The Settlers

By Meyer Levin

From the acclaimed author of Compulsion comes the saga of a Jewish family that flees Russia to become settlers of the nascent state of Israel.

Proclaimed “most significant American Jewish writer of his time” by Los Angeles Times, Meyer Levinturns his journalistic eye for character and detail to an epic tale of the founding of Israel. At the turn of the twentieth century, Feigel and Yankel Chaimovitch are among the many Russian Jews caught up in the burgeoning revolution. To escape the pogroms, they flee with their children to their ancient homeland, Eretz Yisroel.

Though Eretz Yisroel is a place of unparalleled beauty, these pioneers face innumerable hardships: poverty, disease, grueling physical labor, and violent tensions with their Arab neighbors. There are even conflicts within their own ranks, especially between new arrivals and established settlers. And as World War I escalates, each family member—from second-oldest son Gidon, who struggles through the disastrous Gallipoi campaign, to Leah, who awaits the return of her fickle Moshe—struggles to build their future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625670854

Meyer Levin

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) was called by the Los Angeles Times "the most significant American Jewish writer of his times." Norman Mailer referred to him as "one of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition." Throughout his 60 years of professional work, Levin was a constant innovator, reinventing himself and stretching his literary style with remarkable versatility. When he died, he left behind an extraordinary, diverse body of work that not only reflected the incredible life he led, but chronicled the development of Jewish history and culture in the 20th century.

Book preview

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 come 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.

But the movement was not dead, her Reuven declared. It was the Jewish people themselves who would be the Messiah, their own Mashiach, and where only a few score Bilu had got up and gone to the Land in the days of her own girlhood—indeed her Yankel himself had dreamed of going in his youth time, this Feigel knew—there were now several thousand young people, good Jewish children, pioneers, chalutzim, like her own son and daughter who had gone up to renew the land.

Indeed Reuven wrote from the land that if his great-uncle Heschel had remained he would even now be handsomely settled in an almond grove, with his own broad vineyards, like a veritable lord! For to aid those of the Bilu who remained the great Baron de Rothschild had stretched out his munificent hand. No, things were not so difficult as in her Uncle Heschel’s day; her son Reuven, though an idealist, was sensible, and would not have written that the entire family should come if things were truly so difficult.

Yet who could tell what was best for a Jew? Yankel was mumbling the words, and Feigel moved the child, the little Avramchick, to her other side, saying to her husband, Lie down.

Will they go on singing all night? he grumbled.

They sang on, and he ruminated—To leave had been the right thing, for how could a Jew remain in the land of the Czar after the revolutionaries had lost their revolt and the pogromnicks had again been unloosed! What future was there for the children? There was no life in that land but oppression.

And with the kind of children we have, Feigel whispered, who could hold them back from the revolutionary movement? If not Zionists, they would become social revolutionaries. If they didn’t go to Eretz Yisroel, they would end in Siberia. It was indeed fortunate that Reuven and Leah had gone away a year ago, for she could see her eldest son in the chained line of prisoners struggling to the desolate far north, and his young sister would have followed him even there. And if not Siberia, they’d have caught him for the Czar’s army.

The younger boys, lying there on her husband’s side—how much better to take them in their childhood out of Russia! If only the Turks allow us to land. Now Yankel had a new source of worry.

But Reuven had written that it was all arranged, she reminded him. Reuven would meet them on the ship’s arrival, they would only have to pay a small bribe. They must say they were pilgrims going to pray at the Wailing Wall. Yankel growled. Another whole night with singing, he complained. Chalutzim they call themselves. Hooligans!

She wanted to ask, had he noticed, Dvora was perhaps getting too close to a certain one among the bold young men from Kostarnitza.

Yankel’s vast rumble came, his beard rising and falling. She nudged, and he turned heavily, the choked snore subsiding into more peaceful breathing.

Feigel thought about a name for her baby. They had come almost alternately, a boy, a girl, and it was the turn of a girl; still, if this added child should prove to be a boy? She could not risk giving him the name of her lost little Nachman, for then perhaps the Evil One would again snatch him away. There were names for confusing the Evil One—you could call a baby The Old One, Alter, or Abba, the father … And if the child should nevertheless be a girl? Girls were much wanted there in Eretz, it seemed.

Perhaps after all things would turn out for the best with them in Eretz Yisroel.

