by Meyer Levin
“Give me him,” and Leah let her mother feel the black hair on his head—not fuzz but hair—and the thrusting limbs. “Avramchick,” Feigel whispered. “Nachman.” The soul had returned again, but this time in a sturdier body.
Schmulik, in the yard, was sent to call Yankel from his post as stablemaster. “Tell him a briss, a briss!”
Yankel walked in with dignity, nodded and nodded over the newborn, and said to his wife, “Nu, Feigel, a fine boy. Rest, sleep.” And as the women shooed him out along with Schmulik, he added, “To give birth in Eretz Yisroel, truly a mitzvah.”
5
IN SEJERA there was life—families with children, and a cheder, so that Schmulik had to go back to study, and Yaffaleh and Eliza too sat and studied there. The village had a mohel—a circumciser—as well, Chaye-Pesya’s husband the carpenter, so there were many jests about Mottel the Mohel and his shavings, while Mottel himself insisted that his one desire was to give up carpentry and till the soil; for what other purpose had he come to Eretz?
A joyous briss was held in the cheder ochel of the training school. Reuven and Gidon arrived from the Kinnereth, and it was the chief of the Shomer himself, Galil, who bore the babe on the pillow to the circumcision, while Dvora’s betrothed, the young shomer Yechezkiel, exuberant after a single schnapps, cried out as a drop of blood was seen, “That makes him one of us already! A shomer, born in the land!”
Leah remained on in Sejera; she could not tear herself away from her baby brother, nor could she yet return to the kvutsa where all with Moshe had happened; Reuven assured her that Nahama was managing well enough at the kvutsa, and besides, a second girl had appeared there.
The infant had been named Mati, Matityahu after all, for if he were named after Avramchick or Nachman, might-their-souls-rest-in-peace, why then—Feigel had confided her worry to Chaye-Pesya and Chaye-Pesya had fully agreed—the Evil One, reminded by the name, might come to seize him. “I know it is foolishness,” Feigel admitted to Leah. But still, her grandfather Matityahu had lived past the age of eighty. Faintly, there came to Feigel the burning eyes of the poor feverish chalutz, also named Matityahu, whom she had seen the night when they had stayed in the khan in Chedera, and the eyes seemed thankful.
Yankel had assumed a new stature. Even the chalutzim in the training farm showed a jovial respect for the bearded old tateh with his tzitzith, father of a new son, and the head of the establishment, Yud Eichelberg, now assigned him a wage for his supervision of the stable.
Then a kitchen crisis arose, and the whole of the Sejera center was on the verge of collapse, and it was Abba Yankel who now with a display of an unsuspected modern spirit saved the situation. It was for this that the young people gave him their final accolade, declaring that the old Chaimovitch was “a real chevrehman.”
The crisis began when Nadina the Firebrand raised a revolt over Yud Eichelberg’s apportionment of labor. “Why must women always be assigned to the kitchen and the laundry?” she set up the old cry, and, organizing Leah and Dvora and two chalutzoth into a committee, Nadina marched with them to Eichelberg’s little office in the stone hut by the gate from which he was able to keep an eye on the yard and the whole caravanserie. You could never hold his eyes with yours, since his eyes darted everywhere, yet he listened well and replied to every point.
To their astonishment, the training director at once agreed with them. “You are right in principle,” Yud Eichelberg stated. “All tasks should be equally shared by men and women. But nature herself is unequal. What do you want, to plow?”
“Why not!” Nadina seized on it. “You must teach women to plow and men to cook! Every task must be interchangeable!”
“Nadina,” he said patiently, “after all, certain tasks require physical strength, and men are the stronger.”
“In plowing, it is the mule that supplies the strength, not the man!” she snapped, and even her opponent had to smile at the Firebrand’s clever retort. Thus, plowing became the issue. Women, Nadina firmly insisted, must be taught to plow.
