One evening, when he was thirty-two years old, he went to the movies.
“The film was called The Land of Israel,” he wrote in his simple hand. “I saw how they picked oranges, the field crops, and more interesting things, and liked it all. I decided to go there.”
He tried to get the passport that was necessary to allow him to leave Russia. “But because I had been a soldier, and there were rumors of war, it was difficult. So I tried something else. Since I had a daughter sick with bronchitis, the doctors advised taking her to a tropical country. This way I received permission from the government to go to the land of Israel for three months. I was delayed, for my wife gave birth. She bore another daughter, Shoshana. This was in February 1914,” he wrote.
Three weeks after his wife left the hospital, the family took a ship in Odessa and sailed to Israel.
“After a week at sea we arrived at Jaffa and stayed in a hotel. When we left the ship I managed not to give anyone my name, so they couldn’t find me later.” That didn’t help poor Tatar much.
That was Passover 1914. Within five months World War I would break out.
To this country, Palestine in 1914, Tatar came without a cent. Soon he found that manual labor was his only hope. Even that was not easy to find. His young family first lived in Jaffa, then moved ten kilometers east to a cheaper place, the Jewish settlement of Petach Tikva, established in 1878. There they lived on Tatar’s work in the orchards “for a tiny salary, the same as the Arabs,” tells Nathaniel, the former farm manager. “Even this kind of work was given me reluctantly, for the orchards’ owners contended that the work was too hard for us new immigrants and the salary too low for us to live on. There was only one kind of work where I could make some money, and it was mowing hay with a scythe. I had done this work.”
With visible pride he went on to tell how he became a subcontractor and employed others as workers, including men who became important later, such as Shkolnik (Levy Eshkol, fifty years later Israel’s prime minister), and Harzfeld (a future important political figure). He even employed the manager of the local labor exchange!
On August 14, 1914, World War I broke out.
The Turks, who governed the country, began checking the citizenship of every one of the inhabitants of Palestine, and either drafting them into the army or expelling them from the country. Tatar was captured.
“I took seven pairs of horses for deep plowing in Mikveh Israel (an agricultural school a few kilometers southeast of what was then the village of Tel Aviv). We had just gotten organized and begun working when some Turkish cops showed up. They ordered me to untie the horses from the plow and tie them to the carts. We were taken to Jaffa and put in front of the Sakkai (a Turkish military building). There we stayed till the evening. We sent a message to the horses’ owners in Petach Tikva and informed them what had happened.”
Tatar was always very careful with any property loaned to him, and his descendants inherited this from him. “But the owners were too afraid to come and defend their property, and told me to do my best. In the evening I entered the Sakkai and asked one of the officers why we were being kept there. He answered that come morning we would haul a load of cement to Beer- Sheva.”
The Moldovan estate manager turned teamster in Palestine was going to learn about the Ottoman Empire.
“We watched what happened in the Sakkai. In one of the rooms a commander sat, twenty large candles lit around him. From time to time he called in someone who had resisted confiscation of his property. The commander ordered punishment: fifty falaki (blows on the soles of the feet). This was the way it went all night—verdicts, the punishments executed on the spot, and the people around watching.” After this demonstration, there was no more resistance. The next day Tatar’s journey began.
“We loaded the cement barrels, and a week’s food for the horses, a barrel of water on each cart, and off we went without knowing where we were going, as all I knew about Beer- Sheva came from the Bible. We asked Arab passersby. One said ‘go north,’ the other pointed south. We decided to go to Rehovot, and see what to do from there.”
Rehovot was an agricultural settlement some thirty kilometers south of Jaffa. There, civilization ended and gave way to the wild, wild South.
“From Rehovot there was no road fit for carts going south, only camel trails. Thanks to the light loads on the carts we made it somehow, and after a day and a night we came to Kastina, a Jewish settlement.”
So they stopped at Beer-Tuvia, a small settlement among some Arab villages.
“We found there a warehouse, rested for four hours, and continued on our way. From there, there was really no more road, only a narrow trail crossing the wadis (dry streambeds). The barrels were rolling around in the carts and the cement spilled out of the cracks. Another day and night and we reached Kibbutz Ruchama.”
