He had first seen these lovely vineyards under unusual circumstances: one winter’s day in 1944 when the German threat to Syria had dissolved, thanks to the English victories in the desert and the Russian triumph at Stalingrad, Gottesmann’s special unit was sent by truck from Damascus to Cairo, and since the convoy had been directed to use back roads it came by way of Safad, where it was halted in the mountain town by an unexpected snowstorm. The English soldiers piled out to inspect the fairy-tale corridors, crying, “Look at that old fellow from the ghetto.” But Gottesmann went by himself down the narrow alleys, thinking: This is how the Judenstrasse of Gretz must have looked when Simon Hagarzi lived there. And it was with keen pleasure that he stumbled upon the small house marked by the reverent sign:
Here Labored the Great Rabbi
ELIEZER BAR ZADOK OF GRETZ
Who Codified the Law
Later, when he had climbed to the hilltop, the snow ceased and in the ensuing sunlight he saw for the first time the majestic hills of Galilee; how extraordinary they were that wintry morning, brown in their barrenness yet golden in the unexpected sunlight and tipped on each rise with silver from the snow. The convoluted hills twisted and turned in harmonious folds like the intricacies of music, dropping at last to the lake itself, now crystal-blue in the distance. All his life Gottesmann had known of Galilee, but he had not known that it was beautiful.
“Is this the land they spoke of?” he cried with soaring joy. “Is this what we Jews used to own?”
As he looked at the goodness he saw that clouds had begun moving in from the deserts east of the River Jordan, clouds superheated from their thirsty march across waterless sands; and as they drifted across the mountains which protected Galilee they struck the cold air of the snowstorm, so that above the lake they leaped and spun in wild confusion, reaching far into the heavens and breaking into violent patterns. And for a moment Gottesmann had the feeling that nature was showing him a summary of the future with hordes from the desert striking at the Jews of the Galilee, and the turbulence in his heart was reflected in the sky, premonitory of the violence to come, yet consoling in the towering beauty and promise of peace also to come. It was Galilee at its finest—that turbulent area in which states and religions were born; and in a kind of exaltation he climbed into his army truck and rumbled down the mountainside to Tiberias, where the captain in charge suggested, “Let’s celebrate at the hot springs,” and they had piled out to enjoy the old Roman baths at the southern end of town. Feeling unnaturally clean and fresh-eyed, Gottesmann had left the baths to walk slowly southward, coming finally to the end of the lake, where he discovered the rich fields and the sleeping vineyards of Kfar Kerem. Some men were planting grapevines, and he asked them in Yiddish, “Who owns this land?” They replied in Hebrew, “The men of Kfar Kerem.”
“What men are they?”
“We’re the men,” the farmers had replied.
“Jews? Like you?” he had asked.
“Yes, Jews like you,” the men had joked in Yiddish, which they spoke poorly.
At that moment the idea struck him: After the war I’ll never go back to Gretz. And England’s not my home. Carefully he asked the farmers, “What did you say the name was?”
“Kfar Kerem. Village of the Vineyard,” one of the men translated.
“We’re the oldest Jewish settlement along the lane,” another said. “Built years ago by a man named Hacohen,” and Gottesmann had remembered the names, the fields, the vineyards.
When his convoy reached Jerusalem on its way to Cairo, Gottesmann experienced for the first time the mystery of that city so pregnant with meaning for a Jew—“To next year in Jerusalem” the prayer of his family had been—and while the English troops explored the Arab bazaars which gave the city charm he went with a few Jewish soldiers to the Hebrew University, on Mount Scopus, and there as he looked across the hills at the wonder of his land he became aware of three pretty Jewish girls who were speaking to the soldiers in Hebrew. He indicated that he did not know the language, and the leader of the students said in imperfect Yiddish, “We hope that when the war ends you’ll come back to help us capture our homeland.”
