2

IT WAS here to Zuckerman’s that Reuven and Leah had been brought a year before by a gangly, bespectacled Workers of Zion comrade named Avner who attended the arrival of ships. It was the same Avner, Reuven cried excitedly to Leah on seeing him, who had spoken at the secret meeting in Kishinev where he had gone with their cousin Tolya Koslovsky two years ago.

Tolya wore a student cap and was already a member of a social revolutionary cell, but he had condescended to listen to “the other side,” the Zionists. The lanky Avner, come back from Eretz at the risk of arrest, was no fiery orator. Like a teacher, he set things forth. Thus and such were the labor conditions. These were the limited possibilities at present. Spadeful by spadeful the land would be built, brick by brick. No use to go begging as Herzl had to the great powers, the British, the Kaiser, the Sultan, for rights in Palestine. Go to the land and work. Solemnly Avner had repeated the ancient saying of Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, then when?”

Tolya was sarcastic. “There he stands, your leader, even a modern fellow who claims to bring socialist ideas into your Zionist movement, and whom does he quote? A rabbi. Reuven, Zionism is a movement that will never rid itself of religion, which means superstition and reaction.” And he was off on a flood of quotations from the brilliant young Jewish revolutionist Leon Trotsky, who had led the strikes and headed the soviets in St. Petersburg and was even now on the way to Siberia.

“Forget you are a Jew, immerse yourself in the world revolution!” Tolya exhorted. “Only then will we get rid of the curse on our people! The trouble with you, Reuven, is you are still at heart a yeshiva bocher!”

“You are wrong! I am a freethinker!” Reuven insisted to his cousin. He had left the yeshiva and was reading at home, while working in Tolya’s father’s sugar-beet mill to help out, for his own father had had another failure. Now he retorted to his cousin from the writings of Joseph Brenner, the Awakener, who had broken with the Jewish Socialist Bund and joined the Zionist camp. “What are our Jewish socialists? They’re blown by the wind, trying to ape the goyim, but they are dancers at a stranger’s wedding. They rush to lead a strike in the steel mills, yet not one Jew is a steel worker! First we must become ourselves, tear off our masks and face the emptiness of our own lives. Even our leaders, our intelligentsia, are false to themselves—they want nothing but to be acceptable to the goyish intelligentsia, they’re simply assimilationists, and so are our social revolutionaries. We will be true social revolutionists when we remove the motive of getting away from our own people, and are revolutionists so as to reconstruct our own Jewish life. And for that we must remove ourselves bodily. Only as workers in Zion—”

That was the way! That was the only way, Reuven decided. The writer, Joseph Brenner, was a vegetarian and he too, after reading a screed against flesh-eating in The Awakener, decided no longer to eat meat.

In the last year at home, Reuven and his sister Leah had grown closer and closer. They had planted their vegetable garden. Every scrap of knowledge that Reuven brought from his self-teaching from botanical books drew wondering enthusiasm from Leah. They saved their kopecks and made their plans. And when they arrived in Jaffa, though Reuven had exchanged hardly ten words with the leader at that secret meeting in Kishinev, Avner had remembered him and cried out his welcome. And the boy had brought his big strapping sister, too!

From the harbor, Avner had taken them here to Mother Zuckerman’s. Then, too, tea-drinkers had been sitting around the four or five little tables, where you entered from the street—workers who had come to Jaffa from the settlements for a bit of news of the world, for a look around, to find out if jobs were more plentiful in Rishon, in Petach Tikvah?—or perhaps shamefacedly to inquire for a boat home.

Upstairs were cots, seven or eight to a room, and there were also a few holes off the stairway where a sick chalutz might lie in miserable solitude trying to overcome his fever, his dysentery, his bleak despair over a failed ideal.

On the very day of their arrival, eager to begin at once to labor on the earth of Eretz, the brother and sister, leaving their belongings with the Zuckermans, had set off across the sands to the settlements.

A diligence plied between Jaffa and the little chain of “the Baron’s” villages to the south, Rishon le Zion, Nes Ziona, Rehovot—First in Zion, Miracle of Zion, Broad Fields—but Reuven and Leah chose to set out, as befitted laborers, on foot. It was best, Mother Zuckerman advised Reuven, at least to carry a stick.

Suddenly before an endless stretch of dunes the town of Jaffa stopped. Leah sat down on the earth, unbuttoned and pulled off her shoes, her stockings, and Reuven did the same. So now they were barefoots, as the Baron’s settlers called the chalutzim. As the thinker Borochov wrote, you must renew your contact, bare feet to the bare earth! How warm, how good it was, under their feet!

At that time in this sleepy impoverished byway of the decaying Turkish empire, there were scattered perhaps three hundred thousand inhabitants in all, less than a tenth of the population supported by the land in the thriving days of the ancient Jewish kingdom. But here along the coast behind the rim of the dunes was a relatively prosperous area, the golden strip bearing the golden fruits, groves of oranges and lemon, almond trees, and vineyards. South of Jaffa were the richest plantations of the Arab effendis, and amongst them in the last quarter of a century several Jewish settlements had grown. To Reuven and Leah and their comrades this growth was on a mistaken basis.

The Jewish planters had started with the best intentions. Even before the Lovers of Zion groups had begun to arrive from Russia and Roumania, the moribund, pious old Jewish community in Jerusalem had caught a spark of the back-to-the-land ideal. A devout textile magnate from England, Moses Montefiore, had visited the Jews in their hovels within the ancient city walls, the pious ones who lived on a system of dividing donations from abroad. It was called the sharing out, the chaluka. With the thought of changing their mendicant mentality, of bringing them out from their dungeon habitations into the clear air, and of providing them a means of self-support, Montefiore had built houses just outside the Old City walls and set up looms powered by a windmill. This industrial effort had failed, but a few of the enlightened supervisors sent by Moses Montefiore had remained. Tolstoyan and Fourierian ideas of a return to nature were in the air, and there had also come to Jerusalem a leader from the French Jewish Society, the Alliance Isráelite Universelle, who founded an agricultural school on the Jerusalem-Jaffa road, calling it Mikveh Israel, the Well of Israel, and hoping to lure to it the sons of those same chaluka Jews. From all these impulses together, a small group of Jerusalemites had ventured down to the coastal area, bought swampland around the source-springs of the Yarkon River, and founded a village they called Petach Tikvah, the Door of Hope.

Though Arabs living on a hill some distance away had warned them against the infested lowlands, the good Jews built houses and brought down their families. Joyously harvesting their first crop of grain, they carried it triumphantly to Jerusalem in a garlanded convoy of wagons, like King David bringing back the Ark of the Law from the Philistines, up the very same road. But that winter many in Petach Tikvah died of yellow fever. One house after another stood abandoned, until the village was so empty that a settler’s body lay for a week undiscovered.

A few years later, with houses built on higher ground, a new effort was made. In the same years groups of the Lovers of Zion had begun to arrive, founding their colonies south of Jaffa. Foundering in their first year for lack of water, they had desperately sent an emissary to Paris, to the “Great Giver,” Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and he, a pious Jew, influenced by the Chief Rabbi of Paris who was himself a Lover of Zion, and impressed by the horny, toil-hardened hands of Reb Feinberg, the emissary, had given money for well-digging. Gradually the “Great Giver” had turned the redemption of the soil of Israel into a personal project, founding a score of new settlements in addition to subsidizing earlier ones. The Baron’s overseers controlled everything. They even selected bright children for schooling in France, and the daughters of the pioneers returned home playing Mozart.

Fellaheen in nearby Arab villages found they could earn more in Jewish settlements than they could from their tiny share of the crop on their debt-ridden lands. And so, year by year, the Jewish planters themselves went more rarely into their vineyards. The golden orange was discovered, more profitable than the grape, and their groves expanded. Only a few of the Baron’s more isolated settlements in the Galilee kept to “real” farming, growing wheat.

The Baron’s private messianic movement seemed to have leveled off after creating but a dozen villages. It was then that a new wave of pogroms stimulated Theodor Herzl’s politically messianic vision of a Jewish state. This renewal of the ideal aroused a new wave of young people, imbued with a socialist ideal as well, to “go up” to the land. They were called the second Aliyah—the second “going up.” They would go up as toilers, chalutzim!

The first steps of the newcomers, naturally, like those of Reuven and Leah, were directed to the already existing Jewish villages that had been nurtured by the Baron, where they hoped to find work. But there, unhappily, they found themselves regarded as a plague. Arab labor was cheap and subservient.

Trudging across the sands, brother and sister were for quite a time alone. To their left, inland, they had kept in view a fringe of greenery where the citrus groves began; now, as they plunged downward on a dune slope, the groves vanished from sight, and all before them and surrounding them was sand.

This was a moment that neither was to forget. Each pioneer in later years was to be fond of relating something akin to a mystical experience when “Eretz entered into him.” So it was now with Reuven and Leah. The skinlike smoothness of the untrodden sand, the absolute cleanliness of all creation, the pure sea-blue of the quiet Mediterranean, the solitude around them and the presence of each other exalted them. We have done it! Brother! Sister! We are here! Leah’s and Reuven’s eyes said this to each other in a pledge of fervor, joy, dedication, a declaration that what they had known in their souls to be their true course was indeed so.

