Джеймс Миченер - The Source

They were a tough, wonderful, exciting group of young people, and if they had surrendered formal religion, they had found a substitute equally demanding: they were dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state that should be called Israel and that should be founded in social justice. There were no communists in Kfar Kerem, and there were actually those who preferred capitalism with its ever-present chance for a man to become rich, but most were like Ilana: “Our house is not really our house. It belongs to the settlement, and if we should move away the house will go to someone else just like us, which is only right. I work in the vineyard and I think of it as mine, but it really belongs to the settlement, too, and if I leave, other hands will tend the grapes. The important thing is that the land will continue.”

This was the real mystique of the group: the land will continue. “There were Jews on this land four thousand years ago,” Ilana often said, “and I am proud to be a part of that chain. When I’m gone more Jews will live on our land, for another four thousand years. It’s the land that counts.”

She often recalled the teachings of her grandfather, which were kept alive in Kfar Kerem in a small book which was published after his death and in which he spoke of his great difficulty in acquiring land, and of its significance to the Jews who first realized that it belonged to them:I met them as they came overland from Akka and the Arabs gathered at the gates of Tiberias to watch them struggle through, and everyone began to laugh, for they were thin and undernourished, and many of the men’s backs were bent from much study in the yeshivas of Berdichev. Not even the Jews of Tiberias thought that such people could live on the land, beset by drought in some years, floods in others, and Bedouins all the time, But I swore that the Jews of Kfar Kerem—as I had named the new settlement—would master the land. And to that purpose I drove them constantly to watch how the Arabs tilled the land, to remember what tricks the Russians had used on their fields; and weeks and months would go by without my ever hearing the word Talmud , but the word land was before us at every waking hour.

Ilana explained to her husband, “After it was evident that my grandfather was going to succeed, many religious Jews tried to join the settlement, but when they saw how determined Shmuel was to keep Kfar Kerem a farm and not a countryside synagogue, they left in disgust and went up to Safad. My grandfather never allowed a synagogue in Kfar Kerem nor any merchants, and this was the first new setüement to use Hebrew. Shmuel never mastered the language … he spoke it like a little boy, some of the old people told me. But before he died he was conducting the settlement meetings in Hebrew. My own father refused me permission to speak Yiddish, and I’m thankful now. Of course, I’ve picked up the usual number of words and I understand it, but I’d be ashamed to speak it.”

Land was the goal, the land of Canaan and Israel, the ancient fields awarded by God to Naphtali and Issachar and Manasseh. One day when Ilana was riding in an armed truck with her husband toward Acre she saw those once-great farm lands that had deteriorated into malaria-ridden swamps, and she broke into tears: “It’s a crime against the land. This is what happens when Eretz Israel falls into alien hands. We Jews have got to win back all this land, and in three years we’ll make it fertile again. We shall have to fight for it, foot by foot, but we shall win because I can’t believe that God intended …”

“You confuse me when you speak of God,” Gottesmann had interrupted.

“Why?”

“Well, yesterday you said some pretty forceful things against religion. Today you speak as if God were going to give you the swampland.”

“Don’t you believe that God has chosen us to tend this land?”

“No,” Gottesmann replied.

“I do,” she snapped, and her husband decided to drop the matter. Yet it was apparent to him that Ilana had come to identify God with the land, not differentiating between the two, and as the truck bounced along he thought: This must be the way people believed five thousand years ago when the long progression to monotheism started. “God is the land, therefore we shall worship this hill,” and almost at once they discovered that between God and His land there had to be some agent of mediation, whereupon they invented priests and the priests led to rabbis, and the rabbis led to all that Ilana hates.

Now, in his new home, waiting for Teddy Reich and the decisions about Safad, Gottesmann acknowledged to Ilana that he had come partly around to her way of thinking. As he ate the last of the meat—it was a matter of pride among the sabra wives not to serve dessert—he confessed, “In the last few days I’ve decided that you’re right. The land comes first, and after we get it we can worry about the other problems.”

“You’re talking sense!” she cried excitedly, pushing the dishes aside. Propping her elbows on the table she leaned forward and the lines of anxiety about her eyes disappeared. “When we get hold of the land, Gottesmann …” Like many sabras she always addressed her husband by his last name, but in her case this custom also reflected her dislike for his first name.

“I have a feeling,” he continued, “that the next six weeks will decide whether we get the land or not,”

“Whether!” she cried. “Gottesmann, we must get the land. Are you afraid we won’t?”

“I’m a soldier,” he explained. “I know what it means … in a town like Safad … forty on the other side to one on our side …”

“But we must,” she said quietly. In great agitation she left the table and stalked about the room, a husky girl, handsome in feature and explosive in her new-felt power. She was not a tall girl, but she seemed to encompass in her tense body the strength of the fields her grandfather had conquered and protected. “God of Moses!” she whispered. “Let us recapture our land.”

Then Teddy Reich exploded into the new house, and all things changed. He was a young, one-armed German Jew of twenty-four, without an ounce of fat or a shred of illusion. He moved like a charged wire, sputtering and jerking as if animated by some writhing inner force. He had keen, cold eyes, a spare chin and a close-cropped head of black hair. He was only slightly taller than Ilana, which made him much shorter than Gottesmann, and he possessed one of the most daring minds in Galilee. He was accompanied by four men like himself, all tough German Jews, and a fifth who seemed noticeably out of place. This young fighter was actually rotund, had a soft round face, drooping shoulders and a perpetual grin. He was Nissim Bagdadi, and his last name betrayed both his origin and the fact that he alone, of all the eight in the room, was a Sephardi Jew.

“The word on Safad?” Reich demanded. Throwing himself urgently into a chair he grabbed a pencil and listened.

“I was there two days ago,” Gottesmann began.

“Difficulty?”

“Shot at going in and out.”

“In the countryside?”

“No. In the town.”

“That’s to be expected,” Reich hurled back. Ilana gasped. Gottesmann had not told her he had been fired at by the Arabs. He rarely spoke of his war experiences. Reich noticed the gasp and looked at Ilana. “What’s the place look like?” he snapped.

Gottesmann took one of Ilana’s steep-sided bowls and inverted it on the table. “Looks like this,” he explained in bad Hebrew. “This flat part on top, the Crusader ruins, held by Arabs. From here they dominate everything. Now imagine the sides divided into six segments—a pie. The Arabs hold five. We hold one … this little one. At this upper corner of our segment there’s a rugged stone house which the British have turned over to the Arabs, and here there’s a police station which we’re afraid the British will give them, too.” Glumly the eight Jews studied the impossible situation: only one section held by their people, and it dominated by the Crusader ruins, by the stone house and by the police station.