,” Eliav said.

  “What happened?” Cullinane asked.

  “You ever read about the fall of Acre in 1291?” Tabari asked. “That time it was Mamelukes attacking and Christians defending. But the Christians were broken into about ten different autonomous groups: Venetians, Genoese, Templars, Hospitallers … This time it was Jews attacking and Arabs defending, and we were broken into four thousand groups.”

  “Four thousand?” Cullinane asked.

  “Yes. I’m the only general in history to command four thousand one-man armies. We had Iraqi Arabs who had slipped in for the kill. We had Lebanese Arabs who had come down to open shops as soon as we had won. We had some Egyptians, some Jordanians, a lot of Syrians, a few Arabians. I had Falastinian Arabs from Jerusalem who wouldn’t speak to the Arabs from Haifa, and I must have had about three thousand valiant tigers whose sole ambition was to loot Jewish stores. They were willing for the other Arabs to fight the Jews, but their job was looting.”

  “Was it that bad?” Cullinane asked.

  “Worse. Because on the ground floor of the caravanserai there was a thin, ugly, mean-tempered Arab whose uncle knew the Grand Mufti, which gave him peculiar powers, even over me. He had the key to the ammunition depots in the Crusader vaults, and he refused to hand out a single cartridge unless his uncle said it was all right, and his uncle refused to act unless he felt that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem would approve. He drove me mad. I’d plead for more ammunition … a raiding party … two hundred men. He’d refuse to issue it. One day I thought: I’ll shoot that ugly bastard and take his key; but he must have guessed what I was thinking, because he warned me: ‘Don’t think that you can get the ammo by shooting me. Because I keep the key hidden.’ ”

  “What happened to him?”

  “When the Jews approached the city as if they intended to fight, he jumped into a sailboat and fled to Beirut.”

  “The key?”

  “He took it with him.”

  • • •

  The Arab push on the afternoon of May 6 would have ended the Jews had it been followed that evening by a house-to-house mop-up, but for some reason which Gottesmann could not understand, at dusk the Arabs halted their advance, providing the Jews with time to regroup. But it was apparent that the defenders could not hold out much longer, for MemMem Bar-El was exhausted and Gottesmann was near to falling apart. His nerve was quite gone, and Ilana wondered if he could last another day. Of the small command group only Nissim Bagdadi was in good shape, and he seemed to be living off his fat.

  That night the Palmach held a gloomy meeting in Ilana’s house and the plans discussed were those of a prostrated remnant, courageous enough to go through the final motions but lacking the energy to devise any tactics other than wait and hold; and as they talked in the midnight hours they heard frightening sounds coming out of the wadi below the cemetery, and Gottesmann shivered. If the Arabs were launching their final push, he’d have to go but …

  Then voices were heard, as if the red-capped Iraqis and the white-robed Lions of Aleppo were cheering one another on for the kill, and petite Vered grabbed her submachine gun and pushed open the door. Through the starlit night the voices grew stronger. They came from people singing, men … women. Now even Gottesmann could hear the words, the defiant words in the night:

  “From Metulla to the Negev,

  From the desert to the sea,

  Every boy is bearing arms,

  Every girl is standing guard.”

  It was Vered who spoke first. “There must be hundreds.” She dashed from the room. Bagdadi followed her and Bar-El, finding a strength he thought had vanished.

  “Come on, Gottesmann,” Ilana cried.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “All right.” She left him sitting there, staring at the open door, and hurried to overtake the excited Jews running down the narrow streets toward the cemetery, but at the corner of the Vodzher synagogue she stopped dead and stood alone in the night. “It’s a trap!” she said. “They’re Arabs, and when we’ve gone down to meet them the others will attack across the stairs.” On the spot she turned, lowered her rifle and sped alone to the vital sector, but when she got there, ready to fire, she found nothing; for any would-be invaders were paralyzed by the sounds rising from the wadi.

  Two hundred Palmach troops arrived that critical night and leading them came Teddy Reich to add a new dimension to the Jewish effort. Wiry, alert and charged with that intense fire that came from knowing there was no alternative—“We capture Safad or we’re pushed step by step into the sea”—he characterized the impassioned Jewish command as it was to operate for the next eight months. Dressed in faded khakis, with hand grenades hanging from his webbed belt and a revolver convenient to his right hand, he somehow managed to handle with his one arm a small Shmeisser submachine gun. His left sleeve he kept neatly pinned at the shoulder. He was a short man and his tense body seemed to have been transmuted into rock, for when he assembled the local leaders it required only his appearance to reassure them. “We’ve come to do a job,” he said.

  After brief introductions of his lieutenants—“Gabbai, Zuchanski, Geldzenberg, Peled, Mizrachi”—he marched out to a night reconnaissance of Safad.

  “These are the stairs,” the MemMem explained. “Up there the concrete police station.”

  “How many Arabs inside?”

  “About four hundred.”

  “Machine guns?”

  “At least thirty. Left by the English.”

  He moved swiftly to the other end of the Jewish holdings and pointed to the ominous stone house, three stories high with a flat roof. “Defended the same way?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Bar-El nodded.

