Israel

by Fred Lawrence Feldman

Herschel welcomed his mother’s company. The harsh demands of settlement life matured him beyond his years, but in another sense he led quite a sheltered existence within the rural family atmosphere of Degania. He knew how to track his way across Galilee and how to kill, but the thought of an urban maze of cobblestoned streets dismayed him. How could he haggle with a shopkeeper? No money changed hands at Degania. Farm life had afforded him an eyewitness understanding of the facts of life, but the girls on the kibbutz possessed the passion-numbing familiarity of sisters, and Herschel had never had a girl friend, never been in love.

  But it was not merely a matter of finding Jerusalem intimidating; he wanted his mother with him for her sake as well as his. Since the death of his grandparents and the sale of the family home in Jaffa, his mother was feeling very much alone. Some of her brothers and sisters had left Palestine and some had stayed, but all were occupied with their own lives and families, and all had grown apart from Rosie since she moved to Degania.

  Herschel was, quite simply, the only family his mother had left. He relished the role and the responsibility that went along with it. In that expectant, happy time, Herschel assumed that he and his mother would forever be happy in one another’s company, watched over by his father’s ghost.

  The bus to Mount Scopus groaned to a halt before the ponderous castlelike buildings that made up the university. News of the terrorist attack in the Arab quarter preceded Herschel. Several students collared him as he stepped off the bus, demanding to hear the latest.

  Herschel told them he knew nothing, even as he itched to correct the rumor that the lrgun had blown up a coffeehouse filled with “innocents.” Nearby a student anxiously wondered when the police would make an appearance on campus. The university had only recently returned to normal since the last sweep. In that one the police, many of whom were fascist veterans of the repressive Black-and-Tans sent to quell the Irish Rebellion in the twenties, arrested Abraham Stern and David Raziel, former students and lrgun founders. An overzealous police inspector named Cairns ordered both men tortured when they refused to be interrogated. The lrgun issued Cairns a warning and then put forth his death warrant. Soon after that Cairns and another police official were killed by an lrgun bomb.

  “The British will be coming up here again,” the student said worriedly. “They’ll arrest someone—anyone—just to have a culprit.”

  Herschel wandered away, heading for the shaded limestone courtyard behind the science building. “They’ll arrest someone—anyone . . .” The ramifications of his actions were beginning to dawn on him. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving him tired, anxious, remorseful and angry at himself for suffering the weakness of uncertainty.

  He entered the courtyard and sat down on a bench before pulling a book from his pocket. Pretending to read so as to avoid being disturbed, he tried to sort out the jumble of conflicting thoughts and emotions washing over him.

  Raziel and Stern were rotting in jail under torture, he reminded himself. Any action was permissible to protest such injustice, the atrocities committed against Jews and the British government’s white paper, which capitulated to Arab demands that Jewish immigration be curtailed and that the Jews be forever condemned to minority status in Palestine. He ought to be proud of himself, not mired in this confounded funk.

  Then he remembered the look of fear in the eyes of that Arab in suit, and fez, and his resolve to be a “good soldier” once again began to waver. To kill in a fair fight was one thing, but his spirit could not endure the thought of any more bombing attacks. It was true that Herschel wished to avenge his father’s death, but bowling bombs into the midst of unarmed, unsuspecting victims hardly honored his father’s memory.

  If only Frieda were here, Herschel thought wistfully. I could do with some of her strength, her certainty.

  They met during the spring of 1936, during Herschel’s second year of school. He was lazing on the grass, his back against a tree and his nose in his calculus text, when he heard his name called. He looked up from his numbers and equations to see a pretty girl grinning down at him. She had a scattering of freckles across her apple cheeks and a bushy mane of coppery, wiry curls beneath a bright blue kerchief.

  “You are Kolesnikoff, the English Jew?”

  “I am descended from the English on my mother’s side,” Herschel coolly allowed. He tried hard not to be mesmerized by the points of her nipples showing through the gauzy cotton of her blouse, but her grey-green eyes followed his fidgety stare, and she smiled, obviously reading his thoughts.