She was a girl of seventeen, broad-shouldered, sun-tanned, with her heavy hair cut short and her khaki dress even shorter. She was the tough, muscular girl of the impending state of Irael, a true sabra—“flower of the cactus,” as those born in Palestine were called, “prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside”—but there was about her lovely face something that was unmistakably Russian. Her upper lip was thin but her cheeks were full. Her cheekbones were high and her stubborn chin was squared off, so that she did not look Jewish, and when she smiled her teeth were unusually big and white. She was like no other Jewish girl he had ever seen, strong and confident as she asked, “You will come back to help us?”
“To do what?”
She became solemn, most unlike a girl of seventeen who is flirting with strange soldiers, and said, “There’s to be war. There’s to be much fighting and we shall need your help.”
He remembered the turbulent clouds over Galilee and said, “You can’t fight all these Arabs.”
“We don’t want to fight them,” she replied, “but they’ll insist. They’ll think they can destroy us. But after we capture Jerusalem …”
“After you what?”
She looked at him with wide, lovely brown eyes. “We’ll capture Jerusalem,” she said with assurance. “We’ll need help, of course.” And she grasped his hands eagerly, crying. “Soldier, please come back.” Ashamed of her outburst she stepped back, asking, after a while, “Where is your home, soldier?”
“Germany.”
“And your family?”
“I have none.”
She took his hands again and kissed them. “In Germany you have no home. In our free Israel you do.” He was startled, and in Hebrew she spoke words that he could not comprehend but whose passion he grasped: “Here is our home! Jerusalem shall be our capital, and if they mean to war with us, we shall show them war as they have never seen it before.”
Caught by the poetry of her words, he asked in Yiddish, “And where is your home?”
“In the greatest of all Jewish settlements,” she said quietly. “At the foot of the Sea of Galilee, where my grandfather proved that Jews …”
“Kfar Kerem?”
“You’ve heard of it?” she asked proudly.
He took her handsome square face in his two hands and kissed her. “Kfar Kerem will be my home,” he said in Yiddish, “and you will be my wife.”
Like lovers from the Crusades, speaking in Bordeaux on the afternoon when the knight must sail to the Holy Land to be absent for ten years, they spoke that afternoon of the historic days facing the Jews, and her soaring patriotism communicated to him the spirit of Kfar Kerem. “I train in the army, and we shall win from the English,” she predicted confidently, “and from the Arabs, too, if they insist. We’ll have a great city here in Jerusalem and our university …”
“You’ll never hold Jerusalem.”
“We will hold Jerusalem,” she said firmly, and she walked with him to the army trucks, where she gave him her address, although he did not need it: Ilana Hacohen, Kfar Kerem. But as the trucks drew away she cried suddenly with an impassioned voice, “Jewish soldiers! Please, please come back!”
Now, on April 12, 1948, as he sat in his new house among the olive trees, he listened to the untutored clatter of pots in the kitchen. It sounded as if a child were playing at a toy stove, and he thought fondly of Ilana, his reluctant housewife. The Galilee, remote from the centers of power, seemed to be falling apart and the Jews didn’t know what to do. There was idle talk about an attack on the town of Tiberias, held by the Arabs, but bolder spirits argued that the first assault should strike at Acre, also in Arab hands. And as for Safad, the situation there was worse than desperate; it was hopeless.
The situation was this. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations meeting at Lake Success in New York,
had voted 33 to 13 to accept England’s decision to hand back the mandate given her by the old League of Nations, under which she had been responsible for the government of what came to be known as British Palestine. The problem of what to do now with this vital territory reverted to the United Nations, and the responsible committee had already decided that the land be divided into three parts: inland an Arab state containing mostly Arabs; along the Mediterranean a Jewish state containing mostly Jews; and in between, the internationalized city of Jerusalem to be snared by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, since that city was holy to all three religions.