  He then returned to the middle of the line and stood for some time looking up at the menacing Crusader ruins dominating the entire town; then he climbed to the roof of a Jewish house to view the most forbidding of all the Arab installations, the great fortress on the mountain back of town, built solidly by the English and impregnable. It had thick walls, abundant food and a sure supply of water. Looming out of the night this fortress was foreboding in a special way. It seemed so powerful, so unassailable by ordinary men. Gottesmann, trying to control his nerves, thought he heard even Teddy Reich gasp when he saw the monstrous thing.

  If Reich did suffer shock at seeing the Arab positions, he hid the fact. “Back to headquarters,” he snapped, and in the quiet hours of the night he held a commanders’ meeting that none who attended would ever forget. Taking a steep-sided bowl he inverted it on the wooden table and said, “Men, this is what we face. The flat part is the Crusader hill. The flanks of the hill are divided into six parts. The Arabs hold five of these parts. We hold one.” Gottesmann closed his eyes. Somewhere he had heard those words before: “Stone house … cement police station … Crusader ruins.” Once someone had shoved such a bowl across a table and the sound echoed in his ears … echoed. He was about to shout something when the incredible words of Teddy Reich struck him.

  “So,” the one-armed German said, “that being the case, what we shall do, as promptly as possible …” The wiry commander stopped, looked directly at each of his lieutenants, focusing at last on Gottesmann, to whom he said, “We’ll move out every man, every woman, and capture those three strongholds.”

  “Capture?” Bar-El gasped.

  “Yes. Up the hill. Across the Arab road. And we’ll smother each of the
three points.”

  Even the men he had brought with him were astounded and for a moment no one spoke. Then Bar-El pointed to the area above the bowl. “And what about the fortress? Up there?”

  Now it was Teddy Reich who had nothing to say. He took a deep breath, leaned back, then came forward slowly and grasped Bar-El’s hand as it indicated the massive fortress. “About this we shall think later.” He caught the looks of fear and with a sudden leap grabbed Bar-El by the shirt. “We’ll leave it!” he stormed. “Because I tell you that when the Arabs up there hear that we’ve taken the stone house …” His fist crashed onto the table. “The concrete police station …” Another crash. “… and the top of that bowl. Men,” he shouted, “it’s the Arabs up there who will be worried. Not we Jews in Safad.”

  He knew that it was essential to convince his handful of men that this quixotic scheme of taking the fight to the Arabs could succeed, so before they could discuss it among themselves he started working with dizzy speed. “You, Zuchanski. You saw the stone house. How many men? You’ll have to take it floor by floor. Lot of fighting … same as Haifa. How many?”

  Zuchanski mumbled, “Well … with Gabbai and Peled …”

  “They’re yours. How many?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Pick them out.” Zuchanski hesitated, and Reich snapped, “Pick them. Now!” The detachment for the stone house was chosen.

  “You, Bar-El. How many men to capture the Crusader ruins?”

  “If I had Gottesmann, we could use forty-five … fifty. It’s spread out, you know. Trenches.”

  “Fifty men. You have them.” Then Reich looked at the remainder and said, “The police station … at the head of the stairs. That’s for me. And for Bagdadi. Can you still dynamite a wall?”

  “Yes,” replied the placid Iraqi.

  Then Teddy Reich saw Vered and stopped the military planning. “Aren’t you Pincus Yevneski’s daughter?”

  “Yes,” said Vered shyly.

  “Why haven’t you written to your parents?”

  “They’d make me come home.”

  “Where are you staying?” Vered pointed at Bar-El, handsome and bleary-eyed, and Reich smiled at the dashing man.

  “Wait a minute!” Bar-El protested.

  “Oh, not sleeping!” Vered blurted out.

  The men of the Palmach burst into nervous laughter, hilarious and bawdy. “Not sleeping!” some of them echoed, and they began poking their fingers into Bar-Els cheeks.

  “All right! All right!” he growled.

  “Ilana,” Teddy commanded, “you see that Vered stays with you. Understand? Now as to the girls, they’re not to be in the attack positions, but they are to protect the flanks. I suppose you want to be with Gottesmann, Ilana?”

  “Of course.”

  Reich asked the others, who attached themselves to one unit or another. Finally he came to Vered Yevneski. “Where do you want to fight?” he asked.

  “With MemMem,” she said quietly.

  Reich closed the meeting by saying that he wanted six young boys—under thirteen—right now. Ilana knew where she could fine some, and in a few minutes the six little boys, two with lovely curls dancing beside their ears, stood before the Palmach commander, who asked, “Which of you six is the bravest of all?” Each of the boys stepped forward. “Good. Now if you had a very difficult job to do, in two teams, who would you want for your partners?” The two boys with curls moved together. The four without curls made their group. “Good,” Reich continued. He reached forward and grabbed the fringes that peeped from beneath the shirt of one of the orthodox boys. “Your name is?”

  “Yaacov,” the boy answered.

