Israel

by Fred Lawrence Feldman

  And thank God she’s wearing it again, Abe thought. “You look very pretty today,” he said.

  Leah shrugged, making a face. “1 should be a frump on the day I become an American?” She stalked past him, stiff-legged and self-conscious.

  Abe said nothing else as he locked up, afraid to break the spell. His heart was thumping like a newlywed’s; as Leah brushed past him he noticed that she was wearing the gold earrings he’d given her for their anniversary.

  That evening, in celebration of their new citizenship, they drank a bottle of wine with their dinner. Then, slightly drunk, emboldened by the wine and the events of the day, Abe led Leah to their bed. They undressed each other with trembling fingers; they felt extraordinarily naughty and nervous. It had not been so very long since sex, but an eternity since they’d made love.

  They relearned each other, lingering over touch and taste. The cruel and raucous world retreated as they loved each other. Later, when they were resting, they felt renewed and reborn, dreamers ready to wipe the sleep from their eyes and face a bright morning after the passage of a long dark night.

  “We must try again to have a child,” Leah whispered, her sweet lips brushing his ear as they shared a pillow.

  “The doctor said no more children,” Abe objected.

  “Doctor Glueck said no more children after this one we lost, but a loss shouldn’t count,” Leah was continuing, her logic exquisite. “We will have another.”

  “I love you so much, my Leah,” Abe said, and from her delighted laugh he knew that this time she’d heard. He rose up, twisting upon her. As she moaned, her nipples rising to meet his hungry mouth, Abe felt himself grow strong again. The hope was relit inside his heart. There would be a son.

  Any possibility that Haim might have written in response to Abe’s appeal in the Palestine newspaper was swept away by Turkey’s entry into the war. There had been only the slightest of chances in any event, assuming that the advertisement was ever run in the first place, and now that chance was shaved even slimmer. Abe doubted if correspondence could enter or leave Palestine until after the war.

  The war fascinated Abe because he felt so remote from it. He bought armfuls of newspapers every day and spread them out on the counter to read during his free moments in the store. That America could ever get involved in the insanity overseas struck him as totally absurd. America was the New World. The war belonged to the old.

  In April of 1915 Leah confided to Abe that she was once again pregnant. The visits to the doctor were resumed. Leah did not tell Abe that Dr. Glueck was very pessimistic.

  Abe once again relegated his wife to the upstairs apartment. By day he minded the store, read his newspapers and argued current events with his customers. After the Lusitania was sunk, many of the people who came to his store argued with Abe that America would soon be at war.

  “Never,” Abe declared to them all, echoing what Stefano had told him the last time Abe delivered his building’s rent receipts. “Next year comes up a Presidential election. No politician worth his salt considers a war during his campaign.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Abe’s customers would cluck.

  “Take it from a United States citizen,” Abe would brag. “You might as well worry about a pogrom on Cherry Street.”

  In June Leah had another miscarriage. This time it was not nearly as debilitating as the first, but Dr. Glueck insisted that she spend a couple of days in the hospital to be certain there were no complications.

  Abe visited her both evenings. He sat by her bed and held her hand. They both said little, having known there was a strong chance this would happen. This time they could face their sorrow together.

  On the second evening in the hospital, Leah squeezed Abe’s hand. “We will try again.”

  “Of course we will.”

  “We will die trying.” Leah mustered a look of weary determination.

  “I certainly intend to.” Abe leered until Leah had to beg him to stop, for it still hurt too much to laugh.

  As the war progressed, the Yiddish newspapers devoted great coverage to events on the Palestine front and the exploits of Joseph Trumpeldor and Vladimir Jabotinsky. Abe read that both these men were Jews who had fought their way to respectability in Russia despite strong prejudice. Trumpeldor had done it through valor in battle, Jabotinsky through his prowess as a philosopher-writer. Neither man had allowed his own relatively comfortable circumstances blind him to the plight of his people. Both became staunch Zionists.