Through his closed lids Yankel felt the presence of the firmament, and the stars were like thousands of prickling reminders. Be watchful of each possession, all sailors are thieves, only goyim are sailors. But even of a fellow Jew you must be watchful; be wary of everyone who offers to help you when you arrive, particularly if it is for nothing, out of his good Jewish heart. Particularly if they want to sell you land. And especially be wary of Litvaks and Roumanians. The redbeard who had tricked him out of the forestry lease had been a Roumanian.

Though Yankel had paid for space in the hold of the ship, young Dvora and his wife too had ended by dragging him up on deck, declaring the air was cleaner and there was no human stench. He had yielded to Feigel because he knew that otherwise, down there in the hold of the ship, she might have begun to have her morning sickness. And why had she done this to him now? Just now precisely in the middle of everything she had had to do it, just when a man faced an upheaval in his life, when he had to uproot himself and take his pack on his back and set off anew to a strange land, a new land, yes, even if it was the old land. The Holy Land should not be strange to a Jew, somewhere that was written. Yet it was new to him, for was his upheaval in any way less than if he were going to America? It was worse than going to America, it would be harder. In the Holy Land there were no diamonds lying in the streets. And he must find a living, while carrying on his back his entire family, so many mouths to feed. And now in this very time, why had she done this to him?

Feigel had not said anything of it, but early though it might be, Yankel knew the signs in her, particularly the avoidance of his eyes because she had not yet made up her mind to tell him.

It seethed in Yankel; but as long as she did not say anything he could not say anything to reproach her.

Still—to be bringing a new soul to be born in Eretz HaKodesh, this was surely a good action, a mitzvah.

As at other times in his life, Yankel obscurely felt that a good deed had been kindled by his wife despite something in himself that might have prevented it had he known. And in his soul he was aware that this was why he sometimes allowed himself to be led by her. Of himself Yankel was not certain. In his idealist years as a yeshiva bocher he had dreamed of a life that could be carried out with perfection. It would be a perfect thing if a man lived an entire life and never transgressed a single one of the six hundred and thirteen regulations, also called mitzvoth. If a man uttered each prayer and each blessing in its proper time each day and each holiday, if he spoke the words of blessing for each act of the day, rising, washing, eating, entering a house, leaving, what perfection that would be! It was not so much that he had dreamed of becoming a tzaddik, but an ideal of perfection had been upon him. But after the excellent match with a Koslovsky had been made for him, Yankel had caught the fever of earning, of wanting to prove that he did not need the patronage of her father, her brothers; he had gone into the world, buying sugar-beet crops for them from the peasants. And to make money you squeezed—how could one help but befuddle a moujik who could not add seven and nine?—and then he had tried to be a merchant for himself without cheating or twisting or conniving, and had in his turn been cheated; and then he had turned himself into a dealer and trader in horses, in cattle. Her brothers, each time he failed, would tell him how he could have done well, and though in all this Yankel had stayed faithfully observant of the mitzvoth, kept, as though secretly within himself the image of a life unblemished by ritual failings, he knew that beyond the movements of the lips in the given words, and the perfect binding on of the tfillim, and all those mitzvoth that a Jew could regularly follow, a deeper failing was there, simply because he had to be a man walking and dealing among men. Therefore he trusted at times to the simplicity of soul that came more readily in life to a woman; Feigel was a good woman, a woman of virtue, that he knew, and despite all his sense of appearing as something of a failure, something of a schlemiel before her, Yankel sometimes allowed himself to be led into his decisions, like the decision now to go to Palestine since Reuven and Leah were already there.

A saying of Rabbi Nachman’s that the Hasidim were always repeating wafted about behind Yankel’s closed eyelids— Wherever a Jew goes, he is on his way to the Holy Land. But then if a Jew goes to the Holy Land itself, what is the meaning of this saying? That was a question that would have sent her Hasidic grandfather running to his rebbe! No, the Hasidim could wait forever, back there in Medzibuz, or they could wander off to America, all the while crying out for the Mashiach to hurry down from heaven’s Garden of Eden and lead them to Eretz, but meanwhile he, a simple Jew, was on his way there by himself.