  “Yaacov, I want you to take your friend and go as close to the Arab quarter as you dare. Geldzenberg and Peled here will stay in the shadows and protect you with their guns. And you’re to call out to some make-believe friend … You’re to cry as loudly as you can, ‘The Palmach have brought a great cannon.’ If anyone should happen to ask about the cannon, you make up whatever answer you want. Understand?” The boys nodded, and Reich said, “Good. Now let’s all go in the street and let me hear how loud you can shout.”

  The six boys went with Reich into the darkness, and Gottesmann could hear them crying, four in Hebrew, two in Yiddish, “The Palmach have brought a cannon,” and by the time the thin little voices had faded in the direction of the Arab quarter Gottesmann felt sure that the enemy must hear. But then he himself heard Teddy Reich whispering to Ilana, “You think Gottesmann can pull himself together for the attack?”

  “I think he’ll make it,” she replied.

  The secret weapon which the Palmach had lugged into Safad was the kind of implement that terrifies soldiers, especially those who must operate it. When Bagdadi inspected it, and he knew more about explosives than any of the rest, he came back to tell Ilana and Vered, “It may not frighten the Arabs, but it scares hell out of me.” He took them to the housetop on which the home-welded device was installed: a triangular base about thirty inches wide at one end had supports rising from its point, and from them was slung an adjustable length of steel casing cast somewhere in Germany by one H. Besse. It bore the number 501 and was about five inches across and twenty-eight long, making a rude kind of mortar into which could be dropped a massive shell that looked like an oversize potato masher—big and blunt on the far end, trim and narrow in the handle—which fitted in the barrel of the mortar. “It’s these fins that make the noise,” Bagdadi explained, pointing to the four steel projections jutting out from the business end of the crude weapon. “When the shell flies through the air these whine as if they were alive. Sounds awful but doesn’t do much damage.”

  “What’s it called?” Vered asked.

  “Davidka,” Bagdadi explained. “Little David. It’s to help in our fight against Goliath.” He pointed toward the concrete police station, which in a few days he would have to assault.

  That night the davidka was fired. As Bagdadi had foreseen, the cumbersome shell made a hideous noise as it flew through the air, and it must have frightened the Arabs, but it did no harm, for it failed to land on its nose, so its fuse did not explode. The Jew in charge therefore came up with an expedient that horrified Bagdadi: before the davidka was fired, a length of ordinary fuse was jammed into the nose and lit with a match. Then the firing charge was ignited and the burning potato masher was sent through the air. If it landed on its nose, it went off. If that missed, the burning fuse would explode it. The first two shots worked. What worried Bagdadi was this: “What happens if the firing charge backfires and leaves the potato masher in the barrel—with the fuse burning?” The Palmachnik in charge pointed to a girl. “If that happens, she runs out and jerks away the fuse. We hope she makes it in time.” The girl was about sixteen.

  The futility of davidka became apparent when the Arabs wheeled into position some real artillery pieces and began pumping heavy shells into the crowded Jewish quarter. The results were sickening, for when the large English shells exploded they ripped mud-and-stone houses apart and crumbling was excessive. Some Jews were buried alive. Survivors ran into the street, abusing the Palmach and crying, “Until you came with your davidka the Arabs left us alone.”

  Rebbe Itzik went through the narrow alleys, pointing out, “It is God’s judgment upon a willful people,” and as the Arab shelling increased, new gloom settled upon the Jewish district, whose residents could not know that soon Teddy Reich intended to rush out and silence the insolent artillery. At this critical moment support reached Reich from an unexpected quarter.

  There was in Safad in those final days a Rabbi Gedalia, a sallow-faced, black-bearded man of forty, somewhat stoop-shouldered from much study of the Talmud. He was a withdrawn man and normally one would not expect him to be of much help in these critical hours, but after a searching review of the situation Rabbi Gedalia had reached the conclusion that the Jews had a chance to gain a state in Palestine but only if the holy city of Safad were kept in Jewish hands. H
e therefore gave the pious Jews of his synagogue directions quite contrary to what Rebbe Itzik was saying: “Go out and help the fighters. Do anything they demand of you, for with God’s help they shall win.”

  He himself moved among the Palmach, counseling Teddy Reich, Bar-El and the others: “You must not think of the odds against you as forty to one. Because most of the Arab soldiers are not fighting for a cause in which they believe. What do the Iraqis and Syrians really care for Safad? They’re good fighters and I’m sure they’re good men. But this holy place is not their home. It is ours.”

  As Rabbi Gedalia talked, the tough young fighters gained strength from his quotations from the Torah, which they accepted as history if not as religion: “Moses our Teacher foresaw days when his Jews would have to storm up a hill to capture a town like Safad, and he said, ‘If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them? Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the Lord thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt.’ ”

  As time for the assault approached, he quoted God’s heartening promise to His people when they faced trials: “ ‘And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight.’ ” As he spoke, this thin, sallow man of forty communicated to all his conviction that the Jews would win.

  On the afternoon of May 9, when Arab artillery looked as if it must knock out all Jewish resistance in Safad, Teddy Reich convened his last meeting of the men who were to storm the Arab heights. He spoke confidently, reviewed tactics, and advised everyone to get some sleep. “Till eight o’clock,” he said quietly, after which he lay flat on the floor and slept.