Israel

by Fred Lawrence Feldman

  Late every night after visiting Rosie, Haim would walk back to his digs, lost in thought. How could he earn money? Neither was being paid. The understanding was that they’d be allowed membership in the bayit in exchange for their labor. When the time came, they would be portioned out a housing plot in the new suburb, just like the other members. Haim had to figure out a way to earn enough money to be able to build a house.

  A letter from Yol, still toiling at Kinnereth in Galilee, gave him the idea. Most of his friend’s correspondence was taken up with amusing anecdotes and outrageous bragging about his exploits with a gun, but one letter happened to mention in passing some of the things the settlement was lacking. Food they had more or less, but dry goods like clothing and shoes were wearing out and decent replacements hard to come by. Now, the one trade that Haim knew better than masonry was cobbling, but one man could never hope to supply all the work boots for the agricultural settlements.

  He went to Dizengoff with his idea. The Old Man, as most had taken to calling him. furnished Haim with an introduction to an assistant of Arthur Ruppin, who had recently arrived in Jaffa to head the Zionist Organization’s office for Palestine. What Haim proposed was that the organization supply its settlements with shoes manufactured in Jaffa at a far lower cost than imports.

  The idea was enthusiastically received, but there was a considerable delay due to bureaucratic wrangling before he was officially awarded a limited contract on a trial basis. It was even longer before the promised advance was paid. Haim used his savings from his stonecutter’s job in Jerusalem to rent a hall and equip it with benches, tools and leather.

  He went out to hire Jewish cobblers, but to his stupefaction and Dizengoff’s glee he was unable to find halutzim willing to work at the wages he could offer. The fellahin at the building site told Haim of Arab shoemakers, skilled men who would be happy to get the work. Haim hired the Arabs and at last was in business.

  At first he tried to be in two places at once. Mornings he spent at his shoe factory and afternoons at the building site. The Old Man soon spoke to him about neglecting the bayit. Addressing him as Mr. Kolesnikoff, as was the exceedingly proper Dizengoff’s habit when discussing Ahuzzat Bayit business, the Old Man suggested that Haim choose his best cobbler and make him manager of the factory.

  Within a year Haim had forty Arabs working for him and was supplying virtually all the leather goods needed by the settlements: shoes, belts, gloves, aprons, livestock harnesses. He reinvested some of his profits in imported machinery to increase his factory’s production and hired two halutzim to oversee the sale of surplus goods in the bazaars of Jaffa and Jerusalem.

  He soon found that he no longer had the time to be foreman of the bayit project. A vote was taken by the membership and Haim was allowed to resign his position after hiring an Arab to take his job. He then bought in as a full member of the bayit.

  At Dizengoff s urging he began to dress “appropriately” for a “man of his position in the Jewish community.” Haim found himself going around in a white linen suit, a tie and a straw boater. When he and his fiancee were invited to dinner parties, he wore a black suit. Whenever he ran into Dizengoff he remembered their first meeting and imagined that the Old Man was smirking at him.

  On April 11, 1909, the housing plots were portioned out by lottery. Haim immediately contracted for a house to be built on rutted, muddy Herzl Street.

  On a warm, bright Sunday in June he and Rosie were married in the Glasers’ side garden. The chupah was set up beneath the fragrant, blossomy orange tree. Each of the four poles of the canopy was held by one of Rosie’s brothers; Dizengoff stood by Haim.

  The groom wrote to Yol inviting him to the wedding and paying him the honor of requesting his services as best man but mail could take months to travel even short distances in Palestine. Haim suspected he’d be a married man by the time Yol knew what was happening.

  The night before the ceremony Haim walked by himself through the shifting sands that iay between the old town and the new suburb. He thought a little about Yol, who had a gun, the use of a horse and the adventurous life he himself had always dreamed about. If Yol could only see him now, with his suit and tie and his ridiculous straw boater instead of a kayffiyeh, how the little monkey man would laugh!