The name Ruchama came from the Bible. “Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi (my people), And to your sisters Ruchama,” said the prophet Hosea. “Ruchama” means mercy. “I will have mercy upon her that has not obtained mercy.” But Tatar didn’t know all that, and found no reason to stop there. The place was just a few acres with some shacks. There were fifteen workers planting almond and eucalyptus trees. They couldn’t help him with anything—they had brought their own bread from Beer-Tuvia with difficulty, and sometimes personal danger; the Bedouins would sometimes rob them on the way.
So he went on, “There in Ruchama, we found a big wadi with a narrow trail. One of our carts rolled over, and fell to the wadi together with the horses. We worked for half a day until we got it out.”
They were crossing the wadi system of Ruchama—a magnificent area, nowadays a national park with many beautiful bicycle trails. Then they came to a plain.
“We found ourselves in a desert of sand. The carts sank to their axles, and the horses couldn’t pull them anymore.”
Hold it.
There, in this vast plain, I crossed the footsteps of my grandfather Nathaniel for the first time. This happened after I parachuted from my burning Ouragan after an aerial collision. I landed in a desert full of shallow hills, south of Ruchama. I hit the ground, rolled in the floury dirt, and got to my feet. Not far away, I saw a bunch of black, low tents, pitched in what my grandfather had called sand. In fact it was thin, reddish dust.
Bedouins came and gathered around me, interested in my gear. The hot November wind of 1964 stung my burned cheeks awfully, but certainly less than the hamsin (the east wind from the desert) of August 1914, when Tatar and his drivers had struggled to pull their carts through. Finally they had found a solution.
“We tied two pairs of horses to one cart, then drove five kilometers ahead and came back to take the next cart. In this way we advanced fifteen kilometers a day.”
Finally they arrived in Beer-Sheva tired, hungry, dirty, and covered with dust.
“I found a military office. A senior Turkish officer sat there. Luckily he could speak Arabic. From the initial load of 2.8 tons, only about one ton was left, but I told the cart drivers to move the barrels in a way that they seemed heavy.” Tatar was cunning, but he didn’t know the Ottomans yet. “The soldier didn’t even approach to see if there was anything inside the barrels.”
If he thought his mission ended, he was wrong. His story had just begun.
“The commander called me and asked if I had a bag. I told him I hadn’t. He opened his desk drawer and counted eighty-four Turkish pounds in gold. He produced a cloth bag and put it together with a letter, and said we had to deliver pipes from Ramleh—an Arab town near Rehovot—to Kusseima, in the heart of the Sinai desert. That meant two weeks in each direction.”
This way Nathaniel Tatar, formerly a soldier in the tsar’s army, was conscripted to the service of the Young Turks’ post–Ottoman Empire.
FOR AN ADDITIONAL YEAR and a half Tatar continued to work as a cart driver in the service of the Turkish army. “We drove our carts from Beer-Sheva to the Suez Canal, transporting supplies and rations for the soldiers
one way, and coming back loaded with the wounded.
“But,” continued Nathaniel, “at that time we were not paid anymore for the work, and we no longer even got food for the horses, so they began to die one after the other.”
All this time his wife, Bracha, raised her two baby daughters alone in a hut made of eucalyptus branches, its walls covered with towels and sheets, near Petach Tikva. They survived on pita from sorghum flour they baked themselves on an open fire.
At last Tatar decided to desert.
“I ran home on foot, half naked. On the way I got food and shelter from Bedouin and farmers till I reached Petach Tikva. I didn’t enter the settlement, but stayed hidden in the orchards. I was a deserter, and the penalty was death.”
After some time he managed to buy a nefus (Turkish identity card) under a different name, and resumed work as a teamster on the line between Petach Tikva and Jerusalem, hiding all the time from the police.
In 1918, when the British offensive struck from Egypt and pushed the Turks across the Sinai and out of Gaza, the Turks began to expel the Jews from Jaffa and Petach Tikva. They moved them to concentration camps in the North. Their cruelty reached new heights, but Turkish control of Palestine was over. The roads were filled with deserters who offered their rifles for a slice of bread. Eventually, when the army of British field marshal Edmund Allenby took Jerusalem, my Grandfather Nathaniel came out of the cellar he had been hiding in with his cart and horse.