On the morning following the announcement of this decision, the Arabs in Palestine had shown the world how they intended to comply by sweeping down upon an unarmed Jewish bus, killing five and wounding seven. Of course, this was not the first disturbance on either side, but it helped ignite an undeclared Arab-Jewish war, with each combatant fighting to gain territorial advantage against the day when division came into effect and an open war could start. During their final months of custodianship the English tried honestly to maintain some kind of peace, but as the bullets increased, as Arab village and Jewish market went up in smoke, the English made it clear that they were determined to leave. On May 15, 1948, they were quitting the land, and Arabs and Jews could partition it in warfare. As a result, in the difficult months at the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948 the English were beset with irritating problems for which they blamed the Jews; the government in London tried to maintain a façade of impartiality, but their men on the job in Palestine found themselves increasingly partial to the Arabs, and it became obvious that all day-to-day decisions attendant upon withdrawal were going to favor the Arabs and impede the Jews.
This was only natural. The average Englishman had a personal affinity for Arabs and a distrust of Jews; but more important to the dispassionate Englishman was the fact that the Jews were pathetically outnumbered—600,000 Jews against 1,300,000 Arabs in undivided Palestine, plus 36,000,000 others determined to attack from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon, all of whom had common boundaries with Palestine, and from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq, which did not. English politicians could be excused if they believed that within two weeks after May 15, 1948, the last Jew in Palestine would be pushed into the sea; it would be therefore unwise to aid these misguided people in prolonging their suicide. Wherever possible, existing fortifications, equipment and physical advantages were being handed over to the Arabs. By mid-April, 1948, the outlines of the transition were clear: The British would go; the Arabs would come; the fleets of the world would stand by in the eastern Mediterranean to rescue whatever Jews escaped the final massacres. Where the survivors were to find refuge, the U.N. would have to decide.
The raw figures facing Isidore Gottesmann were disheartening. In all of upper Galüee, which he and his group were supposed to hold, there were not more than five thousand Jews. Opposed to them were not less than a hundred thousand Arabs, with some two hundred thousand more available from the contiguous Arab countries to the north and east. For example, in the villages between Safad and Acre there were exactly thirty-four Jewish boys and girls with rifles. In Safad itself, where the first blow would probably be struck, an accurate census of Jews had been made: 1,214 Jews surrounded by an estimated 13,400 Arabs. Since Gottesmann had been trained in German gymnasia and English universities, he knew that one must not associate accurate figures and estimates; nevertheless, he had worked out the fanciful ratio of 11.1 Arabs to every Jew. It was an easy number to remember, 11.1. But even it was misleading in that it represented the Jewish strength as greater than it actually was, for the Arabs not only held every high and strategic point, so that their superior weapons could be aimed downward, point-blank at the Jewish quarter, but the 1,214 Jews who were in Safad were composed largely of elderly religious people who either refused to defend themselves or were incapable of doing so. Many were convinced that God still intended to punish Jews for unknown sins and that this time He had chosen the Arabs to do His work, as in the recent past He had chosen the Germans, and before that the Cossacks under Czmielnicki and the Spaniards under the Inquisition. The Jews of Safad were doomed to die; the Torah said so. And they would sit in their synagogues and wait for the long knives as they had waited in the past.
Gottesmann looked at his gloomy figures: Of the 1,214 Jews in Safad, only 140 are armed, and only 260 in all are capable of fighting. The real proportion as between Jewish defenders and Arab attackers, augmented by reinforcements from without, must therefore be considered to be about forty to one. Yet the capture of Safad by Jewish forces was essential to the preservation of a Jewish state or to the winning of the war that would accompany its establishment. For Safad commanded the hills, and just as it had been vital to the Crusaders in 1100 CE. as a salient protecting Tiberias and the roads to Acre, and to the Mamelukes in 1291 C.E. as a point from which to control the rest of Galilee, so now in 1948 it was again a site overlooking the jugular vein of the area. Taking into consideration the overwhelming superiority of Arab numbers, the United Nations had logically awarded Safad to the forthcoming Arab state, but if it were allowed to remain in Arab hands the viability of any Jewish nation would vanish. As the days of the mandate drew to an end, Safad became the vital target for Jews in the area, and it was held by the Arabs, II.I-to-I.
