The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  The Settlers

  Copyright © 1972 by Meyer Levin

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an ebook in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Cover design by John Fisk.

  ISBN 978-1-625670-85-4.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book I: Return

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Book II: Choice

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Also by Meyer Levin

  For YITZHAK, in promise, and in remembrance

  RETURN

  BOOK I

  1

  UNDER God’s stars, with the younger children lying close on one side and the other side of her, the girls curled against each other on the left and the boys on her right, Feigel truly felt herself like a great mother bird with her brood nestling under her wings.

  Not all of them were there. Two had already flown on, nearly a year ago already, to the new-old land to show the way. And of the remainder of her brood not all were nestling here with her. Up ahead by the prow of the ship there was singing, and Feigel could hear her Dvoraleh’s voice among the others, mingling with the thrusting voices of the young men.

  Perhaps it was good—among so many, a whole group of young men, a girl was safer from some impulse of foolishness that might overwhelm her beneath such a sky of stars on the rocking bed of the sea. For with their revolutionary ideas and their freedom of women, the girls of today were eager to prove themselves in life, even before they felt an ache in their nipples.

  Ah, Feigel allowed herself an inward sigh, a rueful yet romantic sigh, over what awaited girls in their lives before them. And perhaps for this new generation life indeed would be different. They felt stronger in themselves. These were strong bold boys, but also with an eager sudden gentleness and bashfulness; these were the upstanding lads from the town of Kostarnitza who had taken up cudgels, even pistols, and driven off the drunken peas ants from their pogrom instead of huddling deathly still behind boarded-up windows and doors, waiting, straining ears to hear: would the slaughterers halt at your house or pass on?

  Her own man would come presently, stretching out here where she had left part of the floor-throw for him—good she had insisted on carrying it along—here on the farther side of the littlest one, Avramchick, pressed to her as though still part of her flesh. Or sometimes, with the tenderness that he displayed to the children only in their sleep, Yankel would lift the infant gently aside so as to make room beside his wife for himself, then ask her a whispered “Are you sleeping?” and relate what he had been told in his long evening’s shmoos with the Jerusalemite, the envoy who was returning from one of his yearly voyages, a shaliach collecting money to sustain the pious Jews of the Holy City, they whose prayers rose from Yerushalayim straight up to the Above One for the sake of the Jews scattered all over the world.

  Meanwhile Feigel listened to the songs. First they sang in Russian, and then the young folk were teaching each other a song in Hebrew, a new song—

  Who will build

  Galilee?

  We! We!

  Some of their voices faltered over the Hebrew words, for many were from homes where children were no longer even sent to the cheder but to Russian schools, and on into the gymnasia. Now a still-boyish voice slipped with a talmudic singsong into the soft, longing melody of “Elijah the Prophet,” Eliyahu HaNavi, calling, calling—

  Come unto us,

  Come in our time.

  Bring Messiah

  Of David’s line.

  And even though the song was an echo of a pious homey Sabbath eve, and the revolutionists were godless young fighters and home-leaving pioneers—chalutzim—after all they were simply good Jewish children, and they took up the ancient chant, and the vessel rolled with the refrain, rolled gently from side to side, come unto us, come in our time, truly like a mother rocking with a child in her arms. A mother sways from side to side, a Jew praying sways from front to back—the thought came to Feigel suddenly, like one of the amusing thoughts she used to have in her girlhood, relating them laughingly to her sister Hannah. But Hannah had gone the different way, to America, Hannah and her three little children, when at last her husband had been able to send them ship tickets. “Come soon, come soon, O Elijah, come down to us, come bringing us Messiah!” How many times had she herself not sung this song as a lullaby, first to Reuven, now grown up and gone ahead to Eretz Yisroel, “Come, bringing us Messiah, son of David,” and then to Gidon, still hovering half-awake at the edge of the singers there, and to Schmulik and even now to her baby Avramchick as he drowsed at her breast. “Come unto us, come in our day, bringing us Messiah ben David!” How was it, Feigel all at once perceived, that she had sung the melody of Mashiach only to her boys and not to her girls? (To the girls a mother sang of dancing at their weddings.)

  The children stirred in their sleep and Avramchick huddled closer into her, with at once a frown and a smile on his little face, the way he had. There was a breeze; Feigel spread over them all the father’s vast fur-lined coat, the one he had worn when he went forth on his long trips into the Carpathian forests to buy stands of timber. That had been at the beginning of their marriage, before his partner had cheated Yankel out of all he possessed.

  Nu! Still they had lived, and brought children into the world, and raised them until the eldest was already grown, a man. Was he indeed? Feigel thought with troubled mind of her idealist, Reuven—had he yet known a woman? But how could even a mother ask such a thing, even in modern times?

  Under the stars, Feigel permitted herself thoughts that she would never have allowed herself in Cherezinka. In this starry open night with its milky air she felt that her very soul was opening to breathe. As in that remote, sentimental time of girlhood, she asked herself was each star after all a soul in heaven? And was one of those remote and tiny stars the soul of the baby she had lost, the second boy, the one just after Reuven and Leah, the one named Nachman? Only a little while he had stayed with them, and been good as an angel, and then one morning without even being sick he had gone from them. As all the wise ones said, little Nachman had simply decided to return to God’s heaven. And was he waiting again to come down, if God should send him?