So they stood still and breathed, smiling happily to each other.

They would not have expected this joy to come to them in an emptiness of untouched sand. They would have thought it would come when they stood amidst the first Jewish fields; yet it had come to them here in the open dune.

After a time they heard a soft clanging and realized these were camel bells. The caravan appeared on the ridge, coming toward them, perhaps from Egypt as the brothers of Joseph must once have come, returning with their beasts laden with grain, swollen sacks on each side of each animal.

Exactly as in Abel Pam’s Biblical pictures, a small Arab on a small donkey led the train; alongside the camels walked other long-robed men. Leah stilled her heart and smiled to Reuven. One should not fear the Arabs.

So the two continued walking as though quite familiar with these dunes, and presently as they neared the caravan the Arab on the lead donkey greeted them. “Ma’asaalam,” he said. In this moment both Reuven and Leah caught the real meaning of the ancient greeting offered when strangers approach each other.—Peace, they call out, to say “For our part there will be no hostility.”

“Shalom!” both cried, and Leah smiled her large, warm, healthy smile.

A tall one in a long striped galabiya made a remark, then laughed, showing gold-studded teeth. They didn’t know he had jestingly offered to buy the shoes and the girl together, but Leah laughed a responding laugh, and kept walking. When the camels had passed, she said to her brother, “There is really nothing to fear. They are good friendly people,” and Reuven nodded his agreement. All people were at heart good.

So they reached the top of a high dune and beheld square white houses with tiled roofs, not unlike a shtetl. Presently they arrived at the village. There were Jews with beards and Jews without beards, hurrying, or riding donkeys, or sitting on wagons just like peasant carts at home, or buying from the stands and shops in the open square where there also stood a shul. And there was indeed the little fashion shop that satirists of the Baron’s settlements had written about, a shop with women’s gowns from Paris in the window. It was all true.

A passerby, one of their own kind—a barefoot—and tall, Leah noticed at once, with thick black curly hair—greeted them with an ironic, “Well, does our Little Paris find favor in your eyes, chaverim?”

At the same time Leah saw in his smile a comradely intimacy, welcoming them for having come here just as he had come. True, his eyes also examined Leah with a young man’s speculation. And she herself—was she not after all a girl of seventeen looking at each man she encountered with that fateful romantic wonder—would this be He?

Despite all the talk of a new generation and freedom, at home a girl knew there was constant scheming about a match for her. Already seventeen! And her mother’s worried eyes. But she had at fest truly broken free, to seek her destined one by herself. Sometimes Leah suspected that perhaps this was even a reason her mother had finally permitted her to come with Reuven, so that she should have a chance to follow her own heart when it came to marriage.

“Work?” the young man chortled, talking to Reuven while his eyes still gazed intimately into Leah’s. “In this town if you put on a galabiya and a keffiyah you have better luck.” Still, he said, if one of the growers took a liking to you, and if you could live on olives and pittah, the generous Jew might provide you with a cabin in his vineyard as a watchman, for the Baron’s settlers had finally learned that their Arab watchmen were themselves the biggest pilferers. And what was the news back there? He had caught himself up from saying “back home,” Leah sensed. He spoke of “that place” with contempt and yet a kind of eagerness; how was the movement progressing? He meant not just the Poale Zion, she sensed, but the whole revolutionary movement. Naturally he wanted to know. Then, even while lamenting that there was no work, the chaver grumbled: Why didn’t more comrades come, especially girls? The movement—and now it was their own movement, of course, that he meant—ought to organize an immigration of girls!

“Here I am!” Leah laughed.

“Yes, a good sign,” he said. “We don’t have enough girls even to take care of the workers’ kitchen.”

“The kitchen!” she cried. “I came here to work on the land!”

“O ho!” and she saw that he had teased her. His name was Moshe, and he now led them to a cabin just outside the high cactus fence of a lemon grove. How good it smelled! “This is our kvutsa,” Moshe explained.

Reuven and Leah had already encountered the word in the underground paper of the Poale Zion. A kvutsa was a small group living together, each putting whatever he earned into the common fund. It was a communa, like the communa started by some workers in Kiev to carry them through a strike.

Inside the cabin were half a dozen sleeping places made of planks resting on upended orange crates. A curtain of sacking screened off one corner, which Moshe indicated to Leah with a sweeping mock-bow was for the chaveroth. Just now they had but one girl in the kvutsa. She came in from the yard where she had been hanging out washing; older than Leah, perhaps twenty, with short, heavy legs and a bulging bust, Nahama had a pronounced mustache, pearled with sweat. But at once her warmheartedness engulfed you.

Did she belong to the handsome Moshe, Leah wondered, or to either of the two other comrades who wandered in and out of the cabin, tossing a cynical word into the conversation now and again? You could always tell, simply from the special looks a girl gave, which of a group of boys was hers, but here Leah couldn’t tell. Perhaps the Handsome Moshe was free? Only one thing was clear, even here in the kvutsa it was again the woman who was doing all the cooking and washing.

“I’ll admit to you honestly,” Nahama said to her, “For me, I don’t mind. I don’t especially like to work in the fields. I like to be in the house.” She half-giggled in apology for her backwardness.

A kvutsa was the only way they could manage to subsist, Moshe was explaining. Whoever got work for a day or two put in his earnings. And also, sometimes they managed to get jobs as a group, on contract, all six together, for by using a bit of Jewish intelligence they could get things done far more efficiently than under an overseer, and thus they could compete with the price of Arab labor. Right now they were even negotiating with the newly opened Zionist office in Jaffa to go out as a group to work a tract of land recently purchased in the Galilee. Under Turkish law, if the land was not worked it would revert to the government.

“Stay, stay with us a few days and become acclimated,” Moshe urged. Reuven and Leah insisted on paying for food, and Leah went off with Nahama to the village market. There Arab women sat on the ground in a row, each with a little pile of chickpeas and a few eggs on a piece of straw, much like the peasant women in the village market in Cherezinka. Admiringly Leah listened to Nahama bargaining in Arabic. “Oh, you’ll soon enough learn a few words, it’s much like Hebrew.” They bought a large round Arab pittah—it was cheaper than Jewish bread—and at supper each tore off a chunk. Nahama had made a good bean soup, they had cheese and olives, and for each an egg—the contribution of the newcomers, Nahama announced.

During the meal a short young man appeared—Dovidl. He had a huge head with bristly hair, and talked so cleverly that at times Leah found herself no longer looking at Moshe. Indeed from the first instant something completely familiar had sprung into existence between her and this Dovidl, and as in the encounter with Moshe, though not involving man-and-womanness, Leah had a feeling that a meeting of importance for her whole life was occurring here. Unfortunately, as to man-and-womanness, this Dovidl was so small it would have looked ridiculous. Yet here was something perhaps even as important as finding a mate—a friendship could come of it.

He was not a part of the kvutsa, it seemed—indeed he made a barbed little joke about Moshe’s snatching up new arrivals. “What were you at home, Poale Zion?” he asked of Reuven. “So what are you doing here with these renegades?” This was a camp of independents, they even had an adherent of the rival party, the Poël Hatzaïr. Not the Workers of Zion, but the Young Workers. A fine nerve that crowd had to call themselves a workers’ party, they weren’t even Marxists!

“So what are you afraid of!” Moshe laughed.

“Beware!” Dovidl went on. “They are super-idealists, they’ll make a vegetarian out of you!”

“I am one already,” laughed Reuven.

Dovidl turned to Leah. “And you follow your brother?”

“Not in everything,” she declared. She had never been able to suppress her love for her mameh’s Sabbath eve chicken, she confessed, and at the smell of potted breast of veal, her whole insides would melt.

From his banter Dovidl turned to his big news; bursting with it, he had hurried to the nearest camp of workers, even if they were not Poale Zion. “They gave me a job in the winery!” he announced.

“No! Just like that? Or did you put on a yarmulkeh?”

Well, he had brought a letter to the manager from a rich Jew at home who knew him. And already Dovidl had a clever plan. He was going to organize the grape-treaders in the Baron’s winery and pull them out on a strike! The trick was that this was one place where Arabs could not be substituted, for sacramental wine was the product, and to be sacramental it had to be produced by Jewish hands!

“—and feet!” Moshe laughed.

Therefore, Dovidl triumphantly explained, only barely smiling at Moshe’s joke, the Baron’s managers would have to give in! He had already made it clear to the wine-treaders that they held the upper hand.

“But what good will this do us?” demanded one of the kvutsa, a tight-lipped chalutz named Max Wilner. The wine-treaders were all strictly orthodox Jews from the old world, he pointed out, far away from—even hostile to—the thinking of socialist workers.

