Джеймс Миченер - The Source

When Shmuel reached Akka in 1876 he did not, like many Jewish immigrants, fall upon the ground to kiss the soil in which he would be buried, for he saw Palestine not as the end of life but as a beginning, and in this spirit he performed an act even more symbolic than kissing the soil: he dropped his Russian name Kagan and assumed its Hebraic original, Hacohen, and as Shmuel Hacohen—Samuel the Priest—he entered upon his new life.

His trip from Akka to Tiberias was an adventure in disillusionment, especially to one trained as a timber buyer, for both the Old Testament and the Talmud had taught him that Israel was a land heavy with trees: he found only bleakness. In the entire thirty miles from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, Shmuel Hacohen found only one small group of trees, the ancient olives at Makor, and he wondered who had destroyed the homeland of the Jews.

His apprehensions were increased when he reached the hillside where Rabbi Akiba lay buried, for from this eminence he looked down to see not the spacious marble-fronted Tiberias of the Romans nor the beautiful Tverya of the Talmud but mud-walled Tubariyeh of the Turks, a mean little town huddling within Crusader walls. What impressed him most, however, was the utter barrenness of the land; he could find no fields under cultivation, and he recalled the lush, dark loam of Russia. Doesn’t anybody down there farm? he asked himself, and when he descended to the town and entered the stone gates he found a desolation equal to the fields outside. It seemed to him that he was returning to the hatreds he had fled in Russia, for Turks ignored Arabs while Sephardi Jews did not speak with Ashkenazim. He tried to establish friendship with the latter group, many of whom were from Russia and Poland, but they rebuffed him as an intruder who might be trying to share in the charity they collected from Europe. When he explained that he did not want this charity, that he wanted to associate himself with those Jews who worked for a living, he found that what Lipschitz the collector had said in Vodzh was true: Jews in Tubariyeh did not work. To protect the sanctity of Jews in the rest of the world they spent their years reading Talmud, and had he tried to explain that he carried in his pocket funds for the purchase of farm land outside the walls, they would have considered him three times a liar: “No Jew has such money. Nor this one in particular. And if he had, to spend it on land outside the walls would be insane.”

On the afternoon of his arrival he started looking for tillable land, but none lay near the walls, so next morning he went to Capernaum, at the northern end of the lake, where he spotted extensive areas that would be acceptable, and all along the western shore of the lake he found other land that could be tilled. Back in his room, he dispatched an excited letter to Vodzh: “Here empty land is waiting which could be made as fine as any in Russia. I shall inform you as soon as I have completed my purchase.”

Two days later he hiked to the southern end of the lake, where the River Jordan begins its steep descent to the Dead Sea, and beside this bountiful river he found both the land he wanted and the ancient gold coin. After that first acquaintance he sought no other land; here the persecuted Jews of his village would build their farms and replant the vineyards that had lain vacant since the days of Rome. In his second letter to Vodzh he reported in Yiddish: “I have named our land Kfar Kerem, the village of the vineyards, and here we shall make wine, for did not Solomon himself sing, ‘Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear …’ Start packing now.”

Shmuel found his land in February, 1876, but when he tried to buy it he encountered such confusion that he quickly warned his villagers: “You’d better not leave Vodzh until I find who owns our land.”

It took him eighteen months to discover this simple fact, and not until he had bribed three different officials was he allowed to know the owner’s address: “Emir Tewfik ibn Alafa, well known in Damascus,” but when he paid an Arab letter writer to send the emir a message, offering to pay a good fee for the idle land, he received a curt reply from a secretary: “Emir Tewfik has never seen this land, receives no rent from it, is not certain where it is located, and has no desire to sell.”

So in late 1877 Shmuel taught himself Arabic and walked to Damascus, where he tried for two months to see the landowner, but the emir refused to meet him. A tall dignitary in tarboosh and white robes explained, “Emir Tewfik ibn Alafa has never spoken to a Jew and has no intention of starting now.”

“But doesn’t he wish to make a profit on his land?”

“Emir Tewfik never buys or sells.”

“Doesn’t he care that the land is idle?”

“Emir Tewfik has thousands of acres of idle land. They are no concern of his.”

Shmuel was forced to leave Damascus without having seen the landlord and was about to decide that the enchanting fields could not be his, when on his way back to Tubariyeh he fell in with a delightful Arab, who advised, “Handle it through the kaimakam. For enough money he can do anything.”

“Even buy me the land?” Shmuel asked.

“Anything.”

So Hacohen spent the next three months learning Turkish, and in early 1878 presented himself at the kaimakam’s office, petitioning for an interview. To his surprise, the kaimakam, a tall, thin Turk in his seventies, admitted him and listened sympathetically to his problem. The situation was this: the kaimakam knew that in two months he was leaving Tubariyeh, but no one else did, least of all Shmuel Hacohen. So the governor teased the little Jew along, milked him of considerable baksheesh, and retired from active service without having written a single letter regarding the land purchase. When Hacohen discovered the duplicity he also found that the delightful Arab traveler who had suggested that he take his problem to the kaimakam was the latter’s cousin and had collected ten per cent of the baksheesh.

Shmuel’s disappointment was so great that he could not have continued in Tubariyeh, badgered by corrupt officials and outcast by the Jewish community, had he not in the spring of 1878 gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and while it was true that sight of this noble city on the hill inspired him with Jewish longing, its great stone blocks in the temple wall reminding him of the Vodzher Rebbe, it was not this spiritual adventure which was to sustain him. In Jerusalem he encountered something more significant than racial memories: he met young Jews from Russia and Poland who were convinced that Jews had a chance of one day controlling their homeland; he met others who predicted that in years to come the Jews of Israel would speak not Yiddish but Hebrew, “as the prophets spoke to us three thousand years ago”; he met businessmen who had started factories and others who were erecting houses outside the wall; and one night which he would long remember he met six young Jews who had begun to build a Jewish village near Jaffa.

“The Gate of Hope, we’re calling it,” they announced. “It’s to be the first of many.” One of the men turned to Shmuel. “You? From Tubariyeh? Are you starting any villages there?”

The men reminded him of the young Russians he had met in Kiev who were planning to rebuild that moribund nation, and of the poet in Berdichev who dreamed of a Jewish homeland; and as he discovered the vitality which these Jews had brought to Palestine he found new determination and replied, “When I get back to Tubariyeh I’m buying some land … Near the Sea of Galilee. We’re building a village there. Kfar Kerem.” And he returned to his hovel restored in his belief that he could do it.