by Meyer Levin
Even in the sound of his “Shalom,” Trumpledor’s heavy Russian accent could be heard. It was to have a look at this very young man, Gidon Chaimovitch, that he had come, Trumpeldor declared, and he sat stiff-backed, gazing on Gidon, looking him over from head to foot, like a general reviewing troops. But on his long, serious face there was a small self-permitted smile—it even had a certain sweetness.
Already the entire family stood in a fringe by the gate, and Feigel was bustling the girls back into the house to make tea, to prepare the table—see what a guest! Eliza and Yaffaleh went inside, but Leah stayed a while with the men.
He had not particularly looked at her. In the talk, naturally, Trumpeldor included her, a chavera.
As every unwed woman toward every unwed man, Leah had instantly made the additions and subtractions—could she help it? That he stood fully as tall as she, as soon as he dismounted she had measured with her eye. Moreover, she had already known he was tall, she had read descriptions of the hero, she had heard talk of him among the chaveroth. How was it that although he had already been in the land more than a year she had not yet encountered Josef Trumpeldor? First, he had been with his own kvutsa, the group that had come together with him from Russia, and there, as everyone knew, Trumpeldor had his loved one, from his university days after the Russo-Japanese War, a doctoress who had joined him in St. Petersburg. But the kvutsa had not endured—there had even been a suicide among them—and the love affair too had died; the doctoress had gone back to Russia.
Despite, or perhaps even because of, his lost arm, many girls were said to be in love with Trumpeldor. He was indeed handsome, a noble-looking man. Once, Rahel had encountered him at a meeting and she had spoken about him to Leah—Josef Trumpeldor could be of great use to their movement, Rahel had remarked. Out of normal curiosity Leah had guided Rahel’s talk to the personal side, about his arm. One quickly forgot about it, Rahel said, while Leah was thinking: of course if a woman loved a man such a thing wouldn’t matter. But even to Rahel she hadn’t dared utter her real wonderings, about whether at night, with an artificial arm—was it taken off or was it kept attached? She was ashamed of her speculation.
With his single arm he did the hardest work in the field, the chevreh said. He was a vegetarian too, she had heard—just like her brother. Purposely Leah had refrained from going to HaKeren lately. Let fate arrange it, if anything was to be.
In every smallest detail, the hero now questioned Gidon about the attack; as Gidon was modest, there were moments when others in the family put in the answers for him, but Trumpeldor would hold up his hand for them to allow Gidon himself to explain. The military man’s questions were so precise that Gidon became very lively, talking more freely than ever before, even drawing lines with a stick on the ground to show exactly what had happened; they were like a pair of good workmen discussing a piece of construction. It was gladdening to watch and hear them. And presently, straightening up from the map on the ground, Trumpeldor declared to Gidon, “You did well. Excellent.”
It was a final judgment. The whole family glowed.
Leah had moved closer, and as Trumpeldor straightened, she saw for certain that he was even a touch taller than she, but of course he was in boots and she was barefoot. He spoke directly to her now, declaring, “Such are the young men we need.” And yet in that same moment her heaviness came upon her. He hadn’t seen her. He had made his remark the way one does to anyone nearby in a meeting, and as they moved toward the house he continued to speak in phrases one heard over and over at meetings, only it was as though these thoughts had just come to him. He discoursed on the need for self-defense, on the need for personal labor on the soil; he declared that while a laboring family was an excellent unit, he himself preferred a cooperativa. He had reflected much about the principles of communism and the principles of nationalism, and had concluded they were not in contradiction; they went together, for just as each communa could become a unit in a nation, so each nation could be a unit in a world of nations. Hence the ideal of internationalism, of a unified world, could come only through the perfection of nations. But the first task here in the Yishuv was to create unity, unity among the workers’ organizations.