—Ah, Dovidl twinkled, he had already done a little work among them. And he was off, quoting Scripture like a yeshiva bocher, citing the socialistic pronouncements of the prophets. Besides, one of the demands of the strike would be for Jewish labor to be used all through the winery, even in sealing the bottles, and in another year the contract could be still further broadened—already this Dovidl talked as if he had a contract!—so that only Jewish hands tended the vines. There must be something in the Talmud to support such a claim! He would find some rabbi in Jerusalem—

Why not, Reuven joined in the game. Just as the truly pious kept a watch over the fields of grain intended for matzoh, to make sure all was pure—matzoh schmira, this was called—so there could be a grape watch for sacramental wine—a yayin schmira!

“Exactly!” cried Dovidl. He would show the rabbis that they could get all their relatives employed as ritual watchmen, and thus instantly gain their allegiance.

Everybody laughed. “Dovidl, you’re not going to make a compact with the rabbis!” said Nahama.

“Why not? Doesn’t Plekhanov say, with the devil himself, if it furthers the cause? So why not with the rabbis?”

“There’s your Marxist! He brings friendly letters to the Baron’s managers, he makes compacts with the rabbis—next, for the sake of his Marxist revolution, he will become a boss!” snapped the dour-looking one called Max, resorting to Yiddish.

“At least I speak Hebrew, not jargon,” retorted Dovidl. And now began a back-and-forth discussion of the kind Leah loved to listen to, where ideals whirled like swords in the air, and the deepest subjects were touched upon. Meanwhile each person was becoming clearer to her as she followed their words with the avidity with which one listens in a new group; Reuven too was feeling his way among them, putting in a word here and there, quoting now from Ber Borochov, now from Tolstoy. It was Max Wilner who kept opposing Dovidl, he had a compact head like stone and was humorless, but he had read more than anyone else. Another chaver, besmeared from a day’s work in a lime pit, had the remains of a harelip that had been poorly sewn up, and spoke with a slight difficulty; Shimek, he was called, and his eyes followed Nahama though she didn’t seem to have even a glance for him. Already in her life Leah had observed that some persons with a defect insist on doing what is hardest for them; so Shimek spoke much, and everyone had to wait for the words to come out though they had already guessed what he would say. He disagreed now with Wilner, now with Dovidl. It was like the old Jewish saying, if you have three Jews coming to a town, two of them will start opposing synagogues and the third will declare, “I go to neither!”

Just so, they all believed in socialist ideas, but Max Wilner accused Dovidl, “You still adhere to the Socialist International! And what will you do when the International turns anti-Zionist?”

“That can’t be!” Dovidl cried, “Each member party has full rights!”

“We must achieve our own socialism in our own conditions here.”

“Socialism! You don’t even believe in the class struggle, in the victory of the proletariat!” Dovidl snorted.

“We believe in the true classless society, by technical progress.”—And again they began throwing quotations at each other, ah, it was wonderful to hear.

Presently Leah noticed that another girl had joined them, a comely girl in a nice dress. One of the daughters of the orange growers, Nahama acidly whispered. And not long afterwards Moshe went off to walk the girl home.

Reuven lay down on the floor to sleep, but Nahama insisted that Leah share her cot. “I am so big,” Leah laughed, “you’ll have no room.” They lay in sisterly closeness. The night was permeated with the scent of almonds.

“I saw Handsome Moshe looking at you,” Nahama whispered. “Beware of Moshe, Leah, he will break your heart. He is a heartbreaker.” Her whisper trembled.

So that was it. Even where there was a shortage of girls, their hearts could be broken.

* * * *

In the morning Moshe announced with a wink that he had last night found work for the entire kvutsa. Even the newcomer, Reuven, could come along. Moshe had secured a contract with the village girl’s father to plant seedlings to enlarge his grove.

“Take me too!” Leah exclaimed. The men were dubious, but Moshe said she could come along at least to keep them company. Ecstatically Leah strode out with the group—already on their first morning she and Reuven were going to the fields!

Entering by a large wrought-iron gate that interrupted the cactus fence wall, they walked between a double lane of cypress trees—windbreaks, Reuven told her. Behind were orange trees. Leah had an impulse to run over and embrace each one.

Now a horseman came toward them and dismounted. He was middle-aged and heavy, wearing riding breeches with boots and an embroidered Russian blouse. This was the grove manager, one of the few Biluim who had remained, Handsome Moshe told Leah; he had married the daughter of a Lover of Zion, a planter with large holdings. “He still has a twinge of idealism so he uses Jewish labor whenever he can prove to his father-in-law that we cost no more than Arabs.” Thus the contract had been made for a lump sum.

At the edge of the field where the new section of the grove was laid out, a half-dozen mattocks lay ready; the men picked them up and went to work. There was none left for Leah.

Moshe, doubtless wanting to gauge the newcomer’s worth, paired off with Reuven, digging planting-holes. Reuven’s mattock struck the earth and almost in a continuation of the movement lifted out a heavy lipful of soil. Moshe smiled and glanced at Leah. Her brother knew how to work! They were already moving ahead of the other pairs.

Though telling herself she was watching her brother, Leah knew her eyes would not leave Handsome Moshe. His long body moved with the mattock in such balance that no effort seemed expended; as the chevreh said, Moshe was truly an artist with the implement. When her brother glanced back and caught her in her entrancement, Leah flushed.

The ex-Bilu was unwrapping burlap from the seedling roots. As he approached a planting-hole, Leah hurried over to him, and held the little tree upright while he pressed soil around the base. Kneeling, she too pressed down the earth. Here she was already planting trees in the earth of Eretz Yisroel! Warm, pliant, like living flesh it felt to her hand!

When the sun was higher, Nahama arrived on a donkey cart laden with food. She had brought a huge canister filled with tea. There was loaf-bread this time, with jam, tomatoes, cheese. Gathering around the cart in that inimitable relaxed comradeship of respite from labor, the chevreh ate and talked, Reuven and Leah included not even as newcomers but as part of the kvutsa. If they completed the planting in three days, Moshe calculated, they would earn enough to keep the kvutsa for two whole weeks.

“On pittah and chickpeas,” one of the comrades said. His name was Araleh, and he was blondish, with a skin covered with freckles, and clumps of hair on his knuckles. He had not been there the night before.

“The Arabs live on it and so should we,” replied Max Wilner with his teacherish finality.

“What did we come here for, to reduce ourselves to Arab fellaheen?” Araleh demanded didactically. “To prove we too can become serfs?”

“The Arabs are workers and we are workers, and when it comes to workers, there is no distinction between Arab and Jew,” Handsome Moshe declared.

“Why not raise their level instead of lowering ours?” Leah put in, from the discussions of Reuven’s circle at home. But Araleh objected. “This is not the way!” he exclaimed, waving his tomato. “To repeat in Eretz all the struggles we have in other lands, there with the peasants, here with the fellaheen.”

“How will you not repeat it?” Moshe demanded. “The class struggle is one the world over.”

“We must start at their economic level, and as we raise ours, help them raise theirs,” Max pronounced. “We will teach them cooperation by example.”

“Idealism!” Araleh shrugged. He, for one, was interested simply in building the land. The land itself. This land. Let the Arabs solve their own problems. Large tracts of land were being bought by the Keren Kayemeth in the name of the whole Jewish people. Why should he labor here planting a grove for an effendi—yes, this type of Jewish landowner was just as much an effendi as an Arab. Instead, they must go as a group and cultivate land that belonged to the Jewish people itself. Not to private growers exporting oranges for the tables of the rich. As for the Arab fellaheen, if they wanted to continue to live in the Middle Ages, that was their own affair.

“But it can never work like that!” cried Handsome Moshe, and they were off on the whole argument—which was to come first, the workers’ world revolution, or Jewish settlement of this land?

“Together!” Reuven declared.—Everything had to be worked out here at one and the same time, Jewish settlement and socialism together. Were not those the words of Ber Borochov—

In any case they just now had to go on with the planting, Araleh reminded them, for here was the boss approaching, mounted on his steed, back from his second breakfast at the big house.

So they rose and went to their tasks, but somehow stimulated by the argument. They had been called back to themselves as bearers of an idea, they would never be mere clods in the field.

At the far end of the section, cuttings of a different sort were laid out for an intermediate windbreak. Reuven examined the leaves. “Leah, do you know what this is?” he cried. “It’s the tamarisk, the same tree that Abraham planted.”

Handsome Moshe smiled at the naïve enthusiasm of the newcomers.

The grove had been planted and now only two men of the kvutsa, Shimek and Araleh, went out to their lime-plastering job. Max Wilner went off to Petach Tikvah to see if things were better, but returned to say they were worse. Reuven felt he and Leah should leave so as not to be a burden on the group. But Leah had a thought. Why should they not first plant a vegetable garden around the cabin so the kvutsa would have its own greens? A long discussion ensued. The bit of land was not theirs, it belonged to the village. But who would stop them from planting? Max Wilner elevated use of public land to a principle. The whole kvutsa labored putting in cucumbers and carrots and eggplant. This did not pass unnoticed, but luckily the first town leader to pass by was “a good one,” a planter who had himself once labored as a chalutz. Later he had accepted family money to buy land. He employed both Arabs and Jews. A rather thin man with a compassionate face, the pardessan watched them for a while, said, “Why not? A good idea. But perhaps you should first have asked permission,” and walked on. His name was Moshe Smilansky, Moshe said, and he was also something of a Hebrew writer.