THE TURKS WERE DRIVEN OUT, and British rule was established over Palestine. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, Lord Balfour, made promises of “a homeland for the Jews in Palestine,” and at the same time contradicting promises were given to any Arab who happened to be around. Anyway, a temporary peace prevailed in the country. Nathaniel and his family returned to the mixed city of Jaffa, and he looked for a way to make a living. Initially he continued to drive his cart. He transported rice from Jaffa Harbor up to Nablus in Samaria, and returned with homemade soap. Gradually his cart took him farther away, to Tiberias, and even to Damascus.
For a while he tried to become a businessman. There was a shortage of onions, so he hurried to organize a caravan of camels that returned from the South loaded with onions. But during his journey, a ship arrived from Egypt full of onions, and the price plummeted. His second daughter, Shoshana, five years old, was old enough to remember what happened. During my own childhood she used to regale me before bedtime with her stories about those onions, which rolled around in all the rooms and all about the yard. She acted out for me how the whole family ate onions in the morning, onions for lunch, and onions for supper, and how at the end her sister and she were sliding down from the top of their father’s heap of crumbling hopes, which had begun sprouting and rotting.
‡
AFTER WORLD WAR I ENDED, the economic situation of the family improved for a while. I found proof of that in a photograph from that time; from a yellowing panel, cracked and framed in green, the family Tatar stares. Mr. Tatar sits on a chair, as befits the master of the house, and all the other members of the family stand around him. My grandmother, Bracha, wears a long cotton dress. She stands near him like a soldier at parade rest, her hands joined behind her back. The two girls, in two identical dark dresses with bright white collars, peep over his shoulders. The two small boys are pressed against his knees. The master himself is mummified in a suit, his face serious, mustache well clipped, and his white tie matches his white shoes. By then he was no longer a newcomer from Russia or a cart driver whipped down the roads of Sinai by Turkish soldiers. Before the camera sits a Levantine aristocrat. He runs, in partnership with a “good Arab,” a Jaffa khan (hotel) and a fleet of dilijances (horse carts). The family waits for the flash of the camera. From the center of the picture shine Shosh’s unbelievable, bright, disquieting eyes.
In the bedtime stories she told me I heard about the pogrom of the first of May 1921, when an Arab crowd assisted by policemen began attacking and killing Jews in Jaffa and the outskirts of Tel Aviv and looting stores and shops. The family Tatar was smuggled to Tel Aviv. Her father, Nathaniel, wrote, “I stayed alone in the khan, since many Jews who had stabled their horses and stored their merchandise fled and left everything. I was responsible for all of it. I closed the gate and sat alone inside. There was a high wall, but hundreds of Arabs began to force the gate. I climbed the wall and ran to the saraj—the British police station. I stayed there till night, and then they sent me to Tel Aviv in an armored car.”
Shosh also remembered something from the 1921 “troubles.” “I was six or seven,” she told a reporter on one of the rare occasions she was interviewed. “I went to the school for girls in Nve Zedek (a neighborhood on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv) and on my way I was swept up by a violent demonstration of Arabs on Bostros Street. A hand reached in and pulled me out of the vortex, otherwise I would have been trampled. Our house at Suk El Dar became a field hospital for the wounded.” And she summed up in her dry, curt manner, “These events were burned into my memory, and no doubt they affected my later life.”
The events put an end to Tatar’s economic success, and he gave up on Jaffa. He heard that in Balfuria, in the Izreel Valley, a new Jewish settlement had been established. One of the settlers, an American, sold his farm and left the country, and Nathaniel bought nine hectares and a shed from him, with a pair of mules and six cows.
“I moved to Balfuria at corn planting time, so I managed to sow about five hectares. I began to work in the fields. The children were still in school—the oldest of them twelve—and my wife and I worked almost day and night to get it all done. And still, after picking large crops and selling milk and eggs, we couldn’t make a living since prices were so low.”