  Their paths crossed when Jabotinsky, employed as a correspondent for a Moscow daily, went to Alexandria. His assignment was to report on the refugee camps the British set up to shelter Palestinian Zionists, but the Russian journalist had a far different personal motive. Jabotinsky’s dream, according to the accounts in the Yiddish newspapers, was similar to the one the departed Trumpeldor had recently espoused but went far beyond.

  Most Yiddish newspapers carried a certain photograph of Jabotinsky. The grainy black-and-white likeness revealed a slightly built clean-shaven man of indeterminate age with rather large ears and intense-looking eyes behind thick spectacles. From his picture he didn’t look much like a fighter, but he must be one from what the various articles went on to say.

  Jabotinsky believed that the war was the Jews’ golden opportunity to forge an army of their own and earn the Allies’ goodwill by helping to defeat the Central Powers. In return the Allies would endorse the postwar creation of a Jewish national home. This same army would then guarantee the security of the Jewish people. Jabotinsky dubbed his army a Jewish legion.

  The newspaper articles recounted how Trumpeldor and a majority of the Palestine Refugees’ Committee—the governing body—endorsed Jabotinsky’s idea. Training of five hundred volunteers began immediately, with the understanding that they would fight beneath a special Zionist ensign as a British detachment in the liberation of Palestine.

  Things stalled, Abe read, when General Maxwell, the British commander in Egypt, announced that an assault on Palestine was unlikely and that there was a question as to the legality of foreign nationals entering His Majesty’s army.

  “The best we can do,” the newspapers quoted Maxwell, “is allow the Palestinians to serve in some support capacity on some other Turkish front.”

  Jabotinsky and others immediately rejected Maxwell’s offer. Trumpeldor, however, agreed to help train the sort of unit Maxwell had in mind. Trumpeldor believed it to be better than nothing and not so different from his own far more modest concept of a symbolic Jewish presence in the war.

  Under the auspices of the British Trumpeldor formed and led the six-hundred-fifty-strong Zion Mule Corps, which provided supply and artillery transport during the Gallipoli campaign.

  That Trumpeldor and his volunteers worked behind the lines instead of grappling hand to hand with the Turks made little difference to Abe and his Jewish neighbors. The very idea of Jews like themselves wearing uniforms and standing side by side with soldiers from the foremost nations of Europe captured their imaginations.

  The Yiddish dailies knew what sold newspapers. Until the ill-fated Gallipoli venture came to an end in the first quarter of 1916, there were articles on the subject in each issue.

  Abe read them all. He convinced himself that Haim had joined the Mule Corps and was obsessed with the younger man’s safety. When in February one of the dailies published a list of the corps’ six casualties, Abe fully expected to see Haim’s name on it and thanked God that it was not.

  Throughout the rest of that year Abe kept abreast of developments in the war by reading both the Yiddish and English-language newspapers. The Yiddish papers focused a great deal of attention on Jabotinsky’s lobbying efforts on behalf of a Jewish legion in the various European capitals of the Allies. Along with other Jews and Christian immigrants who realized in one form or another the horrors of a pogrom, Abe was appalled at reports of the Turkish slaughter of a million and a half Armenians, a helpless minority within the Ottoman Empire. As Ge
rmany’s use of U-boats increased, more and more Americans, including Abe, began to suspect that America would be forced to step in despite President Wilson’s campaign pledge to keep America out of the war.

  Stefano told Abe that no President would declare a war while running. True, but what might happen after Wilson was safely returned to office was another thing entirely.

  America, Abe read, had a huge economic investment in the Allies. The politicians and businessmen put forth that the nation would maintain its neutrality by selling to the Germans if they could break through the Allied naval blockade, but it was becoming clear from the slant and tone of the newspapers that this country was siding with the Allies. Suddenly Abe’s Old World seemed not so far away.

