Джеймс Миченер - The Source

He had first seen these lovely vineyards under unusual circumstances: one winter’s day in 1944 when the German threat to Syria had dissolved, thanks to the English victories in the desert and the Russian triumph at Stalingrad, Gottesmann’s special unit was sent by truck from Damascus to Cairo, and since the convoy had been directed to use back roads it came by way of Safad, where it was halted in the mountain town by an unexpected snowstorm. The English soldiers piled out to inspect the fairy-tale corridors, crying, “Look at that old fellow from the ghetto.” But Gottesmann went by himself down the narrow alleys, thinking: This is how the Judenstrasse of Gretz must have looked when Simon Hagarzi lived there. And it was with keen pleasure that he stumbled upon the small house marked by the reverent sign:Here Labored the Great Rabbi

ELIEZER BAR ZADOK OF GRETZ

Who Codified the Law

Later, when he had climbed to the hilltop, the snow ceased and in the ensuing sunlight he saw for the first time the majestic hills of Galilee; how extraordinary they were that wintry morning, brown in their barrenness yet golden in the unexpected sunlight and tipped on each rise with silver from the snow. The convoluted hills twisted and turned in harmonious folds like the intricacies of music, dropping at last to the lake itself, now crystal-blue in the distance. All his life Gottesmann had known of Galilee, but he had not known that it was beautiful.

“Is this the land they spoke of?” he cried with soaring joy. “Is this what we Jews used to own?”

As he looked at the goodness he saw that clouds had begun moving in from the deserts east of the River Jordan, clouds superheated from their thirsty march across waterless sands; and as they drifted across the mountains which protected Galilee they struck the cold air of the snowstorm, so that above the lake they leaped and spun in wild confusion, reaching far into the heavens and breaking into violent patterns. And for a moment Gottesmann had the feeling that nature was showing him a summary of the future with hordes from the desert striking at the Jews of the Galilee, and the turbulence in his heart was reflected in the sky, premonitory of the violence to come, yet consoling in the towering beauty and promise of peace also to come. It was Galilee at its finest—that turbulent area in which states and religions were born; and in a kind of exaltation he climbed into his army truck and rumbled down the mountainside to Tiberias, where the captain in charge suggested, “Let’s celebrate at the hot springs,” and they had piled out to enjoy the old Roman baths at the southern end of town. Feeling unnaturally clean and fresh-eyed, Gottesmann had left the baths to walk slowly southward, coming finally to the end of the lake, where he discovered the rich fields and the sleeping vineyards of Kfar Kerem. Some men were planting grapevines, and he asked them in Yiddish, “Who owns this land?” They replied in Hebrew, “The men of Kfar Kerem.”

“What men are they?”

“We’re the men,” the farmers had replied.

“Jews? Like you?” he had asked.

“Yes, Jews like you,” the men had joked in Yiddish, which they spoke poorly.

At that moment the idea struck him: After the war I’ll never go back to Gretz. And England’s not my home. Carefully he asked the farmers, “What did you say the name was?”

“Kfar Kerem. Village of the Vineyard,” one of the men translated.

“We’re the oldest Jewish settlement along the lane,” another said. “Built years ago by a man named Hacohen,” and Gottesmann had remembered the names, the fields, the vineyards.

When his convoy reached Jerusalem on its way to Cairo, Gottesmann experienced for the first time the mystery of that city so pregnant with meaning for a Jew—“To next year in Jerusalem” the prayer of his family had been—and while the English troops explored the Arab bazaars which gave the city charm he went with a few Jewish soldiers to the Hebrew University, on Mount Scopus, and there as he looked across the hills at the wonder of his land he became aware of three pretty Jewish girls who were speaking to the soldiers in Hebrew. He indicated that he did not know the language, and the leader of the students said in imperfect Yiddish, “We hope that when the war ends you’ll come back to help us capture our homeland.”

She was a girl of seventeen, broad-shouldered, sun-tanned, with her heavy hair cut short and her khaki dress even shorter. She was the tough, muscular girl of the impending state of Irael, a true sabra—“flower of the cactus,” as those born in Palestine were called, “prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside”—but there was about her lovely face something that was unmistakably Russian. Her upper lip was thin but her cheeks were full. Her cheekbones were high and her stubborn chin was squared off, so that she did not look Jewish, and when she smiled her teeth were unusually big and white. She was like no other Jewish girl he had ever seen, strong and confident as she asked, “You will come back to help us?”

“To do what?”

She became solemn, most unlike a girl of seventeen who is flirting with strange soldiers, and said, “There’s to be war. There’s to be much fighting and we shall need your help.”

He remembered the turbulent clouds over Galilee and said, “You can’t fight all these Arabs.”

“We don’t want to fight them,” she replied, “but they’ll insist. They’ll think they can destroy us. But after we capture Jerusalem …”

“After you what?”

She looked at him with wide, lovely brown eyes. “We’ll capture Jerusalem,” she said with assurance. “We’ll need help, of course.” And she grasped his hands eagerly, crying. “Soldier, please come back.” Ashamed of her outburst she stepped back, asking, after a while, “Where is your home, soldier?”

“Germany.”

“And your family?”

“I have none.”

She took his hands again and kissed them. “In Germany you have no home. In our free Israel you do.” He was startled, and in Hebrew she spoke words that he could not comprehend but whose passion he grasped: “Here is our home! Jerusalem shall be our capital, and if they mean to war with us, we shall show them war as they have never seen it before.”

Caught by the poetry of her words, he asked in Yiddish, “And where is your home?”

“In the greatest of all Jewish settlements,” she said quietly. “At the foot of the Sea of Galilee, where my grandfather proved that Jews …”

“Kfar Kerem?”

“You’ve heard of it?” she asked proudly.

He took her handsome square face in his two hands and kissed her. “Kfar Kerem will be my home,” he said in Yiddish, “and you will be my wife.”

Like lovers from the Crusades, speaking in Bordeaux on the afternoon when the knight must sail to the Holy Land to be absent for ten years, they spoke that afternoon of the historic days facing the Jews, and her soaring patriotism communicated to him the spirit of Kfar Kerem. “I train in the army, and we shall win from the English,” she predicted confidently, “and from the Arabs, too, if they insist. We’ll have a great city here in Jerusalem and our university …”

“You’ll never hold Jerusalem.”

“We will hold Jerusalem,” she said firmly, and she walked with him to the army trucks, where she gave him her address, although he did not need it: Ilana Hacohen, Kfar Kerem. But as the trucks drew away she cried suddenly with an impassioned voice, “Jewish soldiers! Please, please come back!”

Now, on April 12, 1948, as he sat in his new house among the olive trees, he listened to the untutored clatter of pots in the kitchen. It sounded as if a child were playing at a toy stove, and he thought fondly of Ilana, his reluctant housewife. The Galilee, remote from the centers of power, seemed to be falling apart and the Jews didn’t know what to do. There was idle talk about an attack on the town of Tiberias, held by the Arabs, but bolder spirits argued that the first assault should strike at Acre, also in Arab hands. And as for Safad, the situation there was worse than desperate; it was hopeless.