My Glorious Brothers

by Howard Fast

  “Where are you, my sons, my strong and stout-hearted sons?” he whispered, speaking in the old Hebrew instead of the Aramaic and casting his words in that splendid formal manner in which our ancient scrolls are written, “Where are you, my sons?”

  “Here” I answered him. “Here, my father.”

  “Then, Simon, kiss thou my lips,” he said, “for I would give thee the little strength that remains in me. Heed me now, Simon, for thou art strong and willful and terrible, even as I was.”

  I kissed him and he lifted a hand and stroked my face, and he felt the tears and shook his head. “Nay, nay, art thou a woman that thou must weep over the death of a man? We are flesh and born to die, Simon, so weep no more.”

  “No more.” I murmured.

  “Now heed me, Simon, for I charge you!” His voice rose, and that old, imperious note of the Adon crept into it. “We are a small folk, a tiny folk, yea—a people cast into a wilderness of strangers, and how shall we survive unless we bring forth goodness? For our ways are not the ways of others, and our God is like no other God. Blessed be the Lord God of Israel and the people who keep his covenant, for what saith He?”

  I shook my head dumbly.

  “What saith He, Simon? Surely, He says, Walk in the paths of righteousness, and love goodness and hate evil. So He chose us, a stubborn people, a stiff-necked people, and it was His covenant that we should bow our knee to no one—no one, Simon! Hold your head up—otherwise let Judea be a wilderness!” The effort exhausted him; he lay back in John’s arms, breathing hoarsely, his eyes closed. Then he said:

  “For you, Simon, your brothers. Thou art thy brother’s keeper, thee and no other, and I charge you with them, I charge you with them. And should there be a man or a woman or a child in Israel that wants sustenance, that needs succor, that cries for help or mercy, then turn not away thy countenance, Simon ben Mattathias, harden not thy heart, harden not thy heart—”

  Then he said, “Judas—oh, my son, Judas!”

  Judas bent his head, and my father raised his hands and kissed them. “Thou are the Maccabee,” the old man said, “and the people will look after thee and thou wilt lead them, Judas. Deny me not.”

  “I will do as you say,” Judas whispered.

  “Even as Gideon led, thou wilt lead. And thou, John, my first-born, gentle and good, and thou, Eleazar, who will teach us the splendor of battle when man fights to free himself, and thou, Jonathan, my child—my child Jonathan, come and let me put my arms around you and kiss you—and then I will say, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God…”

  Then he lay back, and the harshness went out of that grim, hawklike face, and with the snow-white hair and the white beard to shroud him, he slept. I raised the tent flap and went out into the rain to where the people waited.

  “The Adon Mattathias is dead,” I told them. “May God have mercy on him, my father.” And then I went back to weep with my brothers; and above the sound of the rain I could hear the people weeping.

  ***

  We bore his body back to Modin, my brothers and I and the Rabbi Ragesh, that whimsical, eager man whom the people of the South loved, almost as much as the people of the North had once honored and respected the Adon—or loved him perhaps; I don’t know; I was his son, and it is not easy to be the son of a fierce and righteous man. Or it may be that they knew him better, for whenever we came to a village and it was told that we bore the body of the Adon Mattathias ben John, the people crowded up to the simple cedar coffin in which he lay, that they might touch it or press their lips to it, so that they could tell this to their children and their grandchildren. And everywhere, whether in a village half ruined to which people clung, or in a little valley where the people hid and lived, there were old men who saluted the coffin with both hands pressed to their foreheads—in the old, old way that Jews had saluted their melaks, or kings, in the time when there were kings—and then wrapped themselves in their striped cloaks, head and eyes hidden, swaying back and forth and chanting, not to my father but to the Lord he had worshiped: “Magnified and sanctified be Thy glorious name forever and forever.” And in other places, the children took the wild flowers, the bright and wonderful wild flowers that make our whole land like a garden, and strewed them over the coffin.