  “B-but I was born here in Palestine,” Herschel continued, flustered and sounding it. “As was my mother.”

  “A sabra!”

  “What?”

  “You never heard the term?” she asked, incredulous. Then she plopped down beside him, sitting crosslegged, carelessly hiking her calico skirt high above her knees.

  Freckled also, Herschel thought, his pulse pounding, her thighs are freckled too.

  “I’m Frieda Litvinoff.” They ended up talking for an hour discussing politics, school and their pasts. Frieda had come to Palestine in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power, when the Nazis were just beginning to blame European Jewry for the world depression. Frieda emigrated without her parents as part of the Youth Aliyah program financed by Hadassah. Now she was studying to be a nurse at the university hospital, also funded by Hadassah.

  Herschel told her of growing up at Degania. They talked of his renowned grandfather and his paintings on exhibit at the university. It was during a lull in the conversation that Herschel remembered. “Frieda? Before, you were calling me by name. You were looking for me.” He smiled. “I’m glad you found me, but why—?”

  “Many students here know English, but not so well as you, I’ve been told.” She tugged a packet of papers from between the pages of her nursing tomes and passed them over to Herschel. “Read them later, at home, in private,” she commanded.

  “What are they?”

  “Later, at home. Be sure no one sees them, understand, Kolesnikoff?” she repeated, her green eyes suddenly hard. “Those writings need to be translated into Hebrew, but not just any Hebrew—The language must be passionate, as fervent in expression as the English is now. It will take someone fluent in both languages, and perhaps somebody with some understanding of how those English words of exhortation came to be written.”

  Dumfounded, Herschel nodded.

  “You can meet me here tomorrow at this same time to let me know if you’ll do it.” Frieda patted his hand and stood up.

  “Wait,” he called as she strode away. “Where do you live? How can I get in contact with you?”

  “You’ll see me tomorrow when you let me know,” she called over her shoulder. “Then we’ll see, yes, Kolesnikoff?”

  That night in the privacy of his bedroom while his mother cooked supper, Herschel read the documents. They were propaganda fliers from the Irish Republican Army demanding that the British leave Ireland and that it be declared a free state. The most recent was dated 1920, but Herschel was astounded at how up-to-date and relevant the words sounded when “Palestine” was substituted for “Ireland.”

  By the time Rosie knocked on his door to tell him the food was on the table, Herschel was halfway through a Hebrew version of the first leaflet. After the meal he finished the work and then slid it between the scribbled pages of his lecture notebook. He hid the originals deep in his closet—safe, he hoped, from his mother’s eyes. Then he went to bed, but he found himself wide awake. The passionate words he’d translated swirled endlessly in his brain, gradually melding with another sort of passion. When he finally dozed, it was to dream of Frieda. The night passed in a giddy half-sleep in which he and Frieda danced and laughed, in which they tumbled endlessly as his trembling fingers traveled her length, learning all the secrets of her body.

  A virgin, he had yet to be romantically kissed. He hungered for that of which he had only a hazy knowledge.

  By the next morning Frieda was his unive
rse. Rosie complained that he was acting thick-headed and demanded to know why, but Herschel did not tell his mother that he was in love.

  That day he gave Frieda the translation and was thrilled at the pleasure she took in it. He began to spend part of every school day with her, and once or twice a week he saw her during the evening.

  He quarreled with his mother about Frieda. Rosie at first attempted to reason with her son, warning him that a girl friend would distract him from his studies. When that failed to deter him, Rosie flatly forbade him to see Frieda. Herschel just as flatly refused to obey. Mother and son did not talk to one another for three days. It was the first time they’d ever seriously quarreled.

  For all the turmoil Herschel’s relationship with Frieda caused his mother, it was for a long while a chaste love. Herschel felt very unsure of Frieda. He was careful how he acted, even what he said. It was months before he even let on that he knew she was an operative for the Irgun.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” she confessed to him. “Your grandfather was a key figure in Zionism. You yourself were raised a socialist on a kibbutz. How could I expect you to be sympathetic to a revisionist platform that goes against everything—”

  “Quiet a minute,” Herschel began, then paused. He’d been on the verge of saying that the differences between Zionist philosophies meant little to him, but he thought better of it. He knew Frieda well enough to realize that disagreement would make her far less angry than apathy.