And as they sat down to the table, Leah sorrowfully concluded within herself that the spark was not there between them. Despite all that would have been right, despite their belief in the same ideas, and his tallness, she must not expect anything to happen. He was a man closed from others. Women had loved him, it was true, but perhaps this remoteness was why he was still by himself. Perhaps it was indeed because of the severed arm, for while he made a point of doing with his one arm all that everyone did with two, Trumpeldor became offended, she had heard, should anyone attempt even in the most natural way to give him a hand—as by putting a dish within reach of his good side.
While Menahem and Trumpeldor carried on the discussion, and while she herself even put in an occasional remark, such as a comment about the role of the woman in the Yishuv, and while Trumpeldor praised Mama’s blintzes—Leah suddenly perceived there was one who was indeed falling in love, totally, touchingly and absurdly, with the Captain.
It was little Yaffaleh.
Though everyone at the table hung on his words, Yaffaleh turned with his turning, breathed with his breathing, her every movement an echo of his every movement, as though she were in some way part of him. And when she was still, she watched him, transfixed, as are all creatures when the spell comes upon them.
Leah saw it, and because of the fantasies she had allowed to run so far within herself, what she saw in Yaffaleh gave her a pang of anguish, for even the most grotesque attachment was something real. How pitiable it was, not to be an ordinary, pretty girl like Eliza! Eliza would never have to worry whether she could attract the man who moved her. But to be too large or to be an ungainly lump—oh, what a stupid trouble the body was in a woman’s life!
Though Yaffaleh was to everyone still the little goose-girl absorbed in her flock and her flower garden, she had grown to a woman’s form, with heavy breasts unbalancing her short body. She had the full lower jowls, nearly without a neck, of her mother. At times, when she led her flock down to the river, Yaffaleh’s solid, firm body with its stocky legs, appeared to Leah to have its own beauty of movement, but she knew that her little sister thought of herself as ugly. And just now Leah saw that their mother too recognized what was suddenly taking place in the child. A glance went between them, a flash of consternation yet of tenderness and even amusement, for this was still a child. Why then did Leah feel a stabbing premonition for Yaffaleh? She knew the girl’s poesy, and precisely because of her secluded nature, because of her unattractiveness, even from so premature a dream, pain might come.
From the stove, Feigel called to the child and gave her more blintzes for the visitor, and Yaffaleh served him, quietly, without trembling. When he looked up to thank her, in his well-mannered way, Leah saw an illumination come into Yaffaleh’s face that dispelled all heaviness and made her momentarily even beautiful.
Now the conversation among the men turned to mules and horses, and as they spoke the Captain kept looking to Gidon for his opinion. Clearly, Trumpeldor was drawing Gidon out, and Gidon’s love for animals, his knowledge of their ways, showed at once. With relish he told the tale of Klugeh, the clever cow who had fed the orphan calf.
“You know what I think?” the Captain remarked to Tateh. “Your son should study for a year with a veterinary.”
“But that was just what we were talking of, only today,” Menahem interposed.
“I myself studied veterinary medicine in Russia, in preparation for coming here,” Trumpeldor went on. What had he not studied! First dentistry, then jurisprudence, it was known, and now it became clear that he was also an accomplished veterinary! More easily now, more humanly, he spoke, and so deftly did he manage his blintzes and his tea that all at once you noticed that you had no longer been noticing. Also, he was the sort of man who, once an idea came to him, went on
to think of every detail connected with it. There was an excellent horse-doctor in Jaffa whom he knew, a Dr. Gustav Mintz, and he would send Gidon to his friend with strong recommendations. In that way Gidon would be out of reach of a stupid reprisal here, and at the same time he would be developing his natural inclination and learning something that would always be of great use, whether or not he chose to follow it as a profession.
Then, at once, the hero turned to a consequent problem. Could they manage the farm without Gidon? He gazed around the table and his eyes stopped on Leah. At last he was really looking at her. “I hear you are equal to any man in the field,” he said.
Even so she flushed. He knew of her.
Schmulik intervened. “I’m already bigger than Gidon was when he started to help Abba, and I can do everything. I can plow, I can keep up in the reaping.” Now even the youngest, Mati, announced, as though the Captain had taken command here, that as for Schmulik’s work around the barn, he could do all of it.