  Two by two, we carried his body—until at last we stood upon a hilltop and looked down the lovely terraces to that sweet and fertile place where Modin had been, but where now only a few walls and chimneys stood among the ashes. We bore him to our crypt, cut into a hillside, and laid him with the dust of his father and his grandfather. “Rest as all men must rest,” Ragesh said, but I was forlorn and frightened and alone in this graveyard of Modin, this dead place of dead memories. Who takes up the sword perishes by the sword, even the Adon who once in my mind was the figure of a grim and just God. Tired and forlorn, I sat on a hillside with Ragesh and my brothers and broke bread and drank from a skin of wine. Already, the terraces were a jungle of weeds, and the fruit on the trees, unpruned and untended, would shrivel and be sour. I had thought on our way here that the spirit of Ruth would pervade this place and join me, but no spirit was there, only the bitter pang of memory, and as I looked at my brothers, looked from face to face, I saw that their memories too were sad and lonely. Judas was like a man bereft, and it shook me to realize how young he still was. Already, there were streaks of gray in his close-cropped beard and his long auburn hair, and a strange and brooding sorrow had begun to line itself on his beautiful features. Ragesh too watched him as he sat there, digging at the earth with a stick, eyes cast down; and suddenly he asked Ragesh:

  “Why are we what we are?”

  Shrugging, the Rabbi smiled and shook his head.

  “For all other people, there is peace, but for us who hate war so and want only to live in quiet, there has never been peace, only our blood spilled over this land for a thousand years.”

  “That is true,” Ragesh nodded.

  “And there’s no life for me,” Judas said bitterly, “or for any son of Mattathias, may he rest in peace. But no peace for us, no woman, no home, no children—”

  Again Ragesh bowed his head, but Judas turned on him and cried, “And you dared to call me the Maccabee—I’m cursed, I tell you, cursed! Look at my hands—already they’re covered with blood, and there’s nothing but blood ahead of me. Did I want this? Did I ask for it? David wanted to be king, but I don’t want that—and what have I ever wanted that was granted to me?”

  “Freedom,” Ragesh said softly, and then Judas put his face in his hands and wept.

  ***

  It will not be remembered so; in other ways will it be remembered—the things that took place in the five years that followed; but for me the memory is of my glorious brothers, of the great charge that Eleazar led against the phalanx, smashing it open as no others but the Romans smashed it, for the fight Judas fought with the Greek Apollonius—Apollonius who boasted that with his own hands he slew eleven hundred and fifty-nine Jews, Apollonius who directed the great blood-letting in Jerusalem when first they defiled the Temple, Apollonius who had brought to him in one night twenty Jewish virgins and despoiled them all, the better to prove his own manhood and the superiority of Western civilization.

  Yet I must tell of the misery and hopelessness in the land for the death of the Adon Mattathias. We came back to Ephraim, and the people were frightened and afraid, sinking into beastlike defeat, for indeed they lived like beasts in the caves and the brushwood shelters. In our valley and in the narrow defiles that led up from the brooding, landlocked swamp—called by some the pit of sorrows—more than twelve thousand Jews now lived, and most had come with only their grief and the clothes they wore, without tools, food or weapons, but always with children, the numberless laughing children that are thicker than olives in Judea and once were rounder too. They came into a place dry and wooded, yet pestilential from the rot and odor of the grea
t swamp. All through the spring, the snows would melt from the slopes of Ephraim and the other mountains, and the water would drain down into the swamp from which there was no outlet, lying there for the next ten months in a deep ooze of decay. As I said, once, long ago and before the Exile, this had been one of the most pleasant and fruitful places in all Palestine; then the spring freshets were caught in stone reservoirs and spread carefully over ten thousand terraces during the ensuing months, and the land blossomed like a garden. But now the terraces were gone, as were the reservoirs—and the whole place was one of the least accessible and most forbidding wildernesses west of the Jordan. Here the bark of the jackal mixed itself with the cry of the wild heron, and here was the tiny part of Judea where men were free.