In this moment Yankel’s heart swelled and he was awake. He was really doing it. He was doing it in earnest. A Jew like himself, without much luck in the world, not clever like his clever brother-in-law Kalman, the Rich Koslovsky, not particularly powerful in his body, not even a sage of the Scriptures, and yet where others feared to take such a step, he, pack and bundle, with his entire family, had heaved himself up and was approaching the land of the fathers! There welled up in Yankel that sense of the miraculous nature of all existence, of the wondrous things that can happen to a simple human being, and the words for this feeling, for this gratitude at living to see the day, the arriving moment of fruition, came to his lips. He must say the Shehechiyanu.

His eyes now open to the full star-misted sky, Yankel moved his lips with the words: Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast given us life, and sustained us in life, and brought us to this time.

But again doubts came over him. Was it indeed such a mitzvah to return to this particular land? What of Rabbi Nachman’s saying, after all? Wherever one goes—so it need not be Palestine at all. Should he rather have gone, should he still go, to America where his wife had kinfolk who would help them? And with a new baby, too.

He was not clever enough to find the inmost meaning of such a saying as Nachman’s, Yankel told himself. And it had had to be Feigel’s brother Simha who had brought up the troubling quotation. Though Simha had never in his life got through a page of Talmud, he was one of those Jews who could spout you apt sayings from the Tractates or from the Gaon of Vilna, as though he were a scholar of scholars. Everything he had picked up from others. So by that saying of Rabbi Nachman’s, Simha had proved himself right in going to America.

Yankel saw again the family gathering in that month of barred windows and doubly barred doors, after the assassination of the minister of pogroms, Plehve, may his name be erased from eternity and let an eternal fire burn in his entrails in Gehenna! It was Reuven, his own eldest, the book reader, the freethinker, a godless son who since his Bar Mitzvah had never once put on his phylacteries, it was suddenly Reuven who had challenged all his uncles to go to the Holy Land.

Hadn’t they been drumming at God’s ears four times a day for nineteen centuries, Reuven demanded, with their pleading and their beseeching and their promises and their weeping and their breast-beating, to let them return to the Holy Land? Well, who was stopping them? The Turk? The Turk was nothing. A little baksheesh. Others had gone. A few coins and the doors were open. It wasn’t even far. Only halfway down the Mediterranean coast. Why must they drag themselves to the other side of the world, to America, the capitalists’ paradise, with its ghettos and sweatshops as everyone already knew, the Golden Land for those who sweated gold out of the toil of their brothers?

To this, Feigel’s clever brother Simha had replied with another maxim: the long way around was the shortest way, and if the streets were not paved with gold, where did the remittances come from on which half of Cherezinka was living? And as for Eretz Yisroel, that was where a Jew went to die, and die they did, even the young, as had the Bilu in their time, as his uncle Heschel could tell them, he who had barely crawled back with breath in his body. From hunger and from fever they died. Besides, Simha reminded them all, Mashiach had not yet appeared to lead the Jews back as it was written. Or did Reuven perhaps believe that the journalist from Vienna, that unbeliever, that apicoiras Theodor Herzl, had been the Messiah? And as for America, it was just as Rabbi Nachman had said, Godliness was everywhere, and whichever way a Jew goes if he is a decent and observant man—

What the saying really meant, Reuven had interrupted, was that a Jew could not escape his destiny to reach the Holy Land. And therefore the best solution was to go at once, directly, and an end! Well said! Feigel had proudly cried out, and Yankel himself had felt pride at the clever answer his son, despite being an unbeliever, had given his wife’s falsely clever brother.

But Feigel’s eldest brother, Kalman, who owned the sugar-beet mill, had taken another view altogether. Why go anywhere? Why flee? Why uproot ourselves? There have been pogroms before and there have been edicts before; the storm blows, you sit quietly in the cellar and the storm blows over. Here in Cherezinka, God be thanked, we are alive and well. A few heads have been cracked but they will mend, the hair will grow back, not even a scar will show. And Kalman blew smoke from the long Turkish cigarette that he held cupped in his hand, while he smiled his prudent wisdom upon Yankel.

A few cracked heads. Might his own head be broken, and every bone in his body, the smiling one, the cigarette smoker, the wealthy gvir with his sugar-beet mill! In Kalman’s interest and for his sake, Yankel had stood up to the raging peasants, refusing to pay a kopeck more a pood for their beets, until a drunken Ivan had leaped from his wagon onto the platform, his whip raised. Yankel had spit in the moujik’s face, it was true, before the whip-handle came down on his head. So he had been carried home, blood clotting his beard, and all the children had wailed and lamented around their Tateh, Leah hurrying with the kettle from the stove to help her mother with warm water to cleanse the wound. It was then that Feigel had declared: An end! We must go! We must leave this gehenna! An end!