As he completed his notes he used the contemporary spelling, Safad, pronounced Sfat in one syllable to rhyme with spot. Like all the places of Galilee this fortress town had known many different names: it had originally been Sepph, then Sephet, then Safat; Crusaders had known it as Saphet, historians as Safed, the Arabs as Safad, map makers as Tsefat, and Hebrew nationalists as Zefat. In similar manner Acre had been Akka, Aecho, Ptolemais, St. Jean d’Acre of the Crusaders, and now purists were calling it Akko; but the most notable of the variations had occurred with the Sea of Galilee: at first it had been known as a sea called Chinnereth, from the resemblance of its shoreline to a harp, then Kinnereth, then Gennesaret, Galilee, Tiberias, Tverya, Tabariyyah, Tyberiadis to the Crusaders, and, to the Turks, Bahr Tubariyeh. For the English it became Lake Galilee and was to be Yam Kinneret, with the second word accented on the second syllable.
Isidore Gottesmann, satisfied that his figures on Safad were in final form, closed his folder and leaned back. He was sure that later on that evening, when Teddy Reich and his Palmach lieutenants came to review the situation, Teddy was bound to say, “We’ve got to capture Safad. Get going, Gottesmann.” The unhappy soldier smiled wryly: Everyone calls him Teddy but they call me Gottesmann. Because I look like a skinny Englishman. And because I like it that way.
He thought back upon the times when the calling of his name by some Englishman had been of critical significance: That night after we blew up the bridge inside the German border. The English major heading the underground had said in his crisp, unemotional manner, “Splendid show, Gottesmann. You’re for Antwerpen.” And that had been the difference between life and the extermination camp, for those who had not made it to Antwerp had been caught and killed. Or the night in the Belgian port when another English underground operative had called, “One more place in the lorry. Look lively, Gottesmann,” and this, too, had been the selection between living and dying, for on the following week this Antwerp ring had been penetrated by the Nazis. He also remembered the time when he had stood at attention in dirty civilian clothes as a professor announced to a motley crew, “And for the University of Norwich, Gottesmann. You did well in your papers, lad.” At graduation his German-Jewish name had been called crisply and he had moved into the British army, then into Syria and later into Italy—always at the command of British Gentiles who were generous in recognizing his merit and in granting him their approval.
But later the voices calling him had changed to Yiddish, the hard, tough voices of small, tough men: “Gottesmann, we’ve got to ship these refugees to Eretz Israel. Rent a boat at Taranto. I don’t know where you’ll get the money. Get it.” And the voice of Teddy R
eich, who was even tougher and smaller than the others, all brain and sinew: “Gottesmann, you’ll take this dynamite to Tiberias and wait till the lorry …” Just before the suitcase exploded a British voice had cried with agonizing despair, “My God, Gottesmann! What have you done?”
It had been while hiding from the British after this dynamiting that he had been smuggled into Kfar Kerem, where he had made his way to the home of Netanel Hacohen. Tapping softly on the door he had aroused a tall, square-jawed Jew, who said gruffly, “If they’re chasing you, come in.”
“I met your daughter in Jerusalem.”
“She’s not here. But you must be Gottesmann and I suppose you blew up the lorry. Welcome, son.”
That night he had seen for the first time the haunting portrait of little Shmuel Hacohen, his left shoulder protruding as if he wanted to fight, his eyes flashing with notable vitality. “He was killed by Bedouins while fighting to protect this land,” Netanel explained. “When the first trouble started the others wanted to give up the vineyards and retreat to the walls of Tiberias, but Shmuel preached, ‘We’ll build walls greater than any Tiberias has seen. Out of our love for the land!’”
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