Tales from the Nakba III
Zinaida
In our home, we did not even have a menorah. Father’s favourite quote was from Marx: Religion is the opium of the people. But when we began to hear of Jews being beaten up, we suddenly remembered who we were. Rabbi Cantaragiu visited us and Father said he was not stopping Mama and the children going to the synagogue, but he did not think it was for him, but one afternoon he came back with a menorah he had bought in the Babushka flea market. I’d do anything to satisfy your mother’s superstitious needs, he said to us with a wink.
Attacks on Jews were becoming more frequent, and Rabbi began talking more and more of the Promised Land. If the people here hate us so much, perhaps we should be thinking of Aliyah. There is a land without people waiting for us, he kept saying. God said it was ours if we trod the virtuous path. Visit the imprisoned he said. We children gaped, first, we did not know anybody who was in prison, nor did we even know where the prison was. Act mercifully to widows and orphans. Father was the most generous man one could ever meet. Welcome the zarim in your midst. We always invited father’s university colleagues from Moscow, Upsala or Heidelberg for dinner. We used to love this, even if we never understood what they said. Tend to the sick, love justice, be merciful. That’s God covenant, Rabbi said, his contract, if you prefer; you’ll find the details if you read Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy. The Promised Land is for everybody who follows these simple rules.
We liked it in our modest city, and nobody bothered too much with the Promised Land. Not until the Kishinev pogrom. Forty-nine dead and a hundred badly wounded, in an orgy of violence against us. We, the children, never understood the reason for this hatred. Was it true that the Jews murdered Jesus? Was it someone from our family? But the people here, under the leadership of some Russian military were acting as if each one of us had personally done something to cause the death of their God. Until then, I personally entertained warm feelings for this kindly, handsome man on the cross whose picture hanged in the main hall of our school.
Father never really recovered from the wounds he received on that nineteenth of April; uncle Dumitru succumbed to his stab wounds a few days later, we never knew what happened to Aunt Mircea. Many of our relatives and friends left the city quietly, some for America, others to Europe, but a few remembered what Rabbi Cantaragiu had said about Palestine, and my friends Petru and Pavla urged me to go with them, and in no time at all we found ourselves on that boat heading for Haifa, with no money in our purses, but armed with our socialist principles, and determined to build that country for our long-suffering Jewish brethren and sisters.
The Jewish Agency for Palestine took us under its wings, and we felt not only safe, but more to the point, comfortable and happy; we immediately felt we belonged. We were all young, only two of us were slightly older than twenty. We were healthy and fit, and with our common aim, we bonded readily. When we were taken to Ein Harrod, near Mount Mount Gilboa, between the villages of Qumya and Tamra, we were shocked and surprised to find that these villages were full of Arabs. We had been led to believe that there would be next to none. In their eyes, I read neither welcome, not hatred, but saw many question marks. However, like my young Komsomol
comrades in Kishinev, I believed that we were all equals, I believed in world brotherhood, in the evil of capitalism and colonisation. We will surely show them that we meant to treat them with fairness and end up by winning them over. This thought comforted us.
It now looked like we were going on a camp. We were going to sleep in a tent, fetch our water from a spring in the valley, we would organise ourselves and cater for all our needs. The Agency had provided us with the bare essentials, but our mentor told us that in a matter of weeks, we would have to produce our own food, or starve.
We loved it!
We recognised ourselves as pioneers. There were seventy-four of us, about forty boys and the rest girls. From Bessarabia, Byelorussia, Latvia, Poland and England. From our rural shtetl, with no more than moderate book learning, few certificates, but we had self-belief. Might even have been arrogance. Nothing was beyond us, no task too difficult. Jews had been betrayed, victimised, persecuted, now we finally had our destiny in our own hands, and nobody was going to stop us. We were no longer the wandering Jews blown away by wherever the winds were taking us. We would be the first step in a million-mile marathon. We’d made the Arabs understand that we would both benefit from what we were doing. We were not like in the far west of America. We were not aiming at exterminating Apaches and Cheyennes. If only they’ll let us, we’ll become their friends. They’d end up with more to gain than us.
Herzl did not want us to expel the natives, but you obviously can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. We were none of us all that religious, none of us believed that fairy tale that God made us his chosen people and gave us this land, but hadn’t we suffered for too long? We had put up with pogroms, jizyahs, slanders. Wasn’t it time pass on the baton, and let others experience what it had felt like for us for centuries? Aliyah was beckoning.
It did not take us long to discover that the rich Arab proprietors were the true enemies of the Arab fedayin, their exploiters. If anything, we were going to become their saviours. We would be providing clean water, a health service, we would coax the land to produce more to eliminate hunger, and they would benefit from our toil.
Yes, we were imbued with the spirit of Masada. We were going to tame Ein Harrod. We Jews are known for our level-headedness, but when we choose to become fanatical, the gentile world beware. We will work fanatically, Stakhanov will gape at us open-eyed and wide-jawed. Fingers to the bone, shoulders to the wheel, our sweat fertilising God’s earth. We will never tire, never complain, we will break boulders, uproot weeds untouched in three millennia. How can that regime not flourish? The soil will recognise our dedication and respond accordingly.