  In December, the election behind him, Wilson attempted a peace initiative, but the new year 1917 was an increase in German U-boat activity leading to the sinking of the British liner Laconia and the loss of three American lives. In February an irate United States learned of a month-old telegram from German Foreign Secretary Zimmerman to the German minister in Mexico City. This “Zimmerman Telegram,” as the newspapers dubbed it, proposed a Mexican-Japanese-German alliance against the United States should she enter the war. By the end of March word of the “pro-democratic” revolution in Russia convinced many Americans that entry into the war was essential if the newborn Russian people’s government was to survive. War appeared inevitable as the Germans sank three American ships.

  Despite it all the newspapers were full of Wilson’s efforts to keep the country neutral. Abe prayed that the President would succeed in his goals. It had been a decade since Abe entered the Russian army, but the talk of a military draft vividly brought back those dreary memories.

  It does not matter what you want, Abe firmly told himself. You became a citizen, you voted, and now you must pay for that privilege if asked.

  But what would become of the store, of Leah? In March she had come to him, tense, hopeful, with the news that she was two months pregnant.

  Chapter 19

  Degania, 1917

  Early in the year the interior agricultural settlements were overwhelmed with refugees. Many were people Haim and Rosie knew from Tel Aviv. The Turks expelled nearly all the Jews from the coastal cities. Dizengoff himself, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, was deported to Damascus.

  About Rosie’s family there was at first no word. Then as the anxious weeks passed, rumors began to abound. Every new arrival at Degania had a different story to tell about the fate of the Glaser household, and every bearer of bad news swore that his version was the truth.

  The Glasers had been deported to Egypt, to Damascus, to the interior. They had been arrested as British spies, had bought their freedom by turning in a Jewish resistance group to the Turks. They had been killed.

  Rosie calmly listened to every story and did her best to believe only the more optimistic accounts. Meanwhile, there was plenty of work to keep her mind off her own troubles. The valley was Filled with people who knew nothing about survival in Galilee. Degania’s shelters were overcrowded and its sanitary facilities were overtaxed. Fever began to spread. At night the settlement was filled with the moans of the sick.

  Rosie worked hard in the nursery. There were many more children, and their health did not permit them to run barefoot or play outside with the thoughtless energy of Degania’s own offspring.

  The mural remained uncompleted, a symbol of life disrupted by war. As she endeavored to be both a teacher and a nurse to the frightened, miserable children, many of them orphans, she found herself struck several times throughout the day by the realization that her own family was lost to her. For the first time she comprehended a little of what her husband had suffered his entire life. Now both of them might be orphans.

  They are not dead, and you know your mama and papa are not spies, so they could not be imprisoned, she sternly lectured herself. At the very worst they have been expelled to the camps in Alexandria or Damascus. Perhaps they are just a few miles from here at one of the other settlements.

  By day her pragmatic self-assurances had weight, but at night, when the sick called out from their flimsy tents and the children, stirring in their nightmare-ridden sleep, wailed so loudly that the jackals in the hills picked up and returned their cries, Rosie could believe the worst. In a world turned upside down by war, a world where the children of once-prosperous Tel Aviv families now wandered pitifully thin and dressed in rags, her parents could well be languishing in a filthy Turkish prison. Her brothers might be forced into the Turkish army and her sisters scattered among the harems of the pashas.

  Or somewhere in Jaffa there could be a public square where the bodies were hanging from their heels, half-eaten by buzzing flies, innocent victims of the Turks’ anglophobia.

  In May a new evacuee presented Rosie with a tattered envelope that had passed through many hands on its way to Degania. It was a letter from her father. The Glasers were alive and well in Jaffa. Despite their British origins and their religion the Glasers’ long-standing relationship with the Turkish authorities had earned them as much goodwill as was possible in the circumstances. That they had never moved from their inn in Jaffa to the Jewish city of Tel Aviv was also in their favor. The Turks promised the Glasers protection and allowed them and a few other remaining Jews to set up a committee and watchmen’s group to protect the evacuees’ property. For the next few days the children at the nursery wondered why Rosie would suddenly begin to weep.

