The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  As soon as he was free of the mutasarrif he dispatched two horsemen to Makor with instructions to search for the gold coin which he must have dropped there, but it was not found.

  LEVEL

  I

  Rebbe Itzik and the Sabra

  Bullet manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, February, 1943 C.E., and intended for use in World War II. Fired from a rifle manufactured in Manchester, England, April, 1944 C.E., and also intended for use in World War II. Deposited at Makor sometime past midnight on the morning of Friday, May 14, 1948 C.E.

  The three had this in common: that each loved the land passionately as a man loves a woman, joyously as a child loves the dawning of a day when there is to be a picnic on the land; the sabra loved Galilee as the soil from which her people had sprung through generations uncounted; the soldier loved Palestine as a refuge after years of fighting; and the little blue-eyed rebbe loved Israel as the land that God had chosen as a site for testimony. It was during the turbulent spring days of 1948 that their three loves came into contact.

  To Isidore Gottesmann, the soldier, the instructions of Moses our Teacher were clear beyond necessity for debate: “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies … the officers shall speak unto the people, saying, What man is there that hath built a new house?… let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle … And what man is he that hath planted a vineyard?… let him also go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle …” Gottesmann especially liked another commandment: “When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war … but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.”

  Thinking ruefully of his own situation, Gottesmann looked up from the almanac on which he was working and reflected: I have a new house. I’ve planted a vineyard. And I’ve a new wife. Moses Rabbenu must have had me in mind specifically, and I want to stay at home lest I die in battle.

  Then he laughed nervously: And I’m particularly covered by this injunction. Here Moses surely had me in mind: “And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house …”

  He leaned back from his desk, where he had been compiling data from the almanac, listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen as his wife prepared supper, and shook his head. He was a tall, thin, ascetic Jew with sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes peering out from beneath dark eyebrows. He did not seem an unusually sensitive man; he was rather more reserved and self-directed than most, and he had the habit of biting his cheek and drawing his lips back from even teeth. When he quoted the Torah he used Hebrew, but his personal reflections were in German, for that had been his native tongue. He also spoke an excellent English with only a slight German-Yiddish accent: And God knows that on that last command I qualify, because I’ve grown quite cowardly. “Fearful and fainthearted” describe me exactly.

  He shook his head and called, in a heavily accented Hebrew, “Dinner about ready, Ilana?”

  From the kitchen of the new white-walled house came a hearty, almost masculine cry: “Tend your figures. Leave the kitchen to me.”

  Gottesmann returned to his almanac and completed his calculations, placing them meticulously within the columns he had ruled in his notebook: Tonight, April 12, 1948, sun sets at eight minutes past six. Tomorrow morning, April 13, 1948, sun rises at thirteen minutes after five. Now, if we allow an additional forty-five minutes of visibility both after sunset tonight and before sunrise tomorrow, we have left … He paused to do some subtracting, then noted the critical answer: We have about nine and one half hours of darkness in which to do whatever needs to be done. Carefully he put his pencil down and slumped over the almanac. He could guess what needed to be done and who would be ordered to do it.

  It was some time before he raised his head, and then he did so wearily: Moses our Teacher could have summed it up in one simple command. “What man is sick of war? Let him return to his house.” He bit his cheek and muttered, “I’m fainthearted and fearful and can do no more.”

  As a sensitive boy of eleven in Gretz he had watched the great madness of 1933 sweep the Rhine, and had understood when his father shipped him to Amsterdam in 1935. When the war started he had joined a hit-or-miss Jewish underground that operated along the German border rescuing refugees. English agents, penetrating into Holland, had stumbled upon the group and had provided a hard-core leadership, giving them the job of blowing up bridges. These English had quickly spotted Gottesmann’s ability and had pushed him through their underground to Antwerp, from which he was ferried across to Folkestone and a good English education. In 1942 he had joined the British army as a stores corporal, handing out Lysol for latrines, but soon he was switched to a secret unit headed for Syria to keep Damascus out of Vichy and German hands. Later, when the fear of Rommel had evaporated, he fought in Italy; and there, meeting for the first time members of the Jewish Brigade from Palestine, he acquired their vision of a free Israel and volunteered to work in the smuggling of illegal immigrants. For nine years, 1939 through 1947, he had been at war, and now he had had enough. He was beginning to lose his nerve—if he had not already lost it—and he wanted only the creative relaxation of tending his vineyards at Kfar Kerem.

  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 grapev
ines, 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 shared 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 Galilee, 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.