“I’ve read his stories!” Reuven cried, as though to run after the man. “They are good.”

“Tell him,” Moshe laughed. “Maybe he’ll give you work.”

The second day Leah straightened up to see a young woman standing there, a neat girl wearing glasses. She was in European dress, a girl delicately made, with small hands, and bare feet. At her very first glance Leah wondered, might this be a girl for her brother Reuven? He was shy, and yet she knew he yearned. At home he had found no one for himself.

Already the others had greeted the girl—Rahel. What was she doing here? Where was Avner?—No use, then, thought Leah, if this was Avner’s chavera. Avner was in an endless sitting in Jaffa, Rahel said, so she had come here. Already she was squatting, examining the planting. Just what variety of eggplant was this, Rahel wanted to know, and what was the proper planting depth? Two centimeters, it seemed to her she had read—

“I just plant them,” Leah said. “At home they grew fine.”

“Oh.” At once this Rahel became diffident. “I only know from books,” and she began to plant under Leah’s direction. A curious one. Even when she poured water she seemed to need a measuring glass. She had prepared herself with book-learning, she was half an agronomist, but she nearly cut off her big toe with a mattock. And yet by the end of the row they were good friends. “If I only had the feel in my hands like you,” she envied Leah. “But I’ll learn to work, you’ll see.” Leah wanted to hug, to protect, this delicate Rahel. Again there was a premonition in her that a lifelong friendship had begun.

Just as they finished putting in their vegetable garden, Handsome Moshe brought word from Jaffa, once more rescuing the kvutsa. A forest was to be planted in memory of Theodor Herzl on a tract purchased by the Keren Kayemeth in a place called Hulda on the way to Jerusalem.

Before dawn the kvutsa set off, Rahel among them. Beyond the outmost orange grove the earth stretched cracked and dry; every green thing had been devoured by Bedouin goats. After an hour’s walk they came to the site; an old stone hut stood in the field, and there they found the overseer, Kramer, a well-known man in the land, an agricultural expert from the Baron’s settlements.

“But you’re too late!” Kramer gestured—on the field they saw a number of fellaheen working, taking the pine saplings out of their clay pots and setting them into the soil.

“You’ve brought in Arabs on Keren Kayemeth land to plant the Herzl forest!” Araleh cried out indignantly.

No help for it! The office in Jaffa had sent them too late; they must leave.

It was then that the memorable rage of Reuven Chaimovitch broke forth, all the more startling to the chevreh as already in these few days he had become known as a quiet and dreamy fellow. But it was a rage that Leah knew, a rage that belonged in the family, a rage that she had witnessed at home, breaking out of her father—not often, perhaps once in a year—but who in the town of Cherezinka did not know that one must flee before the rage of Yankel Chaimovitch as before a tornado?

And like a tornado Reuven rushed down the row of young pines, uprooting them, tearing the newly planted trees out of the earth. The startled fellaheen made no move to prevent him, standing back and staring, looking from the mad Jew to the Jewish supervisor.

“In memory of Theodor Herzl!” Reuven roared. “Jewish land! A Jewish forest! And Jewish hands are not wanted to plant it!”

Leah noticed Rahel watching her brother with such a look on her face as when one watches a superb display of nature, a sky of lightning and thunder. Kramer uttered not a word. He glanced at the sullen members of the kvutsa, and walked into the stone hut.

Reuven remained standing among the uprooted trees. His sister went over to him, and in a moment Handsome Moshe joined them.

“You did well, Reuven,” Moshe said.

And Rahel spoke also, as though representing the entire Jewish people, “Reuven, you did right.”

A few steps away the fellaheen were gathering together. One moved to pick up a sapling and set it back into the earth. “Leave it alone!” Reuven roared in Hebrew. The Arab shrugged and dropped the plant. Then he and his companions simply squatted down on the earth.

After a little time Moshe went over and spoke to them; it seemed he knew some Arabic. Then Kramer came out and spoke to them more fully. They arose and went away. Now Kramer approached the kvutsa.

The fellaheen were from the village of Zayuma nearby, the overseer said, their sheikh had sent them. Standing with his back to Reuven, Kramer declared that he understood what had happened—did he not have the same ideals in this land as they? Else why was he here, wasting his life in a yishuv full of madmen? But he had his problems too, and not always was he understood. The allocation for planting the forest was virtually nil. He had had to combine and contrive, even to beg, so as to obtain the seedlings, which at last had been donated by the agricultural school, Mikveh Israel. As to these Arabs, a small gift, a sheep, had been offered to their sheikh, who had sent them over, for no pay.

“Of course you are right,” Kramer recognized, with a side-glance toward Avner’s Rahel. “It is only appropriate to have the Herzl forest planted by Jewish hands. But wouldn’t it have been better to speak to me first, rather than rush out like wild men and tear trees out of the ground?”

Then they planted the forest, working for token wages, Rahel staying and laboring for a day alongside Leah and Reuven. A few days later, when Kramer swore there was not a copper left, the kvutsa agreed to work on without pay for another week to complete the planting of the memorial forest.

Everywhere people talked of the tree-uprooter. The quiet, shy Reuven had become a David and Samson rolled into one. The forest planted, they were again looking for work, nearly the whole kvutsa stopping into Mother Zuckerman’s in Jaffa where Araleh had a long-standing credit, as there was doubtless something between him and the grown daughter, Saraleh of the long braids. From the kitchen much whispering and giggling was heard, and finally it was the younger sister, Esterkeh, hardly ten, who brought in the great bowl of lentil soup so she could stare at Reuven Chaimovitch, the tree-uprooter, before fleeing to a gust of general laughter.

For weeks there was nothing. The men could only present themselves early each morning in the village square at the “slave market”; there, a grove owner who might need an extra hand for the day would drive up on his wagon, looking them over, sometimes even getting down to feel their muscles before he made his choice. Reuven was taken for a day or two of mattock work. Al ready word had got about that this patriot was also a diligent laborer, a natural hand with the mattock, as deft as Handsome Moshe himself, but if they summoned him onto the wagon, the squires inevitably jested, “Remember, I want trees planted, not uprooted.” Then, when one of the writer Smilansky’s steady hands fell ill, the planter himself came to the cabin asking for Reuven Chaimovitch, and on Reuven’s steady employment the kvutsa managed to survive.

One morning Dovidl the Clever reappeared. “The wine-treaders!” he proclaimed. He had pulled them out on strike! Everyone must come and show solidarity!

A mixed crowd had gathered at the gate before the winery, the largest establishment in Rishon le Zion. The strikers themselves, mostly older men, heavily bearded and wearing the ritual fringed undervest so that the tzitzith dangled out at the waist, now stood together in a group, looking bewildered and uncertain about what they had done, but reassuring each other in Yiddish that no, a Jew could not feed a family on such a pittance, and the pious Baron in Paris could surely afford to pay a pious Jew better wages.

Another group had already formed, a group of planters and villagers, and these called at them with indignation, addressing each by name: Zalman! Have you lost your senses!—What’s come over you! Why do you listen to these socialist troublemakers?—Let them go back to Russia! Do you want the Baron to get angry, do you want to ruin the whole yishuv! A shame!

A wagon drawn by a fat-sided Belgian workhorse drove up, and off jumped a heavyset black bearded settler, holding his long whip. A village founder, owner of an enormous vineyard, in his anger he even reminded Leah a little of her own father on that famous day when he had shouted down the peasants who wanted a higher price for their sugar beets.

“I’ll tread the grapes myself!” the grower shouted, marching toward the gate, waving to the other villagers to follow. Before the gate stood Dovidl, and instantly there was a scuffle with Dovidl in the center; the whole kvutsa rushed to his aid, and as Leah planted her bulk before the wrought-iron gate, the planter paused. “Shame!” he shouted into her face. “A Jewish girl! Do you want to bring the Turkish police down on us!” And he appealed to the striking wine-treaders themselves. “Jews, come to your senses!”

On the second story a window flew open. The manager, wearing a high stiff collar and a necktie, stuck out his head. “The wine-press is shut down!” he shouted in a blend of German and Yiddish, with a French accent. “I have telegraphed to Paris.” And to the militant vintner he called, “BenZion, you too better go home.”

By evening the cabin of the kvutsa had been inundated with barefoots. News of the first strike had emptied out the whole of Mother Zuckerman’s hotel in Jaffa, and Araleh’s Saraleh had also come, bringing a sackful of bread. Leah and the sweaty Nahama were busy over the soup cauldron, cutting up carrots that had already grown to a good size in their garden—what a brilliant idea to plant their own vegetables, everyone exclaimed, it should become a principe! Excited talk went on, rumors of victory; lanky Avner arrived and went into a sitting with Dovidl and Handsome Moshe; for quiet, they used the girls’ corner behind the burlap curtain.