  Haim admired the strength his wife had shown. The land had molded Rosie’s character, turned her from a spoiled rich girl into an indomitable heroine of the Zionist struggle.

  There had been a cost. Strands of grey had appeared in Rosie’s hair and lines were beginning to deepen at the corners of her sable eyes. The soft, dewy-skinned, laughing sprite had been worn down by the wind and sand, as everything was eroded in Galilee. Her laughter was rare, replaced by only the faintest of smiles at the corners of her mouth and by the slightest glint in her eyes. Her curves had shrunk to gauntness. Her slender, graceful fingers were knotted with scars, rough with calluses.

  The changes saddened Haim, but he loved his Rosie none the less for the changes worked upon her. In fact he loved her more, if that was possible, and for a curious reason. She had become the practical one of their family. These days it was Rosie, not he, who made decisions by logic as opposed to emotions. Perhaps it had always been that way; perhaps she had always been the responsible one.

  Haim found himself thinking about Abe a great deal, at work and in the evenings while playing with his son. He told Herschel about Abe and his own boyhood in Russia—as much about it as a six-year-old boy could be expected to understand. He often showed Herschel the portrait of himself and Abe.

  “That man is your grandfather,” Haim told his son. “I lived to be a man thanks to him, and you have descended from me. The two of us are the result of that man’s kindness toward a ragged orphan many years ago in Russia.”

  “Orphans like the children here in Degania?” Herschel asked his father, his eyes wide as his young mind made the connections.

  “The same, my son. Galilee has become very much like the Russia of my boyhood.”

  Haim told Herschel nothing more. He hoped the war would end before the boy was old enough to form strong memories. There was no need for his son to comprehend just how much progress had been rolled back for the halutzim of Degania.

  First there was the amount of work to be done. Systems of crop rotation had been devised by the various agricultural settlements to bring about the replenishment of the soil. With the coming of war and the subsequent cutoff of Palestine’s ability to import food from the Allied nations, a bread shortage developed. Every settlement set to work growing as much grain as possible, and only grain, so that in a short while the beneficial effects of crop rotation were reversed and the soil was again depleted.

  Now, three years after the war came to Palestine, the bread supply was meager and its quality poor. It was supplemented
by only a few eggs and not much milk, a diet not so different from what peasant Jews had been forced to live on in Russia.

  This sort of farming called for every worker with the least knowledge of agriculture to go out to the fields. It was difficult to maintain the proper Zionist spirit when one labored hard all day only to return at night to a settlement made intolerable by overcrowding. Soon it would be another rainy season, and once again Degania’s carefully laid paths would be churned to mud by too many feet. The evacuees would complain about discomfort and lack of food, not understanding how difficult it was to wrest anything from unyielding Galilee.

  At such times it was hard for Haim and the others who belonged to Degania to remember that they were all Jews and ought to band together. As in Russia, the Jews could not afford to be their own worst enemy, and as in Russia, there was somebody to remind them of that fact.

  Several times since the beginning of the war Degania had been overrun by detachments of Turkish troops. Sullen, arrogant soldiers in Prussian-inspired khaki tunics and tropical helmets would march through the gates, ominously silent except for the stomp of leather boots, the creak of equipment belts and the rattle of bayonets.

  Degania had seen to it that its own few were in a safe place. The guns would be uncovered and turned on the Turks when the British came.

  Despite the fact that Degania was behind Turkish lines, news from the outside world did occasionally get through. It was known that the British were advancing from the south toward Jerusalem and that the glorious, long-awaited people’s revolution had taken place in Russia. The future once again held promise. For now, however, the Turks ruled.

  Each time they invaded it was the same. First the storehouses, granaries and kitchens would be stripped and the people driven out of the buildings to make room for the soldiers. Then the interrogations and tortures would begin.

  Haim went through it once. They took him to the dining hall and tied him on his back on one of the long tables so that his feet hung over the edge. Then they slowly removed his shoes and stockings, all the while questioning him about the whereabouts of Degania’s hidden money, British spies, arms caches.