Nevertheless at the family council there was Feigel’s fine fat brother, the gvir, with his voice as smooth as schmaltz, declaring there was no cause to flee. And there had been the younger generation as well, Kalman’s son, one of the intelligentsia from the goyish gymnasia, talking of smuggled pistols and iron staves and the new spirit of self-defense, of Jewish fighters in Homel and Kostarnitza and Odessa who had beaten off pogromists. So declared Kalman’s son Tuvia, who was the same age as Reuven, also a freethinker, a revolutionist—he had even Russified his name—Tolya he now called himself—and he had a fat-lipped smile like his father’s. He too announced there was no cause to flee, indeed it would be treason to the social revolution! In the revolutzia everything would be changed, everything would be solved! No, the revolution had not been broken at all, promised Tuvia-Tolya, the mighty stream flowed underground, and when it burst forth again, it would sweep the world clean!

Oh, what a tumult and confusion in the family. They were like a double-span of horses in the forest pulling a heavy half-buried log out of a wallow of mud, Yankel told himself, with the driver’s long whip reaching them whichever way they tugged and struggled, and each beast pulling in another direction under the lashes.

And so he had permitted Reuven to leave for Eretz Yisroel. Better Reuven should labor and risk himself for the Jewish cause at least, than for the Russian revolution. Better a Zionist with a plow than a Narodnick with pistols and bombs. That had been Feigel’s pleading too. Let Reuven go. If not to Eretz, he will end up in Siberia.

And then came a new confusion. If Reuven went, his sister Leah stubbornly insisted she too had to go. A girl not yet seventeen, but already a new woman with equal rights: if a man can go, a girl can go too! Always Leah had followed Reuven around, more like a younger brother than a sister. Together they had joined the youth movement of the Jewish Workers, laborers of Zion, going to the secret meetings behind the wall of flour sacks in the rear of Mendelovitch’s bakery. What was to be done with a girl like Leah who went out beyond the town into the fields and asked the peasants to teach her to plant potatoes?

Regarding his eldest daughter, a feeling had come over Yankel in those days as though the house were bursting with the femaleness of the girl. She had grown like some Russian peasant woman, broad-boned, tall, nearly a head above himself, taller than her brother Reuven, full-bodied, with great red cheeks and strong teeth. Though he was not of the backward over-observant Yidden who forbade themselves even to look at a woman for fear of Satan’s temptation, Yankel in those days in the presence of his large energy-charged daughter felt an inkling of the fear of those pious men: It was not so much a horror of some drunken sin happening, as between Lot and his daughters—for one thing Yankel was no drinker, only a schnapps now and then to close a bargain—no, it was the surge of femaleness that he felt with Leah in the house, of an overpowering presence of womankind that he had not even sensed in the deepest of permitted doings with his wife. Nor, thank God, did he sense anything like this now from his younger daughters.

And Feigel too had taken count of this in Leah. In the whole village there was not a Jewish boy of the height and size of Leachka, and in any case could one even hint about matchmaking to a girl of today? But there among the pioneers in Eretz a shortage of girls existed, it was known, and perhaps Leah would find herself a big strong chalutz; so perhaps for her to go with Reuven would after all be a good thing.

Let her go with Reuven, Feigel had decreed at last. Leah will keep an eye on her brother; otherwise, idealist that he is, he will forget to put food into his mouth, even a cucumber, the vegetarian!

For this of late had been an added complication in the house. Reuven the idealist had declared himself against meat-eating. He and Leah had even started a vegetable garden in the yard, planting cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, and cabbages, to the amazement of the shikseh who helped in the kitchen. Reuven had brought home botanical books, and Leah had got the peasant girl to bring seeds from her family’s own garden. In their experiments the brother and sister had, astonishingly, raised a bed of strawberries larger than any to be found in the market. Only in his vegetarianism did Leah fail to follow her brother—she devoured everything, flesh-food, milk-food, engulfing with lip-smacking love whatever she put into her mouth.

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 over 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 the 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,