by Meyer Levin
“Here I am!” Leah laughed.
“Yes, a good sign,” he said. “We don’t have enough girls even to take care of the workers’ kitchen.”
“The kitchen!” she cried. “I came here to work on the land!”
“O ho!” and she saw that he had teased her. His name was Moshe, and he now led them to a cabin just outside the high cactus fence of a lemon grove. How good it smelled! “This is our kvutsa,” Moshe explained.
Reuven and Leah had already encountered the word in the underground paper of the Poale Zion. A kvutsa was a small group living together, each putting whatever he earned into the common fund. It was a communa, like the communa started by some workers in Kiev to carry them through a strike.
Inside the cabin were half a dozen sleeping places made of planks resting on upended orange crates. A curtain of sacking screened off one corner, which Moshe indicated to Leah with a sweeping mock-bow was for the chaveroth. Just now they had but one girl in the kvutsa. She came in from the yard where she had been hanging out washing; older than Leah, perhaps twenty, with short, heavy legs and a bulging bust, Nahama had a pronounced mustache, pearled with sweat. But at once her warmheartedness engulfed you.
Did she belong to the handsome Moshe, Leah wondered, or to either of the two other comrades who wandered in and out of the cabin, tossing a cynical word into the conversation now and again? You could always tell, simply from the special looks a girl gave, which of a group of boys was hers, but here Leah couldn’t tell. Perhaps the Handsome Moshe was free? Only one thing was clear, even here in the kvutsa it was again the woman who was doing all the cooking and washing.
“I’ll admit to you honestly,” Nahama said to her, “For me, I don’t mind. I don’t especially like to work in the fields. I like to be in the house.” She half-giggled in apology for her backwardness.
A kvutsa was the only way they could manage to subsist, Moshe was explaining. Whoever got work for a day or two put in his earnings. And also, sometimes they managed to get jobs as a group, on contract, all six together, for by using a bit of Jewish intelligence they could get things done far more efficiently than under an overseer, and thus they could compete with the price of Arab labor. Right now they were even negotiating with the newly opened Zionist office in Jaffa to go out as a group to work a tract of land recently purchased in the Galilee. Under Turkish law, if the land was not worked it would revert to the government.
“Stay, stay with us a few days and become acclimated,” Moshe urged. Reuven and Leah insisted on paying for food, and Leah went off with Nahama to the village market. There Arab women sat on the ground in a row, each with a little pile of chickpeas and a few eggs on a piece of straw, much like the peasant women in the village market in Cherezinka. Admiringly Leah listened to Nahama bargaining in Arabic. “Oh, you’ll soon enough learn a few words, it’s much like Hebrew.” They bought a large round Arab pittah—it was cheaper than Jewish bread—and at supper each tore off a chunk. Nahama had made a good bean soup, they had cheese and olives, and for each an egg—the contribution of the newcomers, Nahama announced.
During the meal a short young man appeared—Dovidl. He had a huge head with bristly hair, and talked so cleverly that at times Leah found herself no longer looking at Moshe. Indeed from the first instant something completely familiar had sprung into existence between her and this Dovidl, and as in the encounter with Moshe, though not involving man-and-womanness, Leah had a feeling that a meeting of importance for her whole life was occurring here. Unfortunately, as to man-and-womanness, this Dovidl was so small it would have looked ridiculous. Yet here was something perhaps even as important as finding a mate—a friendship could come of it.
He was not a part of the kvutsa, it seemed—indeed he made a barbed little joke about Moshe’s snatching up new arrivals. “What were you at home, Poale Zion?” he asked of Reuven. “So what are you doing here with these renegades?” This was a camp of independents, they even had an adherent of the rival party, the Poël Hatzaïr. Not the Workers of Zion, but the Young Workers. A fine nerve that crowd had to call themselves a workers’ party, they weren’t even Marxists!
“So what are you afraid of!” Moshe laughed.