In the dusk, among the gathering crowd there appeared a figure, half emaciated, in a peasant blouse, and by his long ragged beard you would have thought it was Tolstoy himself. This was the “Old One,” Reuven knew at once, the sage, A. D. Gordon—who had not heard of him? Who did not already know him, from his writings in the Young Worker? A lifelong member of the intelligentsia, who had been managing an estate for a relative, Baron Ginsberg of St. Petersburg, the richest of Russian Jews, he had suddenly, at fifty, left all behind, family, home, books, and come to Eretz as a laborer. Frail, often ill, he would take no other task than laboring in the fields.

Catching sight of Dovidl, the Old One called out like a scolding teacher, “You shouldn’t have done it!”

“But isn’t he with us?” Reuven was puzzled.

“He’s with us, he’s with us,” Moshe laughed, “only he’s against strikes. He believes in passivity.”

“No. In patience!” Gordon had heard them. “In endurance.”

“Then how will things ever change?” Moshe demanded, more respectfully.

They would change. Old Gordon was off on a lecture, just as though he were reading from his writings. The Jew, restored to his natural self as a toiler on the soil, would become stronger inwardly. And thus things would change—not through strife and conflict that would only sharpen the difference between Jew and Jew in the so-called class struggle, for what could this achieve? “They will only strike back at you. They will divide you,” he predicted. “All true strength is from within.”

Max Wilner had been listening; now he opened his tight-pressed lips. “Our true vegetarian,” he remarked. And he told a little incident. Not long ago Gordon had stayed at the kvutsa. “You know on top of everything he is pious. He puts on tfillim. At least until then he did. One morning I said to him, ‘Gordon, you are a vegetarian. How can you bind on your arm and forehead these strips of leather cut from the hide of an animal?’ And you know what happened?” Max gave them a moment, savoring his coming point. “The next morning he prayed without his tfillim.”

It was from that moment perhaps that Reuven felt his first impulse of dislike in Eretz, though Max was so intelligent and hardworking a comrade, and widely read.

Singing had begun. Despite the words of the sage, which troubled few of them since everyone could not after all live up to all the ideals of a tzaddik, there was a happy sense of triumph. At last a blow had been struck at the barons, big and little! A bonfire sprang alight and already the circle of dancers swung around the fire. Leah jumped into the hora ring, Handsome Moshe was on one side of her, his fingers squarely around her waist, and on the other side she could feel under her hand the bony shoulder of Old Gordon. Almost the first into the circle, he danced as one ageless, possessed, with the ecstasy of a Hasid. Even Dovidl, she saw, was pulled into the dance. Whatever would come in her life, with such good comrades, never had she been so happy!

When Leah danced, some said the earth shook. But it was from fervor, not from heaviness. As is often true of large women, when she danced, her fleshiness vanished, she was possessed of a weightless grace. How good, how good it was, and the words stamped out in their song said the same: How good and how pleasant for brothers to dwell together in unity. It was a Psalm of David, it had become a chalutz song.

Reuven too was swept into the hora; in the circle his shyness was suspended—as long as he was one with the others, he did not feel it, but the moment the circle halted, this shyness returned on him and he stood alone. There were few such solitary moments tonight as the end-gasp of each song was drowned in the upsurge of a new one. Now Araleh called out the favorite refrain, “Im ayn ani li, mi li?” “If I am not for me, who will be?” The words of Rabbi Hillel, stomped into the earth, harder, always faster. “And if not now, then when, then when!”—“Ay ma-tay!” One by one the chevreh lost breath and dropped out; the circle constricted until there were six, Araleh and Saraleh dropped away, then suddenly Moshe and Leah were standing aside, gasping, laughing, and only Avner’s Rahel was left with Reuven. She flew faster, Reuven too, he waved his free hand for others to come back, but everyone clapped them on. “If I am not for me, who will be!”—“Mi-li, mi-li,” until suddenly he felt the small of her back weighing on his hand, resting there the briefest instant, and then Rahel broke away, breathing rapidly, shaking her head, her eyes sparkling their acknowledgment. Oo-wah! What a dancer was Reuven the Tree-Puller, the longest lasting of all! But Old Gordon sprang back. Now Reuven and Gordon danced on, the fire lighting their faces. “If for myself alone am I, what am I?” They could not let the dance die, it was as though the whole movement would stop, the chalutziut, the redemption of the Jews, the turning earth itself!

Then Leah leaped back, and Moshe, and Araleh and Saraleh, and Nahama and Shimek, and Dovidl, and Avner and Rahel, Max Wilner too, and the circle expanded, grew larger than ever. “Anu banu artsa,” they sang, “We have come to our land, To build and have her build us …”

The yard all around the hut and the floor inside the hut were covered with them, the sleeping chalutzim, while in the girls’ corner Leah had insisted on giving her place to Saraleh Zuckerman, and she herself lay on the mat with Rahel. Too excited to sleep, Rahel talked and talked in a low voice into Leah’s ear; the significance of the event, the first strike, the way was now open, in the orange-picking season they would strike the groves. Jewish labor would become a force, did Leah realize how many chalutzim were arriving? Over a thousand had appeared this year in the Poale Zion hut on the shore near Jaffa. And as many more surely had come to Eretz without registering in their labor exchange. Avner could no longer cope with it all. And a journal was needed, a labor paper to offset the only Hebrew paper with its Old City odor—and suddenly Rahel interjected, “Your brother, what a dancer!” and went on—Handsome Moshe, she had noticed that Leah was attracted to him. No? And dropping to a more intimate whisper she asked was Leah still a virgin? To her chaverteh, Leah answered honestly, and Rahel now embarked on a lecture on sexual freedom as though it were a duty. About Rahel and Avner, Leah was too embarrassed to ask, though everyone took it for granted.

She and Rahel must have drowsed, for before dawn Leah awakened to movement from the other side of their curtain, among the men sleepers on the floor. Dovidl was up and already making off. “Dovidl, wait!” she hurried out to him—at least a mug of tea and a slice of bread. He took the bread but wouldn’t wait for the fire to be made for the water to boil.

From a distance as he entered the village Dovidl already saw them, his fine pious strikers, in a little knot in front of the shul, while their leader, Reb Weintraub of the always-narrowed eyes, was off to a side in a discussion with the planter, BenZion.

So, as Dovidl soon related at the kvutsa, his pious wine-treaders had betrayed him. An advance in wages had been received, but other demands, such as for Jewish hands throughout the winery, would await an opinion by the chief rabbi of the Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Dovidl himself, of course, was no longer wanted in the winery, not because of his radical labor ideas but because he was unobservant, and unkosher—tref.

With this point, a foxy glint had come into Weintraub’s eyeslits.

So it was he who had been used, Dovidl realized; the men had got their increase in wages, and behind their beards they were laughing at him.

Big Leah, bringing hot tea in a large canister as she arrived with the chevreh, at once saw from the way Dovidl walked toward them what had happened. Afterward, sitting on a bench outside the cabin when the crowd of barefoots had gone their way, she listened to his analysis of his mistakes. It was not wrong to work with the religious element, as with any element, for to grow strong the maximum of groupings must be drawn in. Though he should have realized that BenZion the planter would approach the pious workers with his tallis-bag in his hand. The mistake was that before the strike, he, Dovidl, should himself have obtained some sort of hold over the men.

“Nu,” she said, “no use to sit with a let-down nose.” After all he had done something. He had shown that a strike could be effective even here in Eretz.

But then there was no work at all to be had. The orange-picking season was slow in starting. And as Old Gordon had pre dicted, the growers were striking back in their own way. Each dawn the chalutzim stood in the “slave market.” The “little barons” would drive up and stop at the Arab side of the square. Entire families of Arabs they led off to do their cutting, never a Jew. Even for Arab wages, chalutzim were not wanted.

The little kvutsa was breaking up. Shimek of the twisted lip had received a letter from home, from his father, saying his mother would not live through the winter. Though everyone knew about such letters, he was going back—with the vow that he would soon return to Eretz. Moshe was going off to try the Galilee, where it was said hands would be needed for a big plantation being started for wealthy English Jews, on the shores of the Kinnereth. “He’s running away from his orange-grower’s daughter,” Nahama scornfully told Leah. Things had reached the point of tears and marriage demands. And soon poor Nahama herself was running after Handsome Moshe to the Galilee.

With the picking season over, even Reuven’s days of employment were few. It seemed almost as though their coming here were a failure. Who would have imagined, with all the difficulties that had been forecast of fevers and of Arab bandits falling on them, that the greatest hardship would come from other Jews refusing to give them work?

Mama had scented out the difficulty and was sending them bits of money—Leah could almost see her unknotting the kerchief in which she tied away coins, the coins saved from household money—Mamaleh’s kniplach. There could even be enough for passage home if need be, their mother hinted.

From Rahel came the thought of Jerusalem. Months in the land, and they had not even gone up to Yerushalayim! No, Leah denied to herself, it was not because they might leave Eretz without seeing the holy city. They had no thought of deserting. In Jerusalem, Rahel said, they might find building work. Chalutzim were learning to become stonecutters. Women must learn this trade as well! So, with Avner and Rahel, she and Reuven set off.

