The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  A whole group was planning to leave for Eretz Yisroel. But this one went away to a university in Switzerland, and that one decided to wait a bit, and finally out of their entire band of Workers of Zion, how many really went to labor in the fields of Zion? They talked and talked, like the Bilu in Yankel’s own youth time, but who indeed rose up and went? A Reuven and a Leah. One fine morning they were ready with their packs all packed, and their comrades escorted them with singing and banners to the train for Odessa, and unbelievably they were on their way!

  Then letters came to Feigel from Leah, with a few words added at the bottom from Reuven to father and mother. All, all was good. Difficult but good. No one went hungry, believe them! And even when there was no work to be had, because Baron Rothschild’s Jewish effendis preferred Arab serfs to Jewish laborers—What was an effendi? Like an estate-owner with his moujiks—But despite the hard-hearted Jewish effendis, the workers managed, they clubbed together with their bits of earnings so that no one went hungry. Believe Leah, such was the spirit!

  All was good, and Eretz was a land of such beauty, Leah said—before her as she wrote there lay an entire field covered with wildflowers like with a great red scarf—such beauty had the land, that it sang in your very soul! Reuven too in moments of communication could write such thoughts. Not true that Eretz was entirely a heap of barren stones. The hills were stony, alas, because of those devils of Bedouin with their flocks of black goats. These Bedouin were not the same kind of Arabs as the fellaheen settled in the villages; these were wanderers who lived in tents, and their goats devoured every shoot of green, every sapling with its roots, and then the despoilers moved onward, leaving hills of bare stone. The fellaheen were a good people but miserably poor, ignorant, and exploited like serfs.

  But such a land was Eretz! It needed only tending! All was good, all was going well, except that the settlers from twenty years ago, in Baron Rothschild’s paternalistic villages, had become each like a little baron himself, an overlord, a Jewish effendi with his own Arab serfs!

  And then would come tirades against these “old” settlers—what were they but exploiters in their turn, as bad as the Russian landowners! Was this a way to build Zion? What had become of their ideals, these pioneers of a generation ago, now sitting with pianos in their houses, while their daughters practiced the scales up and down, and Arab fellaheen toiled in their vineyards! Arabs were even wandering in from Syria and the Lebanon to work for them and new Arab villages sprang up around the Baron’s settlements, while Jewish workers begged for a day’s employment! Was this the way to build Zion?

  A bitter smile lay in Yankel’s beard as he read such words. Was his son after all so different from himself, despite Reuven’s godlessness? He too at Reuven’s age had been touched with the ancient dream to go and settle in Eretz Yisroel. Besides the few students in the Bilu, who went as laborers like the chalutzim of today, there had been small groups of land buyers called Lovers of Zion. But he had not had enough capital to join such a group, and Feigel’s family had frowned on the idea.

  Now it appeared to Yankel that all was a circle, that he was beginning the voyage he had wanted to make over twenty years ago. Perhaps he had sent ahead his son and daughter because he had meant to be drawn by them, just as Moses had sent forward emissaries into the land. New settlements were being opened, Reuven wrote, good settlements in the Galilee, and this time they would be confined to the principle of self-labor, by Jewish hands alone. Come, come with the whole family, we will all work together, and the young brothers and sisters will grow up on our own soil, with clear eyes and high heads!

  There was a change in the sky, a grayish mist, and eastward on the rim of the sea a solidity appeared at the base of the mist. Then a hint, a lessening of density. Yankel drew himself erect. Within him welled up a sense of trembling and even fright, as though the curtains of the Innermost were about to part before him and reveal the Shechina.

  No one else was awake.

  On his stocking feet, he watched, eastward. A tint appeared behind or within the gray mist, like a warmth of blood returning to the ashen face of the dead. The dead earth. Then, outlined at the base a darker strip was taking form.

  Yankel stooped and touched his second son, Gidon. This son, who had only now completed his Bar Mitzvah, was at least not entirely godless. Not as yet—though who knew what would come in the days ahead in the company of his freethinking brother Reuven.

  Gidon too had been sleeping lightly, awaiting the presence of the land, and he was instantly on his feet, standing with his father to behold the land before others in the family—who were not men but only women and small children—should arise.

  He stood, a stocky lad with square shoulders and long arms, broad hands and large knuckles that were raised just now, child-fashion, to rub sleep from his eyes.

  At the prow Gidon noticed a few chalutzim too were rising, standing, speaking softly to each other, pointing, as the darker shape of the earth formed itself out of the mist. The words from Creation came to Gidon, tohu v’bohu, out of chaos and emptiness God formed the earth, and God said, “Let there be light”—and so it was at this moment, light was appearing behind the dark form of the earth. Here where their ship rose were the waters, and the waters were gathered in to make the land. It was of the water here, it was of this very water as it reached the land before him, that God had spoken. Gidon felt a lifting of mist within his own mind. For all of this, until now, he had never clearly comprehended.

  His father was winding on his tfillim, and motioning to him to make haste so as to properly greet this rising day, this new birth of life, of the world, and of their family’s life. Without withdrawing his eyes from the unfolding beauty of the universe, Gidon reached for his velvet tfillim bag, drew out the rolled-up leather strips and wound the coils around his left arm while dimly he followed a thought, a realization—this binding on of the tfillim was a strength. Like a boxer binding leather around his wrist. Was that perhaps why the old men in the shul did it? to remind themselves of the mighty fighters in Israel in the ancient days?

  His father had already completed the placing of the frontlet on his forehead, strapping between and above his eyes the small receptacle that contained the vow of faith. Gidon knew he was not imaginative but yet today an image came to him: this was like a searing-in, like words of fire burning into your mind—I am a Jew, a Jew bound in with my God.

  Now his father touched his lips to the tallis and, with the old circular movement that Gidon had never quite caught, swung himself into the prayer shawl as he swung it about him, so that he was wrapped away in the world beyond. Thus from childhood he had always seemed to Gidon, as to all the children: when at prayer, Tateh was removed from them; the long heavy tallis around him reaching with its fringes to the floor became a magic wall. Tateh, within, was enclosed with the Almighty. Until he emerged, unwrapped, to shout at them and berate them and command them. This, Gidon recalled, had been his first childish conception of his father.

  Of course he had grown and heard the disrespectful jesting of the older village boys about religion, and heard the views of his older brother Reuven the freethinker, and to his own mind had come the bitter questions about God and the pogroms. And at his Bar Mitzvah, when Gidon had wrapped his own tallis around his shoulders, he had not felt he was like his father enclosed with the Almighty. However, a feeling of being a man among Jewish men had reached him. He had kept up with the daily prayers for a short time, out of a kind of sympathy he now felt for the old Tateh who, he began to see, did not have much luck in his doings, and also for the sake of peace in the house for his mother. He didn’t want to give his father more reason to complain about all his sons becoming atheists.

  This was the time when Tateh had traded in horses, before he lost half his stable to a plague of horse cholera and had to go back to work as a weighman at the sugar mill for Uncle Kalman. It was a time when Gidon helped in the stable, and he had taken to it, enjoying the careful blowing of the beasts o
ver the pails of water he set before them, and the way they rubbed against you, their smell, their goodness if you were decent to them. He had learned by himself to ride a horse and had become a real shaygetz in his galloping. And a new thing had happened to him. The peasants and the peasant lads began to talk to him in a new way, not like to a Jew, and he had even felt in a kind of vague fear that his Bar Mitzvah came just in time or he would have burst away from it all. So too was this leaving for this new land—it was just in time. For it was said that there in the new land there were Jews like plain peasants, people like he now felt he was made to be, and there he could be such a person and still a Jew. These were people without cleverness, without arguments, people who didn’t twist their heads to gain every little advantage but went and did what had to be done with their own hands, and an end.

  Yet today somehow in this arrival Gidon found himself listening, harkening to the words he automatically recited in the prayer, his own words as they came from his lips today, and the same words from his father. Today it did not seem, as the clever fellows at home had said, meaningless and foolish to repeat by rote the same words of prayer each morning, any more than it did to rise and wash yourself every day.