“Beware!” Dovidl went on. “They are super-idealists, they’ll make a vegetarian out of you!”
“I am one already,” laughed Reuven.
Dovidl turned to Leah. “And you follow your brother?”
“Not in everything,” she declared. She had never been able to suppress her love for her mameh’s Sabbath eve chicken, she confessed, and at the smell of potted breast of veal, her whole insides would melt.
From his banter Dovidl turned to his big news; bursting with it, he had hurried to the nearest camp of workers, even if they were not Poale Zion. “They gave me a job in the winery!” he announced.
“No! Just like that? Or did you put on a yarmulkeh?”
Well, he had brought a letter to the manager from a rich Jew at home who knew him. And already Dovidl had a clever plan. He was going to organize the grape-treaders in the Baron’s winery and pull them out on a strike! The trick was that this was one place where Arabs could not be substituted, for sacramental wine was the product, and to be sacramental it had to be produced by Jewish hands!
“—and feet!” Moshe laughed.
Therefore, Dovidl triumphantly explained, only barely smiling at Moshe’s joke, the Baron’s managers would have to give in! He had already made it clear to the wine-treaders that they held the upper hand.
“But what good will this do us?” demanded one of the kvutsa, a tight-lipped chalutz named Max Wilner. The wine-treaders were all strictly orthodox Jews from the old world, he pointed out, far away from—even hostile to—the thinking of socialist workers.
—Ah, Dovidl twinkled, he had already done a little work among them. And he was off, quoting Scripture like a yeshiva bocher, citing the socialistic pronouncements of the prophets. Besides, one of the demands of the strike would be for Jewish labor to be used all through the winery, even in sealing the bottles, and in another year the contract could be still further broadened—already this Dovidl talked as if he had a contract!—so that only Jewish hands tended the vines. There must be something in the Talmud to support such a claim! He would find some rabbi in Jerusalem—
Why not, Reuven joined in the game. Just as the truly pious kept a watch over the fields of grain intended for matzoh, to make sure all was pure—matzoh schmira, this was called—so there could be a grape watch for sacramental wine—a yayin schmira!
“Exactly!” cried Dovidl. He would show the rabbis that they could get all their relatives employed as ritual watchmen, and thus instantly gain their allegiance.
Everybody laughed. “Dovidl, you’re not going to make a compact with the rabbis!” said Nahama.
“Why not? Doesn’t Plekhanov say, with the devil himself, if it furthers the cause? So why not with the rabbis?”
“There’s your Marxist! He brings friendly letters to the Baron’s managers, he makes compacts with the rabbis—next, for the sake of his Marxist revolution, he will become a boss!” snapped the dour-looking one called Max, resorting to Yiddish.
“At least I speak Hebrew, not jargon,” retorted Dovidl. And now began a back-and-forth discussion of the kind Leah loved to listen to, where ideals whirled like swords in the air, and the deepest subjects were touched upon. Meanwhile each person was becoming clearer to her as she followed their words with the avidity with which one listens in a new group; Reuven too was feeling his way among them, putting in a word here and there, quoting now from Ber Borochov, now from Tolstoy. It was Max Wilner who kept opposing Dovidl, he had a compact head like stone and was humorless, but he had read more than anyone else. Another chaver, besmeared from a day’s work in a lime pit, had the remains of a harelip that had been poorly sewn up, and spoke with a slight difficulty; Shimek, he was called, and his eyes followed Nahama though she didn’t seem to have even a glance for him. Already in her life Leah had obs
erved that some persons with a defect insist on doing what is hardest for them; so Shimek spoke much, and everyone had to wait for the words to come out though they had already guessed what he would say. He disagreed now with Wilner, now with Dovidl. It was like the old Jewish saying, if you have three Jews coming to a town, two of them will start opposing synagogues and the third will declare, “I go to neither!”
Just so, they all believed in socialist ideas, but Max Wilner accused Dovidl, “You still adhere to the Socialist International! And what will you do when the International turns anti-Zionist?”