And that’s how we operated, tirelessly, joyfully, methodically. You should have seen us, in out khaki shorts, our cotton shirts with our sleeves turned up, our berets at a defiant slant on our heads, spades in hand, ploughing the land with our three horses, the shares going in like a knife through butter.. Not for one moment did we believe that we were laboring in vain. We willed the earth to do its job, we trusted it, and it heard our prayers. Clearly God was on our side. After all the work we did clearing and the fields, He sent down the rains. One day the fields were light brown or grey, after the downpour they became dark brown. With joy in our hearts we spred our seeds. That night we danced in the moonlight, danced and made merry, made music and made love, why not? We were young and lusty and we were surrounded by love. Next day, we saw nothing with our eyes, but we felt the earth was at work. Two days later, it had turned pale green with the shoots, and on the third day the green splendour brought tears to our collective eyes. We grabbed each other, we skipped and danced and cried. Our land of Israel was breaking out of its earthly womb, in front of our eyes. We were there.
We did not rest. One enemy tamed, we looked to overcome others. The marshes. We had seen our seeds shrivel and die the moment they came into contact with the poisonous emanations, the filth and the stench, but the brigade was equal to any task. We dug canals to drain away the sludge, and filled them with gravel. Gravel we had made one by one ourselves, from boulders from Mount Gilboa, hammering and chiselling away from sunrise to sunset, sometimes late into the night if the Moon lent us some light. When the drains collapsed, we cursed them and started again. Whilst some were chiselling away, another team was tilling the land, marking boundaries, raising beds.
Everyday, the presence of the God we didn’t really believe in made himself felt more and more. It would have been arrogant to believe that a few dozen idiots with no specific skills could make these arid rocks come to life, turn to gold after having first turned green. Like it had snowed gold dust over our dunams. Our hens began to lay, others to hatch, our cows were happily producing their milk, as were our she-goats. Who can describe the bliss of drinking the milk you were producing yourselves? Of eating your own bread from your own flour which you milled yourselves, at first with your own stone grinders.
We were buoyed up by the conviction that we were the pioneers leading our people away from a life of persecution. Our land was gestating, it was a healthy baby, and we would make sure it grew up into a strong fearless and dependable adult. We felt like the future leaders of our new beloved country.
Every morning, when we took our first steps outside our tents, we would feel the crisp cool morning air caress our face, and the sight of forty tents, like a flock of white birds which had just swept in from some distant lands greeted us and filled us with an unearthly joy. Not a single one of us failed to read the message that God had signed over the lease of this land to our people. We remembered God’s covenant: Lead a virtuous life, be good and kind to all, and banish idleness and this land will be yours.
We had lived and worked together for almost two years, it was broadly true that we lived like a family, with love and music, a lot of sex as well as hard work. Not everybody liked our carefree attitude to sex and relationship. We mostly avoided traditional pairing, and I must admit that I relished the situation, but not everybody did. Petru, who I had known since high school in Chisnau always had a pained look whenever he saw me with one of our more dashing pioneers. I was a free spirit, and no respecter of accepted norms, I had even indulged in sapphic activities. I did not fail to notice Petru following my every movement with a hand-dog expression on his face, but I was not going to let him spoil my fun. Once or twice I did corner him and advised him, in a big sister fashion that Myra or Debbie seemed to have a soft spot for him, and he pretended that he meant to explore that seam in time, but was not really feeling like it at the moment.
As a teenager, he was very sweet-tempered and kind, but I noticed that he had turned into an austere young man, always an absent look on his face. He rarely smiled and never laughed. He took everything seriously. We had little contact with the locals in the villages nearby, but on the whole we tried to be friendly with them even if their response was not always what we would have liked. Petru often expressed his disgust at “those filthy Arabs”. Naturally we were not very happy that our offer of the olive branch was not accepted with any enthusiasm.
One of the most successful of our ventures was our poultry farms. They were producing more eggs than we knew what to do with, and one or two Arabs asked if we would let them handle their sales, and that worked well. Then we began losing our hens in the night. At first we dismissed this as inevitable, but one or two of us, including Petru took a very aggressive approach. We voted against guard duty, as being excessive, in view of the insignificant leakage, but this did not stop Petru and two others from acting on their own.
On night, he shot a young scamp in the leg. With an air rifle. The boy had a Red orpington under each arm. Although he was slightly hurt, he dropped his booty and ran back to his village. We expected retaliation, and we convened an urgent meeting and decided that we would offer the family compensation, perhaps money plus a couple of goats and a dozen Reds.
But trust Arabs to make a mountain out of a molehill. A party of them came next day, armed with sticks and spades, and using very aggressive language demanded that we hand over the culprit to them so they could take him to the police, which happened to be under the supervision of the Palmach. We still refused, and they left, saying we would regret thinking that Arab life had no value.
We admonished Petru and his pals and took away their guns, and next night one of our coops was set on fire. A group of us, armed, and this time, not with mere air rifles, marched down to the village, and in an exchange an Arab was shot dead. We had not started this, but this was the seed of a lasting feud between us and them, in which the Palmach was involved. They gave us proper training, and sadly over the years we were forced to shoot the villagers on a regular basis. In five years they were all gone.