At every turn, Avner gave them historical lectures. That was really where his heart was, in searching out old names of villages and valleys; even the names of Arab villagers he sometimes traced to Biblical days, believing these were descendants of Jews who had in the distant past become Moslems to save themselves. But when would he ever find time for this important work?

Here in the low hills was Samson’s land, the vale of Sorek where Delilah lived. How empty it all was! The air was quiet and luminous, and sometimes they walked for an hour, two hours, without coming upon a village. A small herd of sheep might be seen grazing on a hillside, and once there suddenly appeared three Arab girls with water-jars on their heads, coming from a spring. In the girls’ village they were given hospitality, sleeping on mats in the guest-hut of the sheikh; it was here, Avner told them, that the Ark had rested on its way to Jerusalem.

Then they were making their last ascent, between two ranges of grayish, barren hills, on which one could see traces of terracing. All this had once been covered by fig trees, olives, and vines. Rahel suddenly launched into a discourse on forestry. Conifers would be the best. All these hills could be green again. But the bald mountains stretched as far as the eye could see, like the planet earth before plants were created. Tens of thousand of seedlings would be needed, Leah said, and where would they come from? Even for the Herzl forest, seedlings had been scarce.

“Then we must grow them! You and I! That’s something we can do!” Rahel cried and began to sing as they climbed. She had taken Leah’s hand, and they walked behind Avner and Reuven, the huge girl and the little one, their hands swinging as they sang a wordless Hasidic melody. And there atop a hill as barren as the others was the city.

The massive walls, as they approached, appeared to Leah just as they must always have been, even in David’s time. Rising in the center she saw a vast golden dome, and though she knew it belonged to those others, a mosque, it seemed to her it was the Temple. Just so, just there, it must have stood.

Through the covered lanes with their stalls, Rahel and Avner led them into narrower, still more twisted lanes, with glimpses of hovels along dark stone stairways, and suddenly around a double corner they found themselves before the Wall. Why should they—all unbelievers—be drawn to this symbol of fanatic Judaism, of weeping and despair? Yet so it was. They had had to come here first.

Exactly as in the picture that hung in her grandmother’s house in Cherezinka, Leah saw the high wall made of great blocks of ancient stones—ah, in those days Jews indeed knew how to hew stones! In the crevices grew bits of grass like tufts of hair on an old woman’s face, and swaying in prayer at the base of the wall were the old men of the picture, and also a few weeping old women.

Then came beggars tugging at you and demanding the names of your deceased so they could say a Kaddish, and Reuven wanted to leave.

Against the opposite end of the Old City, in Mea Shearim, Rahel led them into the courtyard of a rectangular building, once a monastery, she said. Even as they approached, Leah heard the stonecutters’ hammers tapping away; in one corner of the yard a few chalutzim sat on the ground, their faces gray with stone dust, each with a block before him, chipping away under the eye of a tiny Yemenite with short ear-curls, the master. In another corner, before a huge upended block of stone from which a striding Elijah half-emerged, was a sculptor who turned, gazed on Leah with a broadening grin of appreciation, let out an enormous Oho! and came and walked around her as though she were an object in a museum. Oho! he whistled again, from behind a mufflike mustache, and demanded of Rahel, “Where did you find her?” This was Yosi, Rahel said. “Where will I get a block of stone large enough!” he cried out.

All around the courtyard were tiny workshops, a few with looms, others where sheets of brass were being tapped into ornaments. The deserted building had been obtained by Professor Schatz, the great Jewish painter from Roumania, Rahel explained; he was reviving Jewish culture. There he was in the weaving shop, and Leah saw a bareheaded man with a wild beard, like Yosi’s statue of Elijah, except for a large stomach. The professor embraced them all, an enthusiast, a lover of everyone. It would be wonderful to have a chalutza learning stonecutting—Leah was just the one for it. He was building his new Bezalel Art School and Museum on a hill outside the Old City; a great new city of Jerusalem would grow up around his new museum! Reuven too—yes, he needed workers for the walls! “Come tomorrow!” And he beamed on them, and hurried off.

Upstairs, Rahel stuck her head into one door after another, all of them opening onto the balcony, to find places for Reuven and Leah. The building teemed. Meanwhile they rested in Avner’s room, where there was the usual bed of planks resting on kerosene tins, an orange crate made into a bookcase, and on the floor a large mat with a water jug.

In the yard a soup cauldron cooked, and in no time Leah was quite at home, helping with the soup. During the day she sat among the chevreh, chipping away at the golden-hued blocks of stone; though the Yemenite, who was called Abadiah, had at first balked at teaching a woman, she had simply taken her place, and now he was her friend. Professor Schatz passed, and beamed on her. Reuven was already at work on the new Bezalel building, carrying stones up to the masons. He was even to receive a wage, as Professor Schatz had just returned from a money-raising trip abroad.

It was like the kvutsa again. In the talkative evenings a circle of chaverim sat on the mat in Rahel’s room, next to Avner’s; on her mat was a samovar and she poured tea for everyone; after endless discussions and song-singing, Avner would go back to his own room, others would depart, Reuven would silently leave Leah at her own door and go to the chamber he shared with a half dozen chalutzim. He had understood finally about Rahel and Avner—what was there to understand? But Leah saw that he was unable to keep his eyes from the girl.

For herself, Yosi the sculptor had got her to pose for him, in the afternoons when her stonecutting stopped; he was modeling her in clay, a life-size figure with arms bare, and his hands seemed more often on her than on his clay. Though half her size, Yosi was unabashed. Where he got his energy no one knew, but four times a day he would disappear into his cavelike chamber, and after the door had been closed for a time, you would see a girl flitting out. Nurses! he bragged. From the nearby French hospital. He even hinted at nuns.

A month went by. Professor Schatz again ran out of money and halted his building operations. There was no work to be had in Jerusalem, and Reuven was miserable; what was he doing here in the city—he had come to labor on the soil! Luckily, a message came from Dovidl in the Galilee, calling Avner to a meeting. Why not go along? And there Reuven and Leah found their destiny.

They walked by way of Samaria, and there they saw another land, a land filled with olive groves and flocks on green hillsides; no Jewish settlements were here, though Avner halted them at one effendi’s house where a Russian Jew named Shertok had been installed with his family to manage the estate. Music was heard, they had brought in a piano, and the youngest boy, called Yehvda, was a genius on the violin. A real Jewish family, alone among the Arabs.

Two young daughters wanted to go off with them, while the eldest son—with the name of Moshe—small, slight and witty, jested with Leah that she must divide herself in two, and one of her should stay here!

On the third day they came out on the vast flat plain of Jezreel, with the morning dew rising off the swampland and the stretches of tangled underbrush. All morning they followed a wagon trail toward the soft-rounded breastlike mountain of Tabor. Before nightfall they managed to reach the settlement of Mescha, a walled enclosure of some forty houses—how far from everyone it seemed! Yet here were the real Jewish farmers they had heard of; the center lane of the village was filled with cattle being brought in from pasture by little boys with sticks and dogs, and as they watched the cattle turning off each to its barn, Leah heard her name called. A stocky young laborer with a large head—Dovidl himself. In these few months he had already become the real thing, Dovidl declared, a plowman no less—why torture his head with politics!

Though this was also one of the Baron’s settlements, here there were no Jewish effendi. Dovidl’s own employer labored side by side with him in the fields, a real peasant, and the farmer even refused to pay land-rent to the Baron’s agent!

They ate their supper at a large round table in the farmhouse, the housewife serving a chicken soup such as you would not find in all the rest of Eretz Yisroel, while Dovidl overwhelmed them with talk of yields of barley, of fodder-crops, of mules and oxen, as though he had been here all his life. Reuven was loquacious as never before, not shy, not even refusing when the farmer’s wife, exclaiming, “Oh, a vegetarian,” insisted on making a special milk-soup with dumplings for him.

Of the farmer, Yehuda Shepshovitch, Reuven asked a thousand questions, and Shepshovitch had a way of replying as though each problem were nothing, you found a way to overcome it. Naturally, this settlement flourished. Why? Because they bought virtually nothing from outside, they did not seek to get rich and raise crops for gold, like the orange growers, the pardessanim; here, they grew what they needed, vegetables even four times a year—fodder, wheat, barley, the beans called fuhl; they had geese, chickens —in sum, a true farmer’s life.

“What milk!” Reuven cried.

“And what cucumbers!” Leah added. Could she take along some seeds? Though where she would plant them she didn’t yet know.

As to the milk, Shepshovitch had journeyed to Holland last year and brought back a prize pair of cattle. Never again for him the scrawny black cows of the land. His yield was three times as high and much richer in fat. His bull was now breeding to the little black Arab cows and in a few years the whole of Mescha would flow with milk. And as for honey—taste it!

Seeing her brother so filled with admiration, Leah asked, could they perhaps find work here in Mescha? Nu—Shepshovitch ticked off the names of the villagers; this one had sons, and that one already had a helper … With Dovidl, he discussed various prospects in the nearby villages of Yavniel and Sejera.