  “You’re a nice boy, Kolesnikoff,” Frieda murmured, patting his cheek.

  “Boy!” Herschel was stung. “I’m older than you.”

  “Chronologically, yes, but that’s all. You grew up a sabra. I grew up in Poland. I’ve been the butt of anti-Semitism, and not isolated hatred for Jews, but organized, government-condoned violent hatred. Believe me, what Ben-Gurion preaches is wrong. There is no time to negotiate a political solution, not while millions of Jews in Europe wait to escape Hitler’s net. Ben-Gurion and his supporters are prepared to accept whatever whittled-down scrap of territory the British see fit to hand us, but there are Jews who believe that the British must abide by their word. They promised us all of Palestine, including the Transjordan, and that is what we need to absorb the millions who must flee Europe. We need it and we shall have it, and now, not later, by force if necessary.”

  Herschel was staggered by the intensity of her convictions. He knew of the rift between the mainstream Zionist movement and the fervently nationalistic revisionists led by the renowned Vladimir Jabotinsky. The autonomous Irgun Z’vai Leumi had loosely aligned itself with the rebels, but he’d never known their motivations. Yol and the other elders at Degania only ridiculed the revisionists as fascists. When he explained this to Frieda she laughed.

  “Is it fascist to be more concerned with rescuing and protecting Jews than managing rural collectives or maintaining solidarity with the Russian Communists? I say that they are the fascists, not we. I left my parents behind in Poland; you know why? Because the Jewish Agency refused them papers on account of their revisionist beliefs. Only Jews with the appropriate ideological viewpoints were encouraged to emigrate.”

  She began to tremble. Herschel, lost in her grey-green gaze, wondered if this was how she might look in his arms. “I love you,” he choked, and felt rising from his loins the glassy, thrilling sensation of his declaration soaring away.

  Frieda patted his cheek. “Kolesnikoff, we have something very special. With you I am comfortable as with no one else. You must not spoil it.”

  Herschel closed his eyes to hide his pain and then said the same thing all over again, but in different words. “I want to join the Irgun.”

  Frieda cocked her head in appraisal. “Why?” She must have realized, for she tried to be kind. “It doesn’t matter. We can use you.”

  Herschel’s reveries shattered when a chattering group of students invaded the cobblestoned courtyard. They were loudly debating the grenade attack on the coffeehouse. Herschel had no stomach to listen to their views and dreaded being snared into the argument. He shut his book and left.

  After a moment’s indecision he decided to head for the gallery where his grandfather’s paintings were on view. The brilliant optimistic landscapes of the Holy Land never failed to cheer him. Besides, Herschel spent a good deal of time in the gallery with Frieda, who greatly admired Glaser’s work.

  It was several weeks after his initiation into the Irgun that Frieda at last took him to her bed. They had been at a hushed candlelit cell meeting in the musty basement of a university building. There was a debate about something. Herschel could not remember what, all he remembered was the way he’d fathomed Frieda’s point of view and championed it. She tried to argue for herself, but she’d never been good at that sort of thing. With one other person she could be persuasive, but addressing an assemblage her heady sexuality betrayed her. The women disagreed with her to punish her and the men ignored what she had to say to bask in her aura.

  So Herschel rose to the challenge, taking the floor and speaking for his beloved. He debated, cajoled and harangued for over ninety minutes, alternating jokes and shouts to put her point across to them. All that while he knew Frieda’s eyes were on him. He noticed another Irgun member leaning toward Frieda and heard the man murmur in admiration, “He’s very good.”

  Frieda smiled and Herschel saw her nod.

  Afterward he shyly stood before her, his head lowered, waiting for her benediction. He felt small and vulnerable, but also excited and expectant; he was still elated from his triumph in bending the meeting to his will. His throat tightened as he asked her to have coffee with him. He was ready for her to say no, she was busy, she was going with one of the other boys—Herschel had known from the start that she went with other boys—but she said yes, taking his hand.