  Perhaps he would even come down into her? It was said this could happen. Her own grandmother, almost a witch in her divinations, had told such a tale of a mother who had recognized by certain signs, by a birthmark and a tiny cast in the eye, a lost baby come down to her a second time.

  And could this be happening even now, within her? Could she be at this moment breathing in his soul? The returning soul of her baby Nachman?

  It could be, and it could be that such things were not.

  Would she herself ever become a woman of
wisdom, filled with sagacity? After so many times, ten times if one included the miscarriage after Gidon, and this then was the eleventh time, how was it that she still felt uncertain and abashed within herself, like a maiden unable to be sure of the signs, each time it began? She had believed her body might have had enough and be done with such things, though she was still far from the age of the ancient mother Sarah. She had thought her flow ended, but, as though nature were playing with you, it was also true that the flow ended with each time of conception. And so she had been deceived.

  Did her man already know?

  “You’re not taking anything to eat for yourself—you don’t feel well, Feigel?” he had said when she parceled out the hard-boiled eggs, and her surprise had risen and lingered in her, for when did her husband ever notice whether she ate or what she ate? Yankel was not a man to watch over a woman’s plate, or even a child’s. He was a man driving away in a wagon, or a man standing talking with other men, or a man wrapped into himself in his voluminous tallis, tied with his tfillim into himself, not even with his God—that was how she would think of him when she was angry with him. But tonight Yankel had noticed that she had taken no food…. The ship, she had said, and squeezed her lips as with seasickness.

  And it could be the ship—it could even be so; she had never ridden on a ship on the sea. Still, sea or no sea, this nausea was known to her. Or could such a voyage also bring a delay in a woman’s flow?

  There was no one to talk with about womanish things, no older sister Hannah, no woman even of her own folk, though there were a number of goyetes—Greeks, Turks, Arabesses, who knew?—in long black gowns. Dusty even in the clean sea air, they sat huddled together on the other end of the deck. And so Feigel asked her womanish questions only within herself.

  Lying with her face to the stars, Feigel understood now the tales told at home by her grandfather Matityahu the Hasid when she had been a little girl listening at the edge of the circle of men, tales of the vast universe all made of invisible sparks, every leaf, every stone, a spark of the Great Soul of all being. One could not see the sparks because they were within, and they were not really like sparks of fire, but yet invisibly they glowed. One could feel them as life, and as a growing girl she had sometimes felt the spark bursting open and rising in her like yeast in bread. All the sparks, her grandfather Matityahu had explained, yearned to be united with each other and with the whole universe, the Great Soul. For even a stone could yearn. And the sea too, and every drop of water in it was a part of the Great Soul of all being.

  For it was so that she felt her children about her as part of her own being, extensions of herself, and within herself Feigel felt the new child in the opening seed, and she also felt drawn, her whole being and even the ship itself, drawn forward by her motherly yearning for the two grown children who had gone ahead before the family to Eretz Yisroel.

  Nearly an entire year they had been away from her, Reuven perhaps having fully become a man, and Leah she hoped still a girl, a child, a maiden who did not yet know the meaning of life with a male. Or did Leah already know? Had such a thing perhaps already happened to her young Leah, there in the land? No, it seemed to the mother that in her own being she would have known if this had happened to her daughter; she would have seen it in the writing of her girl’s letters.

  But it was time, time to go to them. Feigel felt herself pulled—they would not return and they needed her still; how were they living there without a home to live in, wandering from one settlement to another, it seemed, without their own beds to go back to every night. For a man this was perhaps endurable, in his youth, in his time of adventure. But for a girl in her tender years, large and strong though she was—ah, Feigel regretted, she should never have let Leah go there like that!

  Gidon came now and lay on the outer edge, and Feigel’s brood seemed to have become as one under her wings. She felt Shaindeleh stir, she felt Avramchick’s hand in sleep clutching her breast. She was only a small woman, and yet in this milky night Feigel felt herself as large as all this life that had come out of herself.

  Her man passed near, pacing slowly with the old Jew from Jerusalem, the shaliach, the envoy whose every step seemed weighted down with the gold he must be carrying back homeward, tied, as Yankel said, in secret pouches all around his body, so fleshly thick that another layer could not be noticed. Her Yankel walked ponderously too, stepping carefully among the clusters of strange passengers, those who had come onto the vessel at Constantinople, and then at Aleppo, and Beirut. Who knew what they were, with their strange tongues, or why they voyaged, all of them, squatting everywhere on the deck, and in the hold below, goyim, with their straw mats and their silent women in black. They did not have to flee pogroms, and no command was on them to return to their Eretz.