They sank into deep poverty.
The children were also put to work and given adult responsibilities. Once Shosh, age fourteen, was sent by her father to Haifa to buy a plow. He hadn’t given her enough money. She didn’t return but stayed for several days in the Arab city, who knows where or how, till she found a workshop to repair an old plow for her to take home.
“No excuses,” she explained to me when she told me that story. “Just results.”
LIFE WAS HARD, AND EVERYONE in the family did his part. The boys stayed in school up to ninth grade and then left home to work as apprentices.
“The girls,” tells Nathaniel apologetically, “saw that the situation in the house was not good, so they left, too. Sara, the older sister, found work in Jerusalem, and the younger Shoshana moved to the youth village in Ben Shemen.” Nathaniel sold the farm and moved to the near town of Afula, where he tried his luck at dairy farming.
Since leaving her parents’ home, Shosh hadn’t had contact with them. On the few occasions when she spoke of them to me, she called their town mockingly “Afulevke.” The youth village of Ben Shemen lies in the hills on the way to Jerusalem. There, instead of a farmer’s poor and narrow vision, the new world of a renascent Israel was opened to her—a “state in the making.”
The founder and manager of the youth village was Dr. Zigfried Lehmann, an educator who believed in tilling the soil, Zionism, and the value of people. Shosh admired him. More than once she told me Lehmann was the best person she ever met. She would compare him with Yanush Korchak, a great writer and educator who went to his death in a Nazi extermination camp with his orphan students.
According to Lehmann’s vision, the youngsters ran the life of the village without adult help. The students of Ben Shemen lived in dormitories, studied and worked in all the branches of the farm, and sold its products. They created a vibrant social and cultural environment, celebrated holidays, and did scouting activities on Saturdays. They lived in groups, each group in its own house, so that family units were formed that functioned at work and while studying.
AT BEN SHEMEN THE IDEAL was personal accomplishment. The goal was taming the land, and indeed many of the graduates established new kibbutzim or joined existing ones, and almost all of them joined the Hagan
a, the Jewish defense force, the forerunner of the IDF. There Shosh found herself in a new and special company, the military avant-garde of the Jewish settlement movement in Palestine in the early 1930s. Since then and to the end of her life, this society was her world, and its values hers. In the fervor of beginning a new society and a state for the Jews, her provincial parents, the poor bookkeeper and his wife, the hen, were pushed out of her life and left behind. They were ghetto folk, bourgeois, leftovers of an old world that no one took pride in.
After finishing her studies in 1932, Shosh—like all her friends—found her way to the Hagana. On March 9, 1940, on a Saturday night, Shosh Tatar married Zvi Spector. I was born on October 20, 1940.
BY THEN, THE WORLD was at war. In the beginning it seemed that the British, who controlled the Middle East and Palestine, were going to lose and be driven out. The fear was great. To our north, Syria and Lebanon were controlled by the French Vichy government, a Nazi puppet state. To the east, in Iraq, the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali rebellion broke out. To the west, Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps marched toward Egypt and the Suez Canal on its way to close the pincers.
The Jewish settlement in Palestine, which numbered less than half a million, was scattered among more than a million Arabs, who began to smell an opportunity to get rid of the Jews. Many of the Jewish youngsters joined the British army and went to Europe to fight against the Nazis. The Hagana, which had organized for a desperate defensive battle in Palestine, looked for a way to cooperate with the hated British Mandate regime to get arms.
On May 18, 1941, Zvi Spector went to sea in command of a boat with twenty-three men, and a British liaison officer aboard, and never returned. This was a top secret and perilous mission, coordinated between the Hagana and British intelligence, and for that mission the British lent the Hagana a patrol boat, the Sea Lion. The boat was lost with all its men on the way to attack the refineries at Tripoli in Lebanon. The men were declared missing in action. The theory nowadays is that the explosives they took with them for their mission (these materials were not British, but taken from the stores of the Hagana, and were nonstandard and extremely unstable) blew up, perhaps when they were being prepped for the mission. Anyway, the rumors and hypotheses about what had happened were ugly.
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