“That can’t be!” Dovidl cried, “Each member party has full rights!”
“We must achieve our own socialism in our own conditions here.”
“Socialism! You don’t even believe in the class struggle, in the victory of the proletariat!” Dovidl snorted.
“We believe in the true classless society, by technical progress.”—And again they began throwing quotations at each other, ah, it was wonderful to hear.
Presently Leah noticed that another girl had joined them, a comely girl in a nice dress. One of the daughters of the orange growers, Nahama acidly whispered. And not long afterwards Moshe went off to walk the girl home.
Reuven lay down on the floor to sleep, but Nahama insisted that Leah share her cot. “I am so big,” Leah laughed, “you’ll have no room.” They lay in sisterly closeness. The night was permeated with the scent of almonds.
“I saw Handsome Moshe looking at you,” Nahama whispered. “Beware of Moshe, Leah, he will break your heart. He is a heartbreaker.” Her whisper trembled.
So that was it. Even where there was a shortage of girls, their hearts could be broken.
* * * *
In the morning Moshe announced with a wink that he had last night found work for the entire kvutsa. Even the newcomer, Reuven, could come along. Moshe had secured a contract with the village girl’s father to plant seedlings to enlarge his grove.
“Take me too!” Leah exclaimed. The men were dubious, but Moshe said she could come along at least to keep them company. Ecstatically Leah strode out with the group—already on their first morning she and Reuven were going to the fields!
Entering by a large wrought-iron gate that interrupted the cactus fence wall, they walked between a double lane of cypress trees—windbreaks, Reuven told her. Behind were orange trees. Leah had an impulse to run over and embrace each one.
Now a horseman came toward them and dismounted. He was middle-aged and heavy, wearing riding breeches with boots and an embroidered Russian blouse. This was the grove manager, one of the few Biluim who had remained, Handsome Moshe told Leah; he had married the daughter of a Lover of Zion, a planter with large holdings. “He still has a twinge of idealism so he uses Jewish labor whenever he can prove to his father-in-law that we cost no more than Arabs.” Thus the contract had been made for a lump sum.
At the edge of the field where the new section of the grove was laid out, a half-dozen mattocks lay ready; the men picked them up and went to work. There was none left for Leah.
Moshe, doubtless wanting to gauge the newcomer’s worth, paired off with Reuven, digging planting-holes. Reuven’s mattock struck the earth and almost in a continuation of the movement lifted out a heavy lipful of soil. Moshe smiled and glanced at Leah. Her brother knew how to work! They were already moving ahead of the other pairs.
Though telling herself she was watching her brother, Leah knew her eyes would not leave Handsome Moshe. His long body moved with the mattock in such balance that no effort seemed expended; as the chevreh said, Moshe was truly an artist with the implement. When her brother glanced back and caught her in her entrancement, Leah flushed.
The ex-Bilu was unwrapping burlap from the seedling roots. As he approached a planting-hole, Leah hurried over to him, and held the little tree upright while he pressed soil around the base. Kneeling, she too pressed down the earth. Here she was already planting trees in the earth of Eretz Yisroel! Warm, pliant, like living flesh it felt to her hand!
When the sun was higher, Nahama arrived on a donkey cart laden with food. She had brought a huge canister filled with tea. There was loaf-bread this time, with jam, tomatoes, cheese. Gathering around the cart in that inimitable relaxed comradeship of respite from labor, the chevreh ate and talked, Reuven and Leah included not even as newcomers but as part of the kvutsa. If they completed the planting in three days, Moshe calculated, they would earn enough to keep the kvutsa for two whole weeks.
“On pittah and chickpeas,” one of the comrades said. His name was Araleh, and he was blondish, with a skin covered with freckles, and clumps of hair on his knuckles. He had not been there the night before.
“The Arabs live on it and so should we,” replied Max Wilner with his teacherish finality.
“What did we come here for, to reduce ourselves to Arab fellaheen?” Araleh demanded didactically. “To prove we too can become serfs?”