  It was not an easy freedom that we came back to. After the first surge of common misfortune, the camps divided into those who had and those who had not. People were close to starvation while other people hoarded food; a thousand petty fights and jealousies had sprung up; an informer had been tracked down and slain, and his family pledged revenge; the stout in heart were murderously bitter toward the defeatists, of whom there was no lack, and the defeatists in turn blamed the advocates of resistance. Within Ephraim, there was a little party of Jerusalemites who held themselves apart from the village folk; whereby, the village folk made the life of the few city people hell indeed. With the sinking of morale had come a physical letdown—dirt, misery, privation of all sorts—this is what my brothers and I came back to, and it was not I who knew what to do or where to turn but Judas who called a council of all the Adons and Rabbis in the refuge, demanding that they meet with him in the tent of Mattathias. Twenty-seven of them came, but nine held aloof, whereupon Judas told Eleazar and me to go with men of Modin and Goumad—men who then and later were rocks upon which we stood often enough—and fetch them. It was not a pleasant thing; it is not good to see Jew against Jew, yet that was seen before; we brought them, and there was one, Samuel ben Zebulun, Adon of Gibeah, who demanded of Judas:

  “And who are you to drag me here in this fashion, you with the pap of your mother not yet dry on your cheek?” He was a proud and resentful man, past sixty; but Judas, standing at the end of the tent, did not answer but looked at him until the Adon could not meet his eyes and turned away angrily.

  “Then choose someone to lead you,” Judas said coldly, “and I will follow him if he fights. And if he doesn’t fight, others will. And if all of you should go and make your peace with the Greek, then I and my brothers will fight, so that the name Jew will not be a shame and an abomination to the nokri.”

  “Is this the wisdom of youth?” Nathan ben Joseph, a Jerusalem Rabbi, demanded caustically.

  “I have no wisdom,” Judas replied angrily, “but I know two things the Adon Mattathias taught me: to love freedom and to bend my knee neither to man nor to God.”

  “Peace, Judas, peace,” Ragesh said.

  “And these two things that constitute the wisdom of Mattathias,” said Samuel ben Zebulun, “brought ruin upon Judea, so that our land is laid waste and the people weep in their agony. Save me from the wisdom of Mattathias!”

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when Judas was upon him, seizing his cloak in two clenched fists and telling him, in a hoarse and awful whisper, “Say what you will of me, old man, but speak no word of the Adon Mattathias, not good and not evil, for I tell you, you’re not worth the fringe of his garment—no, nor fit to serve him or answer his most menial demand!”

  “Judas!” the Rabbi Ragesh cried, and the word was enough, so that my brother let go of the old man, bowed his head and left the tent.

  We followed him, Eleazar and John and Jonathan and myself, and I walked ahead, putting my arm around Judas and shaking him gently, “All right, so easy, easy—”

  “I can’t do it, Simon. You saw what happened to me. I can’t do it.”

  “Then who will do it? Name him.”

  “You.”

  I shook my head. “No, no, there’s only one man in all Israel they’ll follow the way they would have followed the Adon himself, may he rest in peace. Who knows it better than I do, Judas, for is it not true that all my life I hated in you what was not in me?”

  “What, Simon, what?” he pleaded.

  I answered, “The power to make people love you more than they love life itself.”

  “Yet,” he said, moodily and hopelessly, “the one thing I wanted was given to you.”

  My brothers were with us now; we sat down under a tree, and I told Judas: “There are five of us, the sons of Mattathias, and we are brothers. You were right, Judas, for if the rest should go away and abase themselves, we will do what has to be done. I don’t know if it’s the blessing or the curse of the old man, the Adon, but it’s in us, in all of us, different as we are. But they won’t go away, Judas. We came out of them, as the Adon did, and what we are they made us. How else should it be? Was it ever given to Greek or Egyptian to raise up a Maccabee?” Eleazar stopped me, for he saw the Rabbi Ragesh coming. “Enough, Simon,” Judas said, and I saw the reflection of his torment on his face.

  There was no forgiveness in the eyes of Ragesh as he said to Judas, “Thus do you honor age in Israel. It was you I called the Maccabee!”

  “Did I claim it?” Judas asked miserably. “Did I claim it?”

  “Claim it when you deserve it! Now go back, for they will still have you!”

  We rose, and with Judas, we returned to the tent. “I ask your forgiveness,” he said to the old men assembled, and they answered, “Amen—so be it.”