  And then Haim thought about Abe, somewhere in America, undoubtedly fabulously wealthy after all these years. Abe would probably scold him. “For this you came to Palestine? If you’d wanted to wear a necktie you could have come with me to America.”

  Thinking about Abe only made Haim miss his friend all the more. Since coming to Palestine he’d learned that it was possible to send letters to America in care of the Zionist Organization offices located there. But the addressee had to be expecting mail in order to pick it up. Haim had .tried writing a couple of times, but his letters were returned to him unopened. It worried Haim. He prayed that Abe was all right, just as he prayed that someday the two of them would be reunited.

  The next day during the wedding Haim imagined that Abe was standing in Meir Dizengoff’s place. As far as he was concerned it was Abe’s hand that placed Rosie’s wedding ring in his and Abe Herodetzky’s witnessing signature on the fancy marriage certificate.

  Haim and Rosie Kolesnikoff moved into the Glaser household for a month until their house was finished. Then Haim took leave of his father-in-law’s residence and carried his bride across the threshold of their new home.

  The surf was soaking the bottoms of his rolled-up trouser cuffs. Rosie would scold him for letting the salt stain the white linen. Haim, still staring at the lights of Jaffa, stayed where he was. He could afford all the linen suits he needed.

  Five years, he thought, five years since I came to Palestine. It was hard for him to believe. He found himself continually ticking the years off on his fingers and shaking his head in wonder.

  It was May 21, 1910, the night of the big meeting to name the suburb. He and Rosie had been married nearly a year.

  And that year had passed the quickest of all. Haim’s days consisted of little more than meetings with other Jewish businessmen and hours at his desk in the leather factory. At twenty-eight he felt prematurely old. Deskbound, he watched his stonecutter’s physique shrink and fade while his belly grew. Yol, fit and tanned, visited since the marriage. Their friendship remained as strong as ever, but something had changed. Yol was truly a halutz; Haim no longer felt like a pioneer.

  If his days at the factory were a dreary disappointment, his nights made up for it. Rosie was worth sacrificed dreams. Rosie was worth everything. Their marriage was blissfully happy. She was proud of him and proud of herself. Her work with Dizengoff had given her new self-confidence. This and her changed circumstances allowed her to shed her animosity toward her father. Daughter and father were getting along fine. Rosie had even begun to paint, and her father’s critiques bothered her not at all.

  “Haim!”

  He turned to see Rosie coming toward him along the beach. He went to meet her, gathering up his shoes and suit jacket on the way.

  “I know, I know. The meeting . . . I’m coming.”

  Rosie went to him and put her arms around his waist. “Forget it,” she chuckled, giving him a kiss. “It’s over.”

  “What? The voting is finished? They chose a name?”

  “Ummm . . .” She slid beneath his arm and together they began to walk home. “Do you mind not getting to vote?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “I didn’t think so. That’s why I didn’t come fetch you.”

  “So?” Haim demanded.

  “So what?” Rosie teased him, pulling away.

  “Rosie,” he growled, pretending to chase her. “Slow down,” he commanded. “You know the doctor told you to take it easy!”

  “Haim, we just found out that I’m pregnant. There’s time yet before I turn into crystal.”

  “So start now, and when it is time you’ll have trained yourself not to run around like a wild animal. Now then, tell
me what was decided at the meeting.”

  “Mrs. Sheinken’s choice won by a landslide.”

  Haim shook his head. “You think I remember every—”

  “She suggested the title of Herzl’s novel, Altneuland, except, of course, that we’ll use the Hebrew.”

  “So it’s to be Tel Aviv? The ‘Hill of Spring.’” He smiled. “You like the name of your city, my love?”

  Rosie nodded and leaned against him as they trudged through the winding path that led through the dunes to their home.

  Chapter 9

  New York

  The tenth convention of the ILGWU was held in the first part of June 1910. A week into the convention a delegate introduced a resolution for a general strike against the garment industry in New York City. The resolution passed overwhelmingly. There remained only the formality of polling the increasingly militant rank and file and the choosing of the day the strike would begin.