  Now her Yankel had finished with his shaliach, and came and stooped over her. “Asleep?” And she quietly answered, “No,” and already he straightened to take off his coat, removing it carefully, and then bent to undo each shoe, and meanwhile her husband began his recitation of what the pious Jew, the reb from Yerushalayim, had said, all words that had already many times been repeated between them, and examined, turned around, weighed. But in his anxiety her Yankel had to repeat them again, Feigel knew.

  Eliza was wakeful, the mother felt it; the girl was ten and could not fall asleep like the little ones; she must surely be wanting to listen, even to get up and linger near the young people singing there at the head of the ship.

  “With the Arabs,” her husband repeated, “the reb tells me that with the Arabs it is not really the same as with the moujiks. With an Arab you have to keep a sharp eye or he will make off with your horse from under you, but they are not brutal drunkards like the moujiks. They are primitive but they are far from stupid, and they are not drunkards.”

  Feigel made a sound to let him know she understood the difference. Yet an uneasiness—a fear that was both a premonition and a memory—had been awakened in her. It was like some timeless knowledge, some memory of Amalekites and Jebusites, of violent strangers falling on the Hebrews, of men hacking and cutting at each other, and her arms seemed impelled to extend themselves more firmly all around to protect the forms of the children, still so small. Where was her husband taking her? to what wilderness? “They will try to make off with a horse, a cow, even your grain from the field. It is more like a custom with them, they don’t look on it as stealing—they do it to each other too, one tribe to another, unless they have a pact between them. It is like in the times of Abraham still, that is their way of life.” Her husband spoke with a Jew’s patience in his tone, as at home when one talked of the backward ways of the peasants.

  “But at least they are not anti-Semites.” Feigel repeated her part.

  “No. Pogroms they don’t have. A czar and priests to send them down on us they don’t have. There are rulers from Turkey, officials who have to be bribed at every turn. Like all officials everywhere. But pogroms are not known. The Arabs are not anti-Semiten.”

  Feigel was quiet. All that Reuven had written about guarding the barns at night, she knew. Even Leah had slept in a hut in the vineyard where Reuven was on watch, and had written in a tone of jest of one time when her screams had frightened away thieves loading clusters of grapes onto their donkeys. So poor they were, Leah said. Yet Feigel’s brother Simha’s words of only a few weeks ago resounded in her: “Come better with me to America. Surely Yankel can be persuaded. We already have a sister and her husband there in the State of New Jersey. Why go to an old dead land? Come to a new land. Come all of you with us together.”

  And her brother was now on another sea, gone the other way, from the port of Hamburg. He had gone alone, leaving his wife and children with the old parents—the youngest brother, Simha, gone off to begin a life as a Jew in America. Their sister and brother-in-law would help him and in a year or two he would send for his family.

  So too her own eldest son and daughter had gone ahead to another land and now called for them to co
me to Eretz. Surely it was better to be going together with her man and the children rather than to be left in the old country waiting, another manless woman in Cherezinka? So many women sat waiting, a year, three years, even more; there was Shaina Glickson who was now seven years without her man. And think also of the men far away from home, alone in that strange land, living on tea and bread, and working so hard to save pennies and send ship tickets for their families. Better to stay together and brave the hardships together; she was no longer so young that she had years for waiting.

  But who could tell what was best for a Jew?

  Feigel tried to bar from her mind the other advice, from her uncle, Heschel the Tanner, who had already been to the Holy Land—twenty years back—and had soon returned, his tail between his legs, half-starved, with dreadful shivering fits of malaria that came over him every three years or so, and with a dark look in back of his eyes. That uncle had been a Bilu, a student idealist of those earlier days, one of a group that had left their university studies to go labor on the earth of the ancient homeland. But the settlements had foundered. Only a few villages had been rescued with help from the “Great Giver,” Baron de Rothschild of Paris. Every twenty years it seemed indeed this fever of longing returned on the Jews—like Heschel’s returning malaria, he would bitterly declare. But despite the bitter words of her uncle, her own son and daughter had gone.

  Still perhaps things were now really different. There was a whole new movement, far greater than what there had been in Heschel’s day, for at that time no Herzl had yet appeared. Momentarily Feigel saw the image of Herzl with his broad fine beard and deep eyes, the picture she had brought along in the big trunk from where it had hung on the wall in Cherezinka. Eyes like a Messiah. And even there in Cherezinka, in these last ten years when her children had been growing up, how feverishly everyone had repeated the news of Herzl’s doings—now he was being received by the German Kaiser, he was meeting Kaiser Wilhelm in Jerusalem itself! But the Kaiser had not yet handed over the Holy City to him, for it seemed that Jerusalem belonged to the Turkish Sultan. The Turk, everyone explained, was weak and the Germans were his protectors and the Sultan would soon do what the Kaiser asked. And now Herzl was being received by the Turkish Sultan, who for not too much gold would cede the whole of Palestine! In every Jewish kitchen there was a little blue tin box to collect money to buy the land—she and even the children had dropped in their kopecks, the little ones often shaking the box to hear how full it was, in readiness for when the collector came from the Keren Kayemeth. And suddenly Herzl was dead. Already a few years.