  They listened to Judas as he spoke. On the floor of the tent, they sat, their legs crossed, hooded in their long striped cloaks, these old men listening to a boy—for Judas was hardly more than that—even as their ancestors had sat in their goatskin tents in the long, long ago. I watched them as Judas spoke, and how well do I remember their faces, those lined, harsh, hawk-nosed intolerant faces; those bearded, weathered faces that spelled Jew in so strange and definite a way, not by eye or feature but a pattern of thought and a pattern of life that had imprinted itself on eyes, nose, mouth, and cheek—these Adons and Rabbis and venerable patriarchs; for thou shalt honor the gray hairs on a man’s head—and did they not see that Judas, who was youth in all its beauty and glory, was graying too? They were against him at first, but as he talked he melted them, and watching it I thought once more of the incredible simplicity of my brother—and something else beside that—for under all there was an imperious direction. Whether they knew it then or not, Judas laid down there the iron law for a nation that would spend three decades in terrible struggle to liberate itself. And when those decades were done, how many of these old men would be alive? But they did not think of that then; they looked at this boy who was all of the legends of Israel, David in form and Gideon in purity and directness, Jeremiah in passion and Isaiah in wrath, and the harsh lines in their faces eased, and more and more frequently, they said softly, “Amen—so be it.”

  Yet for all that, Judas betrayed himself, placing the burden on himself and us, his brothers. I am not to judge, yet I would not have done it so, but Judas did it, for better or for worse. In battle and in the training of men, he would command—that was his price—and under him would be Eleazar and the child Jonathan. Provisioning and supplies would be under John, and I, Simon, would judge the people—with an iron hand I would judge them, even as a man was judged in battle—that was his price.

  “A harsh price,” one of the Adons said, yet Judas had won them.

  “I know a thing,” Judas said. “I know battle. I know the enemy, whether he be the fat and wealthy Jew, walled up in the Acra in Jerusalem, or whether he be a mercenary in pay of the Greek. For months now, I and my brothers have lived only for battle, for killing and for slaughter. When the killing is over, we will do as you say. When the land is free, we will go away if you so desire—or we will abase ourselves a
nd kiss the hems of your garments. But until then, I put a price on the blood of Mattathias and you have heard it.”

  “Would you be a king in Israel?” someone asked.

  And then I marveled, for before my eyes, standing there, Judas wept as he said, “No—no, I swear it, in the name of God!” They could not face this humility of his. “God forgive you,” Ragesh said, and Samuel ben Zebulun, so bitter before, went up to Judas, took him by the shoulders and kissed his lips. “Maccabee,” he said softly, “weep for the suffering before us—and the old men will follow where a child leads them. Be strong and passionate and terrible and love freedom and righteousness.” But still Judas wept, and finally we all of us went out of the tent and left him alone.

  ***

  There were six weeks then, in which Judas made an army, six weeks while we waited for Apollonius, chief warden of Judea, to feel the fly that was biting him from Ephraim and to blot it out. At the beginning of that time, a Jew of Damascus, Moses ben Daniel by name, found his way to Ephraim with twenty-two mules bearing fine wheat flour. By then, already, John and I had enforced the decree of common pooling of all foods in a central place, so that while no one had too much to eat, no one starved—and the iron hand, as they came to call it, of Simon ben Mattathias was felt; an iron hand that to me was soft and useless, and is, God help me, to this day. I do not make small of myself; I know myself.

  Thus, forty-four sacks of flour were a welcome and a gracious gift from this man who lived so far from Judea. A merchant in wheat, he and his family had lived in Damascus for ten generations, yet they remained Jews, and each morning and each night turned toward the Temple to pray—and when they heard that resistance was alive in Judea, burning like a slow flame, they bethought them of what they might do. He brought us the wheat, and his daughter, Deborah, seventeen years old and white as a lily in a pond, came with him to our dank and lonely Wilderness of Ephraim. Nor was he the only one, for even then Jews all over the world, in Alexandria, in Rome, in Athens—even in far-off Spain—lifted their heads when they heard the rumor that Judea might be free again.