On principle, Eichelberg again conceded, he had nothing against it; if a woman wanted to plow, let her go out and plow—and his eyes rested for a moment on Leah—why not? “Some women are stronger than some men.” But who would instruct the girls? Every man in the place was busily occupied. Indeed some of the watchmen of the Shomer were working the soil by day and going on guard at night. And besides—his eyes wandered, worriedly—“We urgently need people to handle the new chicken incubator.” The first in the land, it had just been brought from Jaffa, sent on a ship from America, the donation of Jews from the state of New Jersey.
“Why, I have an uncle there. In New Jersey!” Leah burst out.
“We have much to learn from them in America,” Yud Eichelberg happily picked up her remark. Did the chavera, for instance, know that the Baron de Hirsch had established a whole settlement and a school for Jewish farmers, there in New Jersey? “Is your uncle perhaps one of the farmers?” As far as Leah knew, no, he was not a farmer but a merchant. “We could multiply our poultry tenfold,” the overseer said enthusiastically. The incubator was a revolutionary invention, and it required special study and care. The regulation of the temperature, the turning of the eggs at the precise moment—it was like a factory, pouring out chicks by the hundreds. His eye lighted on someone hurrying across the yard, and he called out a message.
Nadina sternly brought him back to the subject. Women demanded the right to plow, not to tend incubators as in a factory.
“Chavera Nadina, you must understand my difficulties—” Besides, in plowing, there were times when a certain agility was required. A woman’s skirts—
“We will wear trousers,” Nadina proclaimed.
Though his every argument had been countered, and Eichelberg had even agreed to look about for an instructor, days passed. True, he was having problems in setting up the incubator. But, as though to increase the provocation, the men came in from the fields talking about nothing but how many furrows they had plowed, and how the mules and oxen had behaved. If the subject of women plowing was mentioned, they grinned. Perhaps the girls would like to ride out at night with them too, on guard duty?
Nadina flared. Hadn’t she taken her full part in the 1905 revolution in Russia? Since when were men braver than women? And calling together her committee, the Firebrand proposed that the kitchen would go on strike the next morning unless plowing instruction began.
Yud Eichelberg was leading a team of mules from the stable when Nadina brought him the ultimatum. “Take us right now to the fields, or the girls walk out of the kitchen.”
“Be careful, Nadina! Don’t come close to them!” a chalutz called out. “Those mules are in heat, and it is dangerous for any female, including a human female, to come close to them!”
Involuntarily Nadina jumped back, her pince-nez flying off her nose and swinging on its cord. And a vast howl of male laughter arose, spreading all over the yard, while Eichelberg with a solemn air of concern pulled aside the mules.
Worse, Nadina didn’t even understand the cause of their laughter, and, running back to the kitchen, she exclaimed indignantly to Leah, “Now they have another excuse—the mules are in heat so a woman can’t go near them!”
Leah stared at Nadina, and then herself burst out laughing. She laughed, shaking so hard that the pot in her hand spilled over. “Nadina, a mule—a mule—you mean you really don’t even know—?” And by now all the other girls were in convulsions, though Dvoraleh was flushing at the same time she laughed.
The revolutionary Firebrand, child of a factory-owner, really did not know what a mule was, and when Leah explained to her, Nadina became doubly furious at “having been taken advantage of.”
“Leave the dishes!” she commanded. “We are going out on strike right now!”
The field workers had already finished their early bread and tea and gone off to their labor, to return in a few hours for their full breakfast. It was on returning, ravenous, that they behel
d all five of the girls standing outside the kitchen door, arms folded.
In general the men took the strike in good humor, themselves firing up the big stove, cooking the kasha, cutting up tomatoes and onions, and then—back to the fields, leaving the eating hall a shambles. All day the strike was a source of jest and half-serious argument. By evening, with bits of eggshells all over the tables and the floor, and every plate and cup twice-filthy, the strike had become a burning issue.
Ostentatiously, the girls had prepared a warm, savory soup for themselves alone, though two of them—not Galil’s Nadina—were caught sneaking plates out, each to her chaver.