  They hurried, tense and silent, to Frieda’s small rented room in the Jewish quarter. They made love on her thin mattress on the floor beneath her room’s single gauze-curtained window. The moonlight washed over them as they twisted together. Frieda’s experienced, lushly sensual body enveloped him. He clutched at her, almost frightened as he discovered what delicious physical sensations his own body was capable of. She cried out when he’d moved within her. It was his first time hearing a woman’s passion, and that high, feline sound brought him more pleasure than his own climax.

  He’d heard frightening tales about a man’s first time: that he would be unable to love or else it would be over too quickly. Nothing like that had happened, however. When at last they lay quietly, Herschel’s head resting on her soft hip, he nervously asked her if he’d been all right. Frieda’s throaty, purring laugh filled the gloaming.

  She marked him as her own right then; he felt her etching ownership onto his heart’s pristine surface and rejoiced. “Sweet, sweet boy,” she murmured, her fingers in his hair, “sweet boy . . .” He drew himself up to lie on her; he suckled at her full bosom; he pressed his ear against her ribs to listen to her heart. He was half drowned, embracing the shore after struggling out of the turbulence of a roiling sea.

  “Sweet boy—”

  His low, guttural moan rose from his core as Frieda’s fingers recaptured him, inexorably drawing him back into her warmth.

  Much later that night, as dark velvet gradually lightened to leaden grey and the first expectant bird song greeted the morning, Herschel told her how much he loved her. Frieda said nothing in return, and during that awful silence, as the hopelessness of Herschel’s devotion became evident to him, he left her side and ran to the rusty sink in the corner to wash his face.

  He left his face dripping wet so that she could not see that he was weeping.

  And so at first Frieda refused further advances. She didn’t want to encourage him, she insisted. It was not fair to him. He should find another girl. She was married to the lrgun. She would never take a man until the homeland was established.

  Herschel persisted. He was head over heels in love, but that did not make him foolish. He set ab
out wooing his reluctant lady. Love had not blinded him to Frieda’s weaknesses. She was a slave to her own sensuality, and Herschel had made love to her in an exquisite inspired fashion. No other man could so love her. It was inevitable that Frieda would grow at first to desire and then to need his loving.

  Before another month passed Herschel was able to lay claim to her bed. For a week at a time he’d disappear from the apartment he shared with his mother.

  “Have you ever heard of the Betar?” Frieda asked him one night in bed as they shared a cigarette in the dark. “It’s a youth organization founded in Latvia by Jabotinsky back in the ’20s. Betar’s ideology combines Jabotinsky’s and Joseph Trumpeldor’s ideas on forming a Jewish defense legion—”

  “I knew Trumpeldor,” Herschel remarked. “I was only nine years old when he was killed in the Arab riots. Anyway, he lived for a time at Degania. It’s said that he and my father were friends.” He glanced at her profile, inches away on the pillow they shared. “Is that where you became politicized, in Betar?”

  “Yes.” The tip of her cigarette glowed red as she inhaled.

  “A handsome young fellow probably seduced you into joining,” Herschel grumbled. “Another man—I can’t bear it.” He leapt upon her, tickling her ribs and rolling his tongue about her nipples. Frieda began to screech, letting the cigarette fall to the mattress. She brushed the burning embers to the floor, where they burned bright cherry for a second and then slowly cooled to ashes.

  “The fellow who ‘seduced’ me, as you put it, was not handsome, but he won me all the same.” Frieda planted an affectionate kiss on his brow. “It was my mind, he won, not my body. Truthfully, we never met. I was thirteen when I attended a Betar membership meeting in my village in Poland. A Betar commander, a university student, spoke. What an orator, Herschel—better even than you, and I know how good you are,” she giggled. “The commander’s name was Menachem Begin. The entire audience rose to applaud when he was through. Imagine, a young man barely out of his teens. It was a difficult time for Betar in Europe. The Socialist-Zionists and Betar used to have terrible street fights. Names were called and heads broken.”