  The joint board, made up of nine locals, began its preparations. It was up to this body to hire the halls and organize the relief, information and picketing committees. One of these was Cloak Pressers’ Local 35, Abe Herodetzky’s shop.

  Abe had heard little from Stefano about the coming strike since he handed over his two hundred dollars. He knew about the convention, which was held in Boston, but only because he read about it in the Forward.

  The usually easy-going de Fazio was looking haggard these days and had no time to talk. He was putting in full days at the Allen Street sweatshop and long, late nights at secret union meetings. Stefano de Fazio was no longer very productive at his pressing machine, and once or twice the loft’s foreman threatened to fire the Italian, although everyone knew he wouldn’t. The situation at Allen Street and the other sweatshops scattered throughout the city was like dynamite. The shop foreman was not about to light the fuse by firing a union representative. The looming strike was on everyone’s mind although no one spoke of it. Of course, unlike those horrors, the strike was going to end up being good for everyone. At least that was what everyone hoped.

  Abe had long since moved out of the Kraviches’ Montgomery Street apartment. He did not miss the bearded slaughterhouse worker’s pompous advice or Sadie’s rantings, but he did often think longingly of his blessed private room. He’d moved to nearby Jefferson Street, where he had to share his room with two other boarders.

  Abe’s thoughts also dwelled on Leah Kravich. On the day he left, sweet Leah burst into tears as she shook his hand in farewell. Abe did think of her, but truth to tell, he far more missed the private room.

  On June 25 Stefano came around to each worker to whisper that there was going to be a mass rally at Madison Square Garden in three days. Abe nodded, promising to be there, and was rewarded with a pat on the shoulder. Abe was ashamed of himself for hoping the rally would be a failure. As the day approached, he managed to convince himself that this talk of a big strike was absurd. How could thousands of Jews, Italians and Poles who’d never laid eyes on one another hope to stand together against the combined money and might of the owners, the government and the police?

  It was not that Abe was against unions, and he certainly desired the benefits Stefano spoke of. The problem was that Abe was sorely missing his savings. Stefano never mentioned it and Abe was reluctant to pester him about it, but in his bed at night, while the other two boarders slept, Abe would stare at the receipt. He would read and reread it, taking slim comfort from it. That Stefano was scrupulously honest Abe had no doubt. That the union would repay him—Well, Stefano said it would, but what if the strike failed and the union was shattered?

  And so Abe brooded. His decision gnawed at him. The fact that it was over and done with did not matter. It ached like a scar in the rain. When he did finally fall asleep, uncertainty would jab him awake. Then he would brood about that. He’d done a good deed, but he was ruining it in God’s eyes by his niggardly doubts. That train of thought would set him off in bitter recriminations about why he wasn’t a good man and all chance of sleep would be lost for the night.

  June 28 was a ghastly, humid day with a grey sky and stale air like wet wool against the skin. Stefano had asked that the men meet at the corner of Orchard and Grand.

  Abe was one of the last to arrive. The others greeted him quietly as they stood about with their hands in their pockets, skittish as colts at missing work and self-conscious because of the stares from the Orchard Street merchants. The day seemed preternaturally still as they walked to the streetcars for Madison Square Garden. All Abe could hear was the clacking of their shoes against the pavement and the sudden liquid fluttering of the pigeons overhead.

  They boarded a trolley and watched nervously to see if other workers were going to the rally. The street began to thicken with fellow unionists long before the arena came into view. The streetcar gave up trying to inch its way through the throngs. Abe and the others had to walk the last part of the way, and when they finally got to the Garden, they were informed that there was no more room inside.

  Thousands were milling about waving picket signs. They swarmed like locusts across the green lawns of Madison Square Park and packed the streets all the way to the oddly triangular Flatiron Building three blocks away.