Alongside Sejera, a training farm had been started, so farmhands were now plentiful, but Shepshovitch would keep his ears open as far as Yavniel was concerned. If Dovidl said Reuven was a good worker, then a good worker he must be!

They walked out into the open compound. In the Jaffa area the villages had been spread out, but here each house faced the compound, forming a kind of community. Behind each house was its yard and stable, and the rear wall of each stable was connected on each side by the continuous surrounding wall so as to make an enclosure of the entire village, open only at the gate.

Just then an Arab rode up, sitting a slender-legged brown mare. He sat taller than most Arabs and was, oddly, blue-eyed. “Our watchman,” Dovidl remarked with an accent of distaste. “They’re not even Arabs. Circassians from the Caucasus, that settled here the devil knows why. They have their own village. You find everything, in this mishmash of a country!”

The watchman wore crisscrossed bandoliers and carried a long rifle. “Our protector!” Dovidl spat in the dust, a rural manner he had already picked up in his transformation to a man of the soil. Exchanging greetings with the farmers around the compound, the watchman rode out to circle the village wall, while a couple of grown sons closed and bolted the gate.

Was there trouble in this area, then?

“Trouble?” Dovidl shrugged. “He makes a few rounds and rides home and goes to sleep.” The Circassians had been given a watchman’s contract for the three or four settlements in this area, but it was all blackmail. True, there was a nasty pair of bandits, sons of a half-Bedouin who called himself the Sheikh of Fuleh, a collection of huts in the middle of the plain inhabited by tribesmen from the time the Turks had built the railway line. They had been brought over from across the Jordan to keep materials from being pilfered. Some had settled there, though yellow fever was bad. Those two sons of Fuleh had good horses; they were known throughout Galilee for preying on travelers or running off with livestock if they caught a few cattle grazing away from their herd. But such raiders never ventured inside the settlements, Dovidl went on. The contract with the Circassian watchmen was nothing but tribute, arranged by the Baron’s representatives in their compromising way, and Dovidl for one wanted to see it ended.

Suddenly this diminutive farmhand, in the oversize pair of boots that Shepshovitch had lent him, was the cocky strike-leader again. Could anyone really believe that Dovidl would remain here, a simple plowman? “We’ll soon change things!” he declared, with a touch of conspiracy in his tone, to Leah and Reuven. For though these Galilee farmers were better than the planters of the coastal villages, where was the real difference in outlook? Had Jews come here to continue the fearfulness of their old ghetto mentality, paying bribes to goyim so as not to be attacked? The first requirement of manhood, of a people, was to be able to stand up for itself, and this Dovidl declared was the new spirit that must come to the Yishuv before real progress could be made.

He was talking through Leah to Reuven, who began to feel uneasy. This farmer, Shepshovitch, had seemed an admirable man to him. What was there to change?

Just then there came a rattle of wagon-wheels outside the gate; Dovidl himself hurried to open it, hailing four men in a mule-drawn cart. One Reuven and Leah at once recognized—he had been at a workers’ conference in Ramla, where they had stopped on the way to Jerusalem, and had spoken often and with fire. Galil, he called himself; the son of an enormously wealthy lumber merchant of Minsk named Gewirtz, he had interrupted his law studies to become a social revolutionary, and then been won over to Zionism. Now he was at the training farm in Sejera, not far from here. Two others on the wagon were brothers; even in the evening light they looked fierce, with mustaches like double-pointed daggers that reached beyond their cheeks. These two were called Zeira—Shabbatai and Aaron, Kurdish Jews from Turkestan. Even there, it seemed, there were Zionists. They now were from Sejera, from the village itself, where they had a homestead. The fourth was quite young, a boy called Herschel from the training farm. The ride had been without incident, Galil said, and the whole lot of them at once went off with Dovidl, who made a motion with his head to Reuven to come along, and shrugged at Leah, excluding her.

So they were up to something, the fine chaverim, and even they, with Dovidl and all their “equality,” were excluding women!

What they were up to, she found out quickly enough from the eldest Shepshovitch daughter Genya, a placid, buxom sixteen-year-old who, unfortunately, Leah had seen at first glance, was not the type for Reuven, a vain girl and a gossip. The men were forming a secret society, Genya said; they wanted to replace the Circassians as watchmen, they wanted to ride around on horses, but they didn’t even possess a revolver between them, much less a horse. Besides, the village leaders would never agree to give them the contract unless the Baron’s supervisor for the whole area, the all-powerful Jacques Samuelson, agreed, and Samuelson wouldn’t agree, as he had his own arrangements with the Turkish police chief, the Bimbashi, in Nazareth to keep everything quiet. Her own father, though, might be for it, as he hated everything to do with the Baron and wanted complete independence. And also Dovidl had already stirred up some of the younger lads of Mescha for the scheme. Their secret society called itself Bar Giora after the last defender of Jerusalem against the Romans. They had a fearful secret oath in blood, and not everyone could join—they had tests, and accepted only the bravest.

All this Reuven was learning in Dovidl’s room, a lean-to by the barn, in which there was a cot, a table with a water jug, a chair. A few milking stools had been brought in. On the window ledge Dovidl had his books.

Nine men had gathered, a pair of them from the settlement of Yavniel, farmhands like Dovidl, one of them affecting an Arab keffiyah and fancy boots, something of a loudmouth it turned out—Zev the Hotblood he was called, and he interrupted everyone. The main thing was to show no fear, he kept repeating, show you were strong and fearless, and the bandits would give you a wide berth. He had grown up with Arabs, in the north, in Metulla. Theirs was the ancient code, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. What was the Turkish government to them, they whistled at it. They kept their own laws. Show them you could be strong and determined according to the ancient tribal laws, and they would respect you. A life for a life.

To this, the fierce-looking Zeira brothers cried their approval.

Galil, with a swift, intimate way of talking, interrupted them. “Agreed, we must show strength, and no fear, but even the old laws don’t always demand blood for blood. In many cases payments are made. We are not seeking to start blood-feuds. We must stand for law. Sometimes even the law of the land, instead of tribal laws and the feud.” Once a blood-feud, a ghoum, was begun there would be no end. Between some of the Arab tribes, where a ghoum existed, men were killed on each side, generation after generation. No, if there was a death, their organization must aim to apprehend the killer and bring him to law. Even with the Turks. Once and for all this land must be brought into the world of today. There were Arabs too, in the cities and among the effendi, who would prefer it. “Nevertheless, as you say, we must quickly make known that we can be strong in the old way too. We must be crack shots, each of us. We must outride their best riders. We must win ourselves a name in the whole of Eretz.” He looked to Reuven, as one who already had a name, and Reuven saw that even in the Galilee his angry deed was known. But the thought of turning into a guardsman, riding the rounds at night, did not attract him. —Would they all be guardsmen, he asked, or could they perhaps also make their own settlement?

A thought! Dovidl took this up. A good thought for the future when they were well established. Certain members could stay in the settlement which would be their base, while others went out to guard the villages. Their wives could tend the poultry and the dairy.

“Wait!” Galil brought them back to earth. “We don’t even have wives!” This was true, except for the Zeiras, who were married and indeed had their own farm in Sejera. Concretely, now, how were they to obtain their first watchman’s contract?

“Why not here in Mescha?” Dovidl suggested.

The local settlers would never agree to dismiss the Circassians.

“We can chase off the Circassians!” Zev the Hotblood offered. But Dovidl had already thought of a plan. The watchman, after putting in his appearance, each night went back to his sleep in Kfar Kana. So then someone had only to let a mule out of a stable through the small gate in the back wall. Dovidl himself would set up a howl, “Thieves!” The settlers would wake, rush to their barns, discover a mule was missing, shout for their watchman—and where would they find him?

“Asleep in Kfar Kana!” The Hotblood laughed, won over.

Whereupon they themselves, the Bar Giora, would offer their services as their watchmen who would live right in Mescha itself.

So it was agreed. The intimate-voiced Galil, looking at Zev, reminded everyone that all that passed between them was secret. There were some who had been admitted tonight who were here for the first time and had not yet been inducted into the society. If all were ready, the induction would proceed.

Zev was the first; leaping up from his stool, he took his place before the table. Dovidl reached back to his books on the window ledge, drew forth a Bible and placed it on the table within the glow of the kerosene lamp. From somewhere, Reuven saw, a huge pistol had appeared, and Avner placed it now beside the Bible.

In sudden solemnity, Zev put one hand on the Bible, the other on the gun. It was Shabbatai Zeira, standing alongside of Galil, who administered the oath.

“Say after me: In blood and fire, Judea fell, in blood and fire, Judea will arise.”

Smacking his lips, Zev almost shouted the words.

In Reuven, dismay was deepening. Now the boy called Herschel from the Sejera training farm repeated the oath, his voice going high at the end.

