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. We weren’t different from the rest of the Jews of Chisnau, only attending service in the Central City synagogue for funerals and weddings, and the occasional birthday of an elderly, practising relative. But when we began to hear of Jews living near the Polish border being beaten up, we found ourselves remembering more and more our roots, and began listening to older people talk about the Kishinev progroms. Kishinev is what Chisnau used to be known as.
We had vaguely heard about the Kishinev pogrom, but nobody dwelled upon it. It was somewhat like the first world war which everybody knew happened, but it was like an old film which people seen and mostly forgotten, but for an iconic scene or two. Yes, we knew that the Russians had systematically orchestrated massacres of our people, but that was half a century ago. Father assured us that the Bolsheviks were against antisemitism. Yes, there was in turmoil in the region, but only because the rich were trying to stop the march of socialism. That was his true faith, and he never missed the opportunity of airing his views.
Rabbi Cantaragiu often visited us, much to father’s irritation, and lately he began harping on the imminent danger posed to us by the victory of Adolf Hitler at the polls. That’s over a thousand kilometres from here, dad said dismissively, why not let sleeping dogs lie? What has happened will happen again, the Rabbi said. We are the Chosen People, the man of God kept repeating, the whole world is imbued with antisemitism and everybody hates us; we need to close ranks. We need to pray more, to beg God to spare us the catastrophe that hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles. Father said he was not stopping Mama and the children going to the synagogue, but he did not think it was for him, he was not a believer. So we were surprised when one afternoon he arrived home 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. But even though I was barely a teenager, I understood that something had shifted in him.
When Mama took us kids to the synagogue, the Rabbi devoted most of his sermon to the history of massacres and pogroms against us Jews. The Kishinev pogrom began to acquire perspectives hitherto invisible to us. Every week he read us a few lines from The City of Slaughter, a poem by Haim Nathan Bialik, which goes like this:
Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; / /Into its courtyard wind thy way; There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,// Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,// The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead. // Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,// Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the breach …
He read it in the original Hebrew which few of us knew, and then in his own translation in Romanian, the language of Moldavia. Every week, he said in his slightly irritating and trembling voice, one hundred and fifty Jews were killed or severely injured by Russian anti-semites. Every week five hundred of our women were “molested”, which everybody understood to mean raped. At least a dozen Jewish houses were lapidated, severely damaged, or set on fire, the city fire-brigades taking their time arriving. There was an orgy of violence against Jews, Rabbi said tearfully.
We, children, never understood the reason for this hatred. Was it true that the Jews murdered Jesus? Was it our own ancestors who were the guilty ones? People here, under the leadership of some Russian military were acting as if every single Jew 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, a crown of thorns on his head and nails sticking out of his hands and legs, whose picture hanged in the main hall of our school.
Rabbi was getting more and more frantic by the day. I’m expecting the worst, he said, history’s gonna repeat itself. Then he began talking of the Promised Land. The people show us how much they hate us, he repeated every week, say we are intruders, interlopers. We’re rich, we’re thieves, we’re beggars, we’re dirty people with no hygiene, we stink, we knead our flour with the blood of Christian babies, we’re full of diseases. Perhaps we should be thinking of making Aliyah. There is a land without people waiting for us, he kept saying. God said it was ours if we undertook to tread the virtuous path. Please Rabbi, tell us how to do that, someone from the congregation asked. Visit the imprisoned he said. We children gaped, first, we did not know who to visit, we knew nobody 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. Mother used to say, Your father would borrow money to give to the needy. Welcome the zarim in your midst. We always invited father’s university colleagues from Moscow, Upsala, Bucuresti, Cambridge, Roma 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 in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy; read those texts. The Promised Land is for everybody who follows the righteous path, the rules are simple.
Things were now rapidly taking a turn for the worse. Daily we heard of fresh antisemitic onslaughts, Kristallnacht in Germany, Austria, even France and England, until as the Rabbi expected, the Jews of Bessarabia living near the Polish border who had been spared so far, began to be attacked and killed. The panic reached a crescendo when an elderly citizen of Chisnau was beaten to death in his own shop in Melestiu. That was the turning point.
Father suddenly acknowledged that his great uncle Dumitru had succumbed to his stab wounds inflicted when a group of young thugs attacked a Jewish quarter. For the first time he spoke of his great Aunt Mircea who disappeared into thin air one morning. Once known for our cheerful and merry dispositions, we Jews could now be seen going to our businesses, eyes fixed to our shoes, taking timid steps, avoiding eye contact with our gentile fellow citizens. The great sadness which had invaded our community had reached our home. Many of our relatives and friends were leaving the city quietly, some for America, others to Europe, but a few remembered what Rabbi Cantaragiu had said about Palestine, the Promised Land, and my friends Petru and Pavla urged me to go with them. Mum and dad said they were too old to seek pastures new, but encouraged us to go to a safer place, 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 not only did we feel safe, but more to the point, comfortable and happy. We immediately knew that was where we belonged. We were all young, only two of us were slightly older than twenty. We were healthy and fit, and with our common ideals, 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 were told it was a land without people, that there would be next to nobody there, that they had all decided to leave. Some of us were uneasy about this situation, but we reminded ourselves that God had given us this land. The fact that most of us did not really believe in God was only slightly irksome.
In the eyes of the Arabs, 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 very much like we were embarking on a camping adventure. 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 had told us that in a matter of weeks, we would have to produce our own food, or starve.
We loved the challenge!
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 throwing us. We would be the first step in a million-mile marathon. We would make the Arabs understand that we could both benefit from what we were doing. We were not like in the far west of America. We were not aiming at killing Apaches and Cheyennes to take their lands. If only they’ll let us, we’ll become their friends. They’d end up with more to gain than us.
Theodore Hertzl 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 going to become the norm.
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 had better 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 and two donkeys, the shares going in like a knife through butter.. Not for one moment did we believe that we were labouring in vain. We willed the earth to do its job, we trusted it, and it responded. 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 brownish grey, after the downpour they became dark brown. With joy in our hearts we spread our seeds in the furrows. 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 stirring with our heart. 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 ourselves, one by one, 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 without help, 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 rudimentary stone millstones.
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, then 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 land 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 fun 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 unconventional situation, it was exhilarating, 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 own that I had even indulged in sapphic activities; why not? 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 had a soft spot for him, and seemed ready for the plucking, 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 in Chisnau, 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 now, 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”; one or two others adopted a similar disdainful attitude to them. The great majority of the pioneers were always scrupulously fair in our dealings, but naturally we were not very happy that they did not respond to our offer of the olive branch 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.
One 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. We 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 rifles, 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 a couple of Arabs were 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 thieving Arabs on a regular basis.
In less than five years they were all gone. Who gives a fuck where?