Dvoraleh was torn. She listened to the young wife of a shomer, “Be happy you are a woman. Do you want to ride all night in the darkness and have your bones maybe broken by the club of some bandit—if you are lucky enough not to get shot from behind a rock? We women have the best of it—we stay in the house, sew, cook, and have our children near us.” And then the young wife added, with a touch of cunning, “If we are foolish enough to learn to plow, next thing they’ll be sending us out to do all the work in the fields, like the Arab women, while the men sit in the cafe with their domino boards and play shesh-besh.”
Presently Nadina emerged from a conference with Yud Eichelberg in which Galil had acted as intermediary. On her part Nadina had conceded that not every woman wanted to plow—but those who wanted to learn, she insisted, must be taught. And Eichelberg had pleaded that he had already asked one man after another to undertake to teach them, but a strange reluctance had appeared. On this one thing, the men begged off. They said they would feel foolish. Let the women find themselves an instructor, Eichelberg temporized, and he was ready to assign them a pair of mules and a plow.
It was Leah who, without knowing why, thought of her father. Somehow it seemed to her that it was not certain Tateh would refuse. But how to put it to him?
The kitchen strike had not really reached Yankel except as one of the strange antics of the chalutzim and chalutzoth, for when it came to the family’s meals, Feigel scorned the cheder ochel and prepared their food in her own little corner.
“Tateh,” Leah asked, “is there anything in the Torah that says a woman should not plow?”
Indeed, not an uninteresting question. That the Torah said you should not plow with an ox and an ass yoked together, anyone could tell you, but as to a woman plowing—a Talmud sage he was not. Yet if women worked in the fields, if they worked the earth in a vegetable garden, what then was the difference? If a man should die and leave no sons, and his widow was strong enough to guide the plow, would it be a transgression?
“Then maybe you will instruct us?” Leah asked.
For a moment Yankel was taken aback. But all these chalutzim with their modern ways, like his own son Reuven who thought of him as an alter kaker, let them see, these revolutionists with their vaunted ideas, whether a plain, pious Jew could not be as modern in his ideas as they!
And so Yankel announced for the sake of peace in Sejera, that he was prepared to go out with the girls to the fields.
Leah and Dvora, together with Nadina the Firebrand, and a laughing-faced girl named Miriam who openly declared that she was doing this because she liked to be among men, were to be the first group. The plowwomen were up early, making themselves ready for the historic occasion, while several other chaveroth now returned to work in the kitchen, even putting raisins into the porridge as a recompense for the discomfort they had imposed on the men with their strike.
Nadina already possessed a pair of trousers, having disguised herself as a young Hasid in her escape from the Okhrana, and Dvora wore trousers of Gidon’s that Mameh had brought along for mending, while for Leah, there was found a patched pair belonging to Tateh, who was portly enough so that she could pull them on, though they were short in the leg. Inevitably as she pulled the garment over her hips, there came to Leah the recollection of that other time—the time when they were all going out to plant eucalyptus trees—how, as she pulled on the trousers of Moshe—No, such memories were forbidden.
Shoes too. In the yard the girls had gone barefoot or in sandals. Only Leah possessed a pair of heavy workshoes. But somehow with scurrying and laughter and borrowing, in boots and in huge oversize clodhoppers, the girls were accoutered, and presented themselves at the stable.
Yankel took one look at them and turned his back.
The whole plan was impossible. For does not the Torah declare that a woman shall not put on the garments of a man?
However, on an inspiration from Dvoraleh, this crisis too was solved. The girls returned to their rooms, and each put on a long skirt under which the trousers could not be seen. Yankel was dubious, but talmudically concluded that what a man did not see, he need not know.
And so at last they went out behind the mules. Leah took to the work at once; the beasts obeyed her, and her very first furrow was straight. “Like a man’s!” declared Galil, coming over with a few chaverim from the next field.
“Why a man’s? A straight furrow is a straight furrow,” Nadina bridled, and all at once to everyone’s astonishment Galil lifted her straight into the air, and with a burst of open laughter that was rare for him, set her back down between the handles of the plow. And he remained on the field, watching.