“Reuven?” Startled, he heard Galil calling his name. Galil looked so young himself, his locks falling across his forehead. In a way it was all like what children did, making vows of blood. Yet something in Reuven held back. A swift rider he was not, and he had never held a gun in his hand. Blood and fire. The words rumbled in his head. No, he could not. In labor, in sweat, Judea must arise. In decency, in love.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I—it’s a very serious thing. I—I’m not ready.”

He felt Dovidl’s hand on his shoulder. “We wanted you to know about us. If the time comes, we will speak to each other.” Of a sudden Reuven felt Dovidl was something more than he had judged, not only a clever one, but a man who saw into your heart. Half-babbling, Reuven added, “You know, if there is a need, you know you can count on me.” Just what he meant, he hardly understood himself.

Early in the morning, as Leah emerged into the yard amidst the chicken-cackling and the smell of compost, an arm went around her waist from behind and a voice laughed, “Don’t pull up any trees!” It was Handsome Moshe! What was he doing here? He had come for supplies, the kvutsa was beyond, over the last ridge, on the shore of Kinnereth. The kvutsa? The same, not the same. Maxl the Hardhead was there, and a few new ones.

“Nahama?” she asked.

Moshe grinned. “No.”

But Araleh had come, with Sara Zuckerman. The kvutsa had received a contract from the Keren Kayemeth to plant a whole tract of land. “Come back to us”—to him.

And presently Reuven and Leah were aboard Moshe’s wagon, Leah sitting next to Moshe on the seat. Suffused with excitement, she hardly heard Moshe’s explanation; her hands she had to hold clasped in her lap to keep from reaching for his curly hair. So much had she longed for him, without admitting it to herself.

Araleh and Saraleh had actually been married—hadn’t she heard, there in Jerusalem? Married, and by a rabbi, with a great feast in the Zuckerman house in Jaffa. Old Zuckerman, who spent his life in the shul, had complained that he had always known that such would be the result of his wife’s harboring every barefoot chalutz in the land. But every hungry mouth had been stuffed with roast goose and kishkes! And now, with nine chalutzim in the kvutsa’s new place here, and Saraleh the only woman—she needed help.

“Oho, so that’s what you want me for,” Leah said.

“No, not only!” Moshe dropped his voice so it was for her alone. She felt a flush in her very limbs.

“What are you planting?” Reuven asked from behind.

“Just now, eucalyptus trees, against malaria.”

As the mules labored to the top of the ridge, Moshe pulled the wagon to a halt, for them to behold the land. And just as Eretz had possessed him on the dunes beyond Jaffa, at this moment Kinnereth entered into the heart of Reuven Chaimovitch. The glowing sea, slender and long, with a billowing curve like the gown of a bride, reclined before him. The bride his young manhood longed for, by her side he would pass his life, and she would give him peace.

His sister too beheld the beauty of Kinnereth, the swelling form like the harp of King David that gave it its name; yet profoundly as Leah felt this moment of beauty, she felt it also through its effect on her brother. Her heart knew what was taking place in Reuven. And a touch of apprehension arose in her, for there is danger in feeling any love so instantly and deeply. As in that moment, in that night of dancing, when she had felt him falling in love with Rahel, who, he knew, was already Avner’s.

“Beautiful,” declared Handsome Moshe, but there were those who recognized beauty without being possessed by it.

“Beautiful,” Leah agreed.

Moshe pointed out to them the lands of the kvutsa, but only a wild, uncultivated area could be seen, with the Jordan River lying there twisted like a great hairpin. It was not until the wagon was winding down near the level part of the rutted lane that they made out a structure, a small abandoned khan with a cubicle atop the roof. This was the kvutsa’s abode.

Araleh’s Sara ran out to meet the wagon and when she saw another woman she burst into tears.—Oh Leah! She had been so alone here.—Still sniffling, she demanded first of all the quinine Moshe had fetched. They had run short, and two of the chaverim were down with kadahat, she explained to Leah, hurrying with her into the house.

The sick men lay on their boards against the wall in the dim gloomy room lit only by a beam of light from the small square window in the thick wall. With their gaunt stubble-covered faces Leah barely recognized them, but there was Shimek, already returned from Russia—his mother had not been so sick after all. His dulled eyes lighted and he mumbled the blessing for guests, “Beruchim haba’im.” The other was a good worker known as Tibor the Jester, who had only stayed with them a few days in the old kvutsa. “Leah is here!” he cried. “With so much flesh it can’t be a vision!”

She had picked yellow wildflowers when they stopped, and now at once found a little jug and set the flowers on the sill of the small window, in the light.

* * * *

It was scarcely a month since the kvutsa had come to this place, but how the members had altered! In their hut near Rehovot they had been close to civilization, among townsfolk, with a coming and going, and several other villages nearby, but here the little group was alone in a wilderness. At night, Saraleh said, not even another lamp could be seen. Saraleh didn’t stop chattering.—Ooy! she was so glad to see another girl! She wanted to hear all kinds of things that men never talked about—yet in her eagerness she didn’t give Leah a chance to say a word. It was difficult for her and Araleh here, she confided, because they were the only couple. Their happiness—she confessed she was ashamed before the other boys who were so alone. Because of being a couple, she and Araleh had been given the little room on the roof to themselves, while down here all the men were crowded. “You can stay in our room with me, and Araleh will sleep outside on the roof, it’s so warm here,” she offered, but Leah hastily assured her, no, she would put up the usual curtain in the room below.

Here, Leah’s romance with Moshe took place. There were no daughters of grove owners to distract him, and among the other men it seemed stolidly accepted that she was for Moshe. Even Reuven seemed to be waiting for it to happen, as though on his own part he had found his love, the Kinnereth, while she had come to her man.

Struggling with the outdoor cooking fire that smudged her cheeks and smarted her eyes, Leah caught herself worrying about how her hair would look should Moshe come by. And when the whole kvutsa except Saraleh went out to the fields, Leah at first walked between her brother and Moshe, and then, when Reuven got into an argument with Max Wilner about where to plant oats and where to plant wheat, she walked ahead with Moshe alone.

The air at night was a warm balm caressing the skin. One night in a nest of high grass by the shore she lay in his arms, with only their clothes between them, and Leah’s thoughts were in turmoil. Just as Rahel was with Avner, should she not become Moshe’s complete chavera, his woman? Yet she saw her mother’s face, and even her aunts’, and would she herself want her younger sister Dvora to do such a thing? Entire generations of behest and condemnation seemed to weigh against the honesty and simplicity that should rule between a man and a woman in their desire, so that, still, she lifted his hand away from her clothing.

One thing Leah happily noticed was how, just now, she no longer felt the largeness and fleshiness of her body but felt feminine and delicate like Saraleh. But then suddenly there would intrude the desolate words of poor stricken Nahama, “Beware, he is a heartbreaker.” The words would not go away. And another image assailed Leah, the image of her Moshe making light with that pardessan’s daughter in Rehovot, even lying with her—not simply like this, but more completely. It was lewd to imagine such things. Yet a sudden wanton sense of power arose in her; that village girl could not succeed, could not hold Moshe, but she herself could be the woman really to hold this man. Poor Nahama had not been strong enough, either. But might it not truly be that he was destined for herself? And Leah asked herself, how could she know such feelings—she was an ignorant girl, not yet eighteen—though she had read Anna Karenina, where there was such a man as Moshe.

And also the greatest curiosity of all now urged her. To know what it really was with a man. But this was unworthy; not merely to satisfy this would she begin!

They were staring into each other’s eyes; his eyes were warm, liquid, darkly luminous like the waters of the Kinnereth, and he pressed his mouth on hers again, and turned so his weight lay on her and she felt his manhood, as she called it to herself, it was throbbing, through the cloth. But Araleh had married Saraleh, and in her girlish palavering—womanly now—Saraleh had told Leah, Ooy, she had been such a bourgeoisie, she had not been able like a free woman to bring herself to it before marriage; even though she had felt how Araleh suffered, yet she had made him wait. With this, Saraleh would suck in her lower lip, peering at Leah but not openly asking her whether she had already yielded to Moshe.

No, it must not be a yielding but a meeting of two beings, Leah told herself, and “Not yet, not yet,” she groaned, managing to turn so that his body was off her body and the throb against her was gone. Oh, why could she not be a complete companion to him, like Rahel to Avner?

A wagonload of eucalyptus seedlings arrived from Chedera, and at dawn Leah arose to go with the men to plant them along the muddy, flooded Jordan banks. Not only did she feel the hollow urge in her hands to be planting, but now her entire body de manded to cleave alongside Moshe wherever he went. Since a woman could not stand for long in her skirts in the muddy water, Leah took Reuven’s other pair of trousers and went behind her curtain. If Tateh should hear of this, brother and sister jested, a woman going forth in men’s clothing, a sin of sins! But Leah could not pull Reuven’s trousers closed and had to hand them back. Then came a roar of remarks from the men, with Tibor Kalisher declaring that the first test of a chavera must be whether she could wear the trousers of a chaver. Of a brother one did not speak! And another pair of trousers was flung in to her. Leah herself had patched them—Moshe’s. In a tumult of confused feelings the big girl drew them on, flushing as she closed the buttons; it was as though what she had not been able to go through by