  Inside the arena Samuel Gompers, the president and a founder of the American Federation of Labor, was exhorting his vast audience to press for higher wages and shorter hours, not social revolution. Outside far lesser union officials were repeating the same message. It was a circus. Stefano jumped up and down, tossing his hat into the air, delirious with excitement and joy. “I told you all! I told you to believe,” he cried between lapses into Italian.

  Stefano laid eyes on Abe and set upon him to grab his sleeves and whirl him around the jam-packed sidewalk in a dance of triumph. “Now aren’t you glad you gave the money?” Stefano shouted into Abe’s ear.

  Abe nodded, for right then he was glad. It was a grand thing to be a part of all this activity. He felt giddy locked in Stefano’s robust embrace, the center of everyone’s attention.

  Then Stefano released him. The Italian veered away to join a trio of men Abe didn’t know and blended into the crowd. Abe’s other Allen Street compatriots were also gone. He was alone and he began to feel claustrophobic from the press of bodies and the weather.

  He fought his way to the edge of the crowd and began to head down Fifth Avenue. Past the Flatiron Building the throngs thinned out and Abe was able to breathe a little easier, but with the distance came loneliness and depression.

  It’s unfair, he told himself, I belonged back there. But he did not. He didn’t care about the union, not really. His dream was far different from the common one shared by the celebrating unionists.

  Stefano de Fazio and the other men he worked with wanted nothing more than higher pay and more time to spend with their families and their God. Let others have the responsibilities of ownership as well as its rewards.

  Responsibilities were what Abe needed, to fill the difficult days and the far worse nights. A busy man would not have time to dwell on his personal shortcomings. A wealthy man, no matter how lacking in personal appeal, grace and warmth, could send out his money to win respect and even affection in the community.

  The kind of woman he wanted to marry would expect him to have money, proof that despite his unprepossessing appearance he had what really mattered in the world, intelligence and shrewdness.

  He expected the same qualities in a woman, along with durability. Abe wanted good value in a wife as in all things.

  Abe kept walking downtown. He cut east on Twenty-first Street, past the locked gates of lush Gramercy Park, down Irving Place past the brownstones and an Irish policeman who gave him a hard stare.

  This was a wealthy area, but Abe had not come this way to view the architecture. Parked on the tidy streets were many automobiles, the magnificent playthings of the very rich. Abe saw two Pierce Arrows and a shiny Welch Tourer. He managed to peek inside the vehicle before being shooed away by its chauffeur, most li
kely a former coachman.

  Abe walked the next mile in a daze, dreaming about what it might be like to sit in such a contraption. One would be cushioned on soft, fragrant red leather upholstery—there was enough fine leather in that Tourer to make fifty pairs of shoes. One would issue curt orders to the chauffeur, “Right, left; fast, slow”—but no. It would never do to direct the vehicle. The chauffeur must know the way on his own.

  The daydream collapsed of its own implausibility and its dreamer’s ignorance. Abe did not know enough about automobiles even to imagine the realities of owning one. He did not know enough about anything except what it was like to be poor.

  I might just as well have stayed in Russia, he thought. The lament had occurred to him many times before, but now he was beginning to believe it.

  Abe walked clear home. To ride the dingy, crowded streetcar after seeing those automobiles was an impossibility. Besides, saving the trolley fare made him feel correct, even virtuous in his behavior. It was a small pleasure, but these days, with so little in his pocket, not spending was the only pleasure he could afford.

  The weeks following the rally at Madison Square Garden were filled with progress reports from Stefan. To Abe’s astonishment more talking than working was going on at the Allen Street factory loft and the foreman seemed resigned.

  Voting day finally came around. Stefano approached each man individually to record his vote on a small pad. No names would be attached to their votes, he promised. Only he would know, and he would promptly forget. There would be no recriminations.

  When it was Abe’s turn to voice his opinion, he hesitated, wondering if a vote against the strike would have any meaning.

  “Well, my friend, yes or no?” Stefano asked. The Italian looked drawn and nervous but also excited, like a man who was about to savor hard-won success.

  Abe hesitated, a trifle hurt becuase Stefano’s eyes were already on the next fellow.