By sheer will power the tiny Nadina managed to cling to the handles, though the mules kept swinging their heads around and thrashing their tails as at a bee. Several times when the animals lurched, Yankel had to lunge for the plow, almost wrenched out of Nadina’s hands. Nor could it be said that her furrow was straight—indeed, when she managed to glance back, she was startled by the snaky path. “Never mind,” the diplomatic Galil said, “it reminds me of when I tried to sew a seam.”
As for Dvora, when she pointed the plow into the earth and felt the soil parting, that same blushing sensation came over her as when she drew on Gidon’s trousers, the secret and exciting touch of shame, the confused feeling that there was something perversely daring yet inappropriate in what she was doing. Nor could she feel herself in command of the tall beasts, as was Leah. The mules knew this too, and kept halting as though to remind and to tease her. Yet Dvoraleh kept smiling and declaring to her big sister who walked alongside her that there was nothing like plowing to make you feel you were indeed part of the renewal of this land.
But to herself, she told herself it was, after all, good to have tried to plow, for now at last she understood something about men. She understood why of all the toil on the land they liked best to go out and work the soil. She would whisper this to Yechezkiel. Perhaps tonight in his room in the hour before he went out on his rounds, and when his chaver, Menahem, understandingly absented himself. But no, perhaps it would be unfair to say such a thing and excite her Yechezkiel. How close, how close she had been to giving way lately in their embraces, not only because of the melting in her body, but also she had wanted to prove to her self that hers was not a love that withheld itself so as to lead a man into marriage. Only, what had happened to Leah with her Moshe intervened and held Dvoraleh back. Her Yechezkiel was good, he loved her with all his soul, he would never—and yet, like an old-fashioned girl, she could not. When the danger in her grew, she would always get Yechezkiel to call Menahem back to the room, pretending she wanted to hear more of his adventures from the time he had run away from the yeshiva.
The mules had completely halted, Dvoraleh realized, and she was just standing there.
At the noon meal Yankel was the center of much questioning and genial laughter. Oh, he attested, the girls had done well enough, he had not minded instructing them at all, he would instruct any chavera who desired it! This brought even more laughter. —Oh, this old pious Yankel who had just fathered a new child—there was more to him than anyone had thought! And Yankel now enjoyed a sort of fame—Reb Yid who taught women to plow!
Only Leah took regular turns with the actual plowing. The work tired her into the very depths of her being and in some way left her, at night, w
ith less longing. As for Dvora, she became more and more absorbed in the chick incubator. The first batch of eggs had failed, filling the barn with a dreadful stench, and it was she who discovered for Yud Eichelberg that too much heat had been applied in the ambition to hatch chicks even more swiftly than in America.
Every ten minutes she ran to look at the thermometer, and, as hatching time neared, Dvoraleh could not be brought to leave the closed, stifling room. It was she who first heard the tiny sound of a cracking shell and then a cheeping, and Dvoraleh rushed out into the yard with the news, crying unbelievingly, “They’re alive!”
Soon now, in a few weeks, she and Yechezkiel would be married.
It was to be a double wedding, and something of a royal wedding, for suddenly Galil and Nadina too had decided to be married. Their wedding, it seemed, was in some way a legal necessity for the revolutionary Nadina’s safety in the land, so the marriage was not really a betrayal of the principle of free love.
Besides, this double wedding in the Shomer would really be a celebration of the spring harvest, which fell at Passover. It was the cutting of the winter grain, Nadina explained, that was really the origin of Pesach, and hence, as the renewal of an ancient agricultural festival, Passover could be celebrated without their bowing to religious observance.
From all over the land delegates were coming, many of them on foot all the way from Judea, for, in addition to the weddings and the harvest festival, there was to be a meeting at Sejera of the new united agricultural workers’ union that Dovidl and Avner had at last succeeded in organizing. During the whole of Passover week, things would be happening. A wild-riding fantasia was promised: the settlers of Mescha and Yavniel and Sejera were lending their steeds so that every Shomer could be mounted at the same time, galloping in the celebration.