“School will be starting,” Eliza reminded Mati.
“Then what? What is school, what do we learn there?”
“You’ll go to school!” the Captain decreed, and as Mati’s mouth opened to protest and suddenly closed, everyone laughed. “But every morning before school,” Trumpeldor consoled him, “you will water the animals, and after school you can help in the fields.”
Mati looked from the man to Leah and then back to the man again, as though it was between these two that things were decided. How tantalizingly the world was made, Leah felt—so as sometimes to give you a glimpse of how good and right things could be! The voice of a man to a child, a family in warm agreement around a table—But only because it could be good, you must not let yourself believe that things would fall out that way. Yet you must not believe that they couldn’t.
Menahem had the news first, from a fellow-shomer who passed, riding north; the war had broken out, there in Europe. An Austrian archduke had been assassinated somewhere. Austria had declared war on Serbia, Russia had declared war on Austria, Germany on Russia, France on Germany: the whole applecart was upset, armies were spilling forth in all directions.
Now least of all could Leah remain tied to the homestead. In this remote village, torpid under the oppressive heat of the summer’s end, her entire being strained to catch some hint of fate from the outer world. It was like the women waiting outside the cabin at the yearly secret meeting of the Shomer, for some hint of what was being decided among the men behind the closed door. And how would it affect each woman’s fate? And wanting to burst in and take part. So it was with the great nations there in Europe; surely the Jewish fate too was being decided.
All day now she worked in her vegetable garden near the house so she could see any wagon that drove into the village. Sometimes a driver even had a recent newspaper. But how to interpret the news? Menahem had gone to Gilboa for discussions. Even if she picked up a scrap of news here, with whom could she weigh its meaning? With her mother, only such items as might have a direct bearing on the family. First, the sons. A blessing from the Above One that they had left the Czar’s land! For otherwise Reuven and Gidon too would now be conscripted! And then Feigel worried over her brother Kalman who had remained in Cherezinka, and for his son Tuvia, who would surely now be seized for the Czar’s army.
How could Leah discuss with Mameh the thoughts that kept pounding, not so much in her mind as in her heart? Surely this was the revolution! The war would bring the Russian revolution. In some fated and mysterious way it would be the end of czardom. The revolutionists exiled in Siberia would rise up and from Siberia the revolution would spread! She did not dare name him in her thoughts or relate it all to her own fate, for this was too great a thing, too momentous for the entire world. A secret, inspired belief was in her that once the revolutzia had swept through Russia, it would inundate all Europe, and in some way it would also reach to this land. The Jews, Jews like her own Moshe—for in this new turn of events she could allow herself to think so of him—it was such as they who would bring the revolution here, so that in some way when the upheaval was over, there would be Palestine, a socialist land, open and shining and free, the chevreh like some great perpetual committee sitting in Jerusalem, a sanhedrin of chalutzim, and even the fellaheen would enjoy their entire harvest from their own fields, without landlords, without moneylenders seizing the largest part of their crops, and the Arab children, clear-eyed, free of trachoma, would go to schools in their villages, and Arab villagers would live alongside their Jewish neighbors as in a perpetual sulha.
Toward the end of the day, when the men brought in their oxen and mules from the fields, there was more of a lingering now on the town’s single street. But the Roumanians asked each other only for word of Roumania, turned to Leah to ask only if there was news of Roumania, sighing with relief that their homeland was still out of the battle. It would soon all be over: the Kaiser was strong, they declared. With whom could she talk seriously? If only she could hear the views of Dovidl, of Avner.
When her father finished his stubborn solitary evening prayer and came to sit down at the meal, there was little to be said, for Yankel Chaimovitch had only one declaration: to him all the goyim were equally evil, let them kill each other off, and let every Jew stay out of their war as best he could.
“In each country Jewish sons have to go into the army,” the mother sighed. “In the battles it is Jew against Jew.”