“The Arabs are workers and we are workers, and when it comes to workers, there is no distinction between Arab and Jew,” Handsome Moshe declared.
“Why not raise their level instead of lowering ours?” Leah put in, from the discussions of Reuven’s circle at home. But Araleh objected. “This is not the way!” he exclaimed, waving his tomato. “To repeat in Eretz all the struggles we have in other lands, there with the peasants, here with the fellaheen.”
“How will you not repeat it?” Moshe demanded. “The class struggle is one the world over.”
“We must start at their economic level, and as we raise ours, help them raise theirs,” Max pronounced. “We will teach them cooperation by example.”
“Idealism!” Araleh shrugged. He, for one, was interested simply in building the land. The land itself. This land. Let the Arabs solve their own problems. Large tracts of land were being bought by the Keren Kayemeth in the name of the whole Jewish people. Why should he labor here planting a grove for an effendi—yes, this type of Jewish landowner was just as much an effendi as an Arab. Instead, they must go as a group and cultivate land that belonged to the Jewish people itself. Not to private growers exporting oranges for the tables of the rich. As for the Arab fellaheen, if they wanted to continue to live in the Middle Ages, that was their own affair.
“But it can never work like that!” cried Handsome Moshe, and they were off on the whole argument—which was to come first, the workers’ world revolution, or Jewish settlement of this land?
“Together!” Reuven declared.—Everything had to be worked out here at one and the same time, Jewish settlement and socialism together. Were not those the words of Ber Borochov—
In any case they just now had to go on with the planting, Araleh reminded them, for here was the boss approaching, mounted on his steed, back from his second breakfast at the big house.
So they rose and went to their tasks, but somehow stimulated by the argument. They had been called back to themselves as bearers of an idea, they would never be mere clods in the field.
At the far end of the section, cuttings of a different sort were laid out for an intermediate windbreak. Reuven examined the leaves. “Leah, do you know what this is?” he cried. “It’s the tamarisk, the same tree that Abraham planted.”
Handsome Moshe smiled at the naïve enthusiasm of the newcomers.
The grove had been planted and now only two men of the kvutsa, Shimek and Araleh, went out to their lime-plastering job. Max Wilner went off to Petach Tikvah to see if things were better, but returned to say they were worse. Reuven felt he and Leah should leave so as not to be a burden on the group. But Leah had a thought. Why should they not first plant a vegetable garden around the cabin so the kvutsa would have its own greens? A long discussion ensued. The bit of land was not theirs, it belonged to the village. But who would stop them from planting? Max Wilner elevated use of public land to a principle. The whole kvutsa labored putting in cucumbers and carrots and eggplant. This did not pass unnoticed, but luckily the first town leader to pass by was “a go
od one,” a planter who had himself once labored as a chalutz. Later he had accepted family money to buy land. He employed both Arabs and Jews. A rather thin man with a compassionate face, the pardessan watched them for a while, said, “Why not? A good idea. But perhaps you should first have asked permission,” and walked on. His name was Moshe Smilansky, Moshe said, and he was also something of a Hebrew writer.
“I’ve read his stories!” Reuven cried, as though to run after the man. “They are good.”
“Tell him,” Moshe laughed. “Maybe he’ll give you work.”
The second day Leah straightened up to see a young woman standing there, a neat girl wearing glasses. She was in European dress, a girl delicately made, with small hands, and bare feet. At her very first glance Leah wondered, might this be a girl for her brother Reuven? He was shy, and yet she knew he yearned. At home he had found no one for himself.
Already the others had greeted the girl—Rahel. What was she doing here? Where was Avner?—No use, then, thought Leah, if this was Avner’s chavera. Avner was in an endless sitting in Jaffa, Rahel said, so she had come here. Already she was squatting, examining the planting. Just what variety of eggplant was this, Rahel wanted to know, and what was the proper planting depth? Two centimeters, it seemed to her she had read—