Джеймс Миченер - The Source

SABRA: Seems to me your brother took a long time to say a simple thing: “Take the girls back, you fools. They fought the war in their way, you in yours.”

REBBE: You miss the point. You could say it as simply as that, but the listener could believe you or not. When my brother said it the Jews of Vodzh had to listen and to obey. They required some higher authority, some moral authority if you wish, to remind them what the law was and then to say, “In this case it must not be obeyed.”

SABRA: What you say applies to the ghetto. But not to Israel.

REBBE: What I say applies to the human heart … to the continuity of Judaism.

SABRA: There’s a famous Jewish saying which I like better than your brother’s response, Rebbe Itzik. I think it applies to us in 1948. “In the palace of the king are many rooms and for each room there is a key, but the best key of all is an axe.” We’re in the age of the axe.

REBBE: In Jewish history each age is the age of the axe, but we seek something more permanent. I wonder if you consider what you may be doing to the man you call your husband? The Talmud has a proverb about the man who was studying Torah and came to a cool tree. In Hebrew ilana . And he cried, “How lovely is this tree,” and in pausing under it, in disrupting his study of the Torah, he had not only committed a great sin but had also put himself in danger of death itself.

SABRA: This, of course, I do not accept. Gottesmann and I will have children, and they will inherit a noble land, which we will rule together without rabbis.

REBBE: The rabbis you will have with you always, for your heart will call after them.

SABRA: Not this heart.

REBBE: Not until you come home with your arm tattooed … in Arabic.

On the morning of Thursday, May 6, the dialogue ended. The final partition of Palestine was only nine days distant and the Arabs besieging Safad received an order from the Grand Mufti’s high command in Jerusalem:Safad must be immediately cleared of Jews and converted into our permanent headquarters for northern Galilee. Once we are secure there, we can move out to conquer all of northern Falastin.

So that afternoon the final push on the Jewish quarter began. Sniping was intensified and Jews began to die. House by house the Arabs tightened the noose, even crossing over the stairs to do so, and in the Vodzher synagogue men prayed.

… THE TELL

John Cullinane, as he retraced the ground that had been involved in the battle for Zefat, told Eliav and Tabari, “It was during the height of this battle that I just escaped making an ass of myself in Chicago. One of the newspapers discovered that I had worked in this area and knew a little Arabic. The editor asked me for an article about what was going to happen when the Arabs began throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean. I got out my maps, asked our reference library for the latest statistics, and wrote a fairly impressive article pointing out how the enormous Arab superiority in manpower, weapons, training and terrain meant that within three weeks of their initial push they would automatically succeed. I assured the paper and its readers that from my investigations on the spot—I threw in quotes from English experts and a lot of figures—thirty-seven million Arabs against six hundred thousand Jews: ‘Obviously, the war will be short, savage and for the Jews disastrous.’”

“Most experts agreed with you,” Eliav reflected sardonically.

“How was your Arab propaganda received in Chicago?” Tabari joked.

“Fortunately for me I had the good sense … Moses or Muhammad must have been watching over me. Anyway, on a hunch I took my article around to the chaps at the British consulate to check the figures, and the two top men said they couldn’t spot any errors, but when I got home I found that the chap they call the Cultural Attaché had been phoning frantically and insisted upon seeing me right away. He came over and with no formality blurted out, ‘My God, Cullinane, you haven’t submitted that article yet, have you?’ I said no, and he fell into a chair and asked for a drink. ‘Thank God, old man. You’ve saved your neck.’ I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, ‘Well, the Jews are going to win and I don’t want you to look a bloody fool in public.’ I remember that I stopped pouring the drink and gasped, ‘What? Jews win?’ He looked at me with surprise and said, ‘Of course. Everyone knows that!’ I pointed out that his own superiors hadn’t known it, and he laughed, ‘They don’t know their bums from third base. They think that because some dotty English colonel has been teaching the Arabs how to ride camels that somehow an army has bloomed in the desert.’ He said a lot more, most of it profane, then told me something that helped make me a prophet in Chicago. He said, ‘Look at it this way, Cullinane. It’s positively impossible for the Arabs to move a motor cavalcade of petrol and ammo from Cairo to Gaza.’ I called up in my mind’s eye the map of the area … saw the roads and the various conditions and corrected him. ‘You forget. There’s a good paved road now. They’re not driving over rocky wadis any longer.’ He banged his glass down and cried, ‘You miss the whole bloody point. So do the military blokes at the office. They see the figures on paper. Egyptians, eighty thousand armed troops. What the bloody hell good are they in Cairo if the fighting’s in Gaza? They see on paper, Egyptians, eight hundred heavy guns. What are they going to fire at from the pyramids? Take my convoy of essential military hardware. It’s moving up to the front under the command of two colonels. It forms up in Cairo one night, and before it leaves the city Colonel One sells to his cousin who’s operating in the Cairo black market all the spare tires. Every one. At the first inspection point Colonel Two allows his uncle to steal half the reserve supplies of gasoline. At the second inspection point Colonel One sells off two thirds of the ammo. At the first village a large operator in the black market, a nephew of Colonel Two, offers to buy half the trucks and pay in cash. And at the border the drivers of the remaining trucks decide to steal the machine guns and sell them to the Jews.’ I remember how he dropped his arms and made his fingers flutter like leaves falling from a tree in November. ‘So you see, Cullinane, it’s morally impossible for that convoy ever to leave Egypt.’ His argument was so seductive that I tore up my essay and we got stinking drunk together and collaborated on an analysis of the war that gained me some notoriety. In fact, Paul J. Zodman read it and he was so gratified to find someone who thought his Jews might win that later on he put up the money which is now paying my salary, and yours, and yours.”

The three men walked to the flight of stairs that had once separated the Arab and Jewish quarters, and to the left they could see the deserted mosque, so marvelously proportioned and with such pleasing juxtapositions of wall and dome and minaret; it was a minor work of art gracing the hill and lending character to the deserted Arab houses that clustered about its base; while to the right they could see the blunt, squat old synagogue of the Vodzher Rebbe. It lent neither the countryside nor its encroaching mud-walled houses any artistic dignity, but it did cry out the fact that to its doors had come, through the centuries, stubborn men who believed that there was a God who was one, and who in the affairs of men played a significant role, if the men would permit Him to do so.

Tabari sat on the stairs with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped on his knuckles. He said to Cullinane: “Have I ever told you about the defense of Acre? You know, as Sir Tewfik Tabari’s son I was handed the job of defending the old city, and I certainly had the men and the machines to do it. I was particularly pleased about the fact that in the caravanserai of the old Venetian fonduk we had ammunition enough to blow up all of Falastin. In particular, we had two million rounds of British ammunition. Two thousand ammo cases of a thousand rounds per case. And other goodies to match,”