—Yes, Yankel admitted, that was a bitter thing, but still the French and English Jews were hardly Jews to him, or the Germans either, for that matter; it was only the Polish and Russian Jews who were really Yehudim, and for them he suffered, and yet, if they had had sense and followed God’s command and taken themselves up and come here to build up the land—
“But, Tateh, the war can also bring great changes for the Russian Jews,” Leah offered. “Out of the war may come the revolution.”
“The revolutzia! What revolutzia? The czars and the kaisers will send all your fine revolutionists to the war and kill them off!” It had always been left as though Tateh knew nothing about her Moshe, and Leah even believed that what he said now was without thought of Moshe or the pain this might still give her. —And what good was their revolutzia to the Jews? Yankel went on. It served only to make them forget they were Jews, and become godless. He spat on them all, with their wars—Czar Nicholas, Wilhelm the Kaiser, and all the revolutionists— “May the cholera overtake the lot of them!” It was the time of Babel again! Any Jew who ran to take part in their wars was a fool. “Look at your fine hero Captain Trumpeldor!” he cried. “He ran to fight the Japanese for the Czar. What for? To show that a Jew could fight. A patriot. What did he get? An arm cut off. And are there any fewer pogroms in Russia because of Trumpeldor?”
Leah caught a quick glance from her mother—let it pass, Tateh would soon stop his ranting. And on Yaffaleh’s face she saw a trembling.
* * * *
On Shabbat at last she could go over to HaKeren to hear an intelligent word. Lately the discussions there were livelier, as three young men from the first graduating class of the Herzlia Gymnasia in Tel Aviv had come to HaKeren to have a taste of working in the fields and of communal life. They were a bit too young for her, but to hear them argue with Max Wilner and Josef Trumpeldor was a pleasure. They were the brightest, at the head of their class, and they had organized a club to devote themselves to the future of the Yishuv. Each had been assigned his life task. One was being sent, like Dovidl and Avner, to study Turkish law in Damascus—he was the son of Shertok, the Jewish manager of that Arab farm where she and Rahel had once stopped on the way to Galilee. Another, a solid youth named Eli, was among the three sent to learn life in a kvutsa. He was in love with Shertok’s sister. They were bright Tel Aviv youth who were not Marxists, but who had visions of building “the just society” here in Eretz. Old Gordon often agreed with them, and Reuven too, but Trumpeldor said the youngsters of the Yishuv didn’t understand world politics.
; As it was the week of the High Holy Days, Leah put on the long white abaya-dress that she had made for herself at the time Bialik came to visit Mishkan Yaacov. The chevreh, also in their Sabbath clothes, were sitting on the patch of grass that Reuven had grown in front of the cheder ochel, and, remarkably, as she approached, Trumpeldor was discoursing about some of the very things that were on her mind. Leah squatted down beside Reuven. In his clumsy, half-Russian Hebrew, Trumpeldor was declaring that without question in Russia the war would lead to the revolution. Either with victory or defeat, the revolutzia must come. “First of all, Siberia will be emptied.”
And with that word, her foolish heart leaped away. It was as though she saw Moshe coming toward her on the wagon-road. She was a hopeless case. Leah heard Trumpeldor’s voice and saw him sitting there simply as any other speaker at a meeting, an interesting man, but with no personal call to her. Still wrapped in the fantasy of the returning Moshe, she heard Reuven saying that the quickest way to socialism was for all workers everywhere to declare a peace strike. As he spoke, his face had that impractical, idealistic look that made her feel toward her brother as a mother must feel toward a little boy.
Josef Trumpeldor answered that unfortunately the masses of workers were still too backward to realize they should refuse to fight. Therefore all true revolutionists must go into the war alongside the toilers, making ready for the proper moment to turn them from the war to revolution. Only if the revolutionist fought alongside Ivan would Ivan trust him. And this was particularly true for the Jewish revolutionary leaders and therefore eventually for the Jewish cause. For after all the heart of the revolution was in Russia, and the heart of Jewry is in Russia, and there the movements must join—
“Then we should all lift up our feet and run to join the Russian army, which we came here to escape,” declared Tibor the Comical, and, leaping up with a mock flourish, he cried, “Lead on, Josef, I follow!”