  So it was with the chalutzim too, he saw, as he glanced toward the bow of the ship: one after another of those splendid fighters from Kostarnitza now reached into his belongings and, freethinkers though they were, each brought out a siddur, and a few even wore the tallis. There was a lanky fellow with a reddish stubble clinging to his cheeks, the one who had sat together so much with Dvoraleh—he had an odd expression, half-sheepish, half-defiant, as he wound on his tfillim.

  The sky was all at once clear, unflecked, a freshly unrolled canopy of blue, and amazingly close to the ship lay the golden thread, the shore.

  Sands. Nothing but sands.

  —No, no, the little band of young men assured one another, and they seemed to include, in their reassurance, Reb Yankel with his sons and daughters, no. Everything grew here! they cried as they gazed with feverish eagerness at the yellow, empty shoreline. —Behind the sand dunes was good solid earth, they declared to each other, and everything grew, almonds, grapes, oranges, melons delicious and sweet, sweeter even than the melons of the Crimea, while inland grew wheat and barley and corn. In this climate and in this soil could be grown every fruit, all the produce of the earth!

  Now presently a heap of structures could be discerned, a hill from which there emerged several pencil-like minarets, and spires with crosses.

  This was Jaffa!

  “Yaffa—yaffeh,” Yechezkiel announced to Dvora, practicing his Hebrew. “Ir shel yoffi.” The city of beauty; the name meant beauty.

  “With their crosses and crescents,” remarked his dour friend Menahem, the usually silent. “This is what we see to greet us.”

  “Wait, one day we’ll put up the Star of David, higher than all,” said Yechezkiel.

  “Lighted with electricity, like in America,” said Menahem, made loquacious by the wondrous moment, and Dvora uttered a rosy little “Ah.” For Menahem, her friend Yechezkiel had told her, had even sailed to America and had seen the new wonder, electricity.

  Dvora felt Yechezkiel’s arm tighten around her waist, and his lips were brushing her ear whispering, “This is a moment, dear one, we will share through all our lives.” Yechezkiel had sensed her inmost thought! And unseen because of the chaverim crowding around them, Dvora slipped her arm, too, around Yechezkiel’s waist. At once as they stood there sealed together, the entire length of their clothing in contact, Dvora experienced a revelation. Her arm around his body, and his arm around hers—this was not simply comradeliness, the comradeliness with a spice of flirtation that she had enjoyed during the voyage under the uneasy eyes of her mother and father. Yechezkiel’s arm encircled her entire waist and his spread fingers rested on her body as though to hold her very organs, as though sealing to himself what made her a woman. And then against her own hand Dvoraleh felt, through the cloth, the muscle of his loin, and flushing, her senses swollen and vibrating, Dvora knew that this was how a woman held a man’s body during the act of love, and she wanted to rush into her mother’s arms and weep together with her and murmur Mamaleh, Mamaleh, for in this instant she understood the lot of all women, even to the feeling of a child growing in the womb.

  Just then her eyes met Yechezkiel’s, turning back from the glowing shore. Their eyes met in complicity, and Yechezkiel swiftly bent his face to hers in a short, burning kiss, the first true kiss of a man and a woman between them, the first such kiss of her life. Then they both gazed outward again with profound seriousness at the homeland where they would lead their joined lives and—they now knew—raise their offspring.

  All through the voyage Dvoraleh had gravitated toward Yechezkiel, though warning herself to keep a wary heart, as he was without question the most dashing and handsome of the four chalutzim from the town of Kostarnitza—the famous group that had posted themselves at the corners of the ghetto and fired pistols and driven away a drunken mob of pogromists. Now they too were coming as pioneers to Eretz Yisroel.

  The young men from Kostarnitza composed a little circle to themselves during the voyage, and she had, as it were, nestled into their girlless group. More and more she had stayed alongside Yechezkiel, though there was also his friend Menahem, small, wiry, with a dark soul, who kept his eyes on her. Differently. This one had known women, he had even run away from the famous Volozhin yeshiva and been a sailor in the far ports of the world. Late at night after the singing when some of the boys finally stretched out to sleep, Menahem too would move off, and then Yechezkiel always wanted her to linger a bit longer with him alone, but she so far always slipped away.

  Yet during the days there had been times for talking alone together, and he had revealed his soul to her. Yechezkiel knew he was not witty just as she knew she was not really beautiful, but Yechezkiel was strong and good. He wanted to hurt no man, wanted not to be devious and take advantage of others, not to bargain and confuse the moujiks—indeed, such twisting took too much troubling of the brain, he told her with the boyish smile that she loved. His father was a seller of household supplies to the peasantry, and Yechezkiel did not want such a life. Nor had he even wanted to hurt the drunken pogromists, some of whom were his father’s customers. He wanted to be a new kind of Jew, no longer huddled in a townlet and haggling in the market, but living in nature, in the open, and raising children who could ride horses. He wanted no longer to be told—in Kiev a Jew may not reside, in Moscow a Jew may not live, in this town you need a permit and in that town you may not enter; no longer to have to buy false papers, to employ subterfuges and bribes.

  Then how do you imagine we shall land in Palestine? Dvora teased him. But as his face grew dour, she squeezed his hand to show that this of course was a different matter, this would be the last time, and in any case, as her brother Reuven who had the same ideals as Yechezkiel had written, by what right should the Turks tell a Jew whether he could or could not enter Eretz Yisroel?

  The vessel was already in an awakened turmoil, with the children running everywhere, climbing the rails, stumbling over the goyish passengers, who shouted at them angrily.

  “Feigel! See!” Yankel called to his wife, who had dressed herself in her brocaded gown for this day, and was braiding the hair of little Eliza, the dainty one, the pretty one. Yankel too had prepared himself for the arrival, donning his fine black silk coat, rubbing his black, wide-brimmed round hat to a gloss against his sleeve. Now as his wife came to his side to gaze at the land, there was on Feigel’s countenance the glow of her best days, the glow of a good Sabbath eve when he came home from the shul and saw her standing by the window dressed and waiting, perhaps tying a last velvet ribbon in little Eliza’s long golden braid.

  Wild beasts, nothing else! the Jewish passengers cried, warned though they had been of what to expect when the Arab boatmen came thronging aboard. Without asking whose, what, where, these pirates with their daggers in t
he sashes of their wide drooping Turkish trousers suddenly seized luggage, bundles, feather quilts, flinging everything over the side without even glancing to see if your possessions fell into the water or into their little boats that jumped like popping blobs of goosefat on the waves.

  With their very bodies Yankel, Feigel, Gidon and even the small children tried to block off their belongings from seizure, but the huge shouting bandits pulled things from under them, from out of their hands, all the while keeping up their heathenish screaming and cursing, and where could you turn to, who could protect you? Where was Reuven, Yankel demanded, couldn’t he have come out in one of these rowboats? Others had come aboard, some Jews of affluence could be seen, and Turkish officials in uniform had arrived, wearing the red tarboosh; meanwhile from all sides money was being demanded of him by fierce Arabs in long white gowns, by fierce Arabs in European clothes, also wearing the tarboosh, by wilder Arabs in the loose black cotton trousers that drooped from their behinds—so much for each head they insisted, small children the same price—a tax, a bribe, a boat charge, what was it for, who knew? A fortune they wanted! They didn’t even give a Jew a chance to compute how much it all came to in rubles, they demanded gold francs, and the pious shaliach, the fund collector from Yerushalayim who at least could tell you the value of a bishlik—he was already gone. There he was below on the sea, with two other Jews in caftans sitting calmly in one of the tossing little boats, being rowed ashore—how had he managed to climb down?

  Even as Yankel was gazing at the departing Jerusalemite, his wife tugged at him in terror—an Arab had seized one of the children, little Shaindel, and was about to hurl her over the rail! Shaindel kicked and screamed, and while Yankel pulled at the Arab, and Eliza in fright threw her hands around her father’s neck so as to be saved from the same fate, and while Gidon manfully tried to wrench Shaindel back, a Turkish official yanked at Yankel’s other arm, demanding something in a harsh angry voice, in some unknown tongue, Arabic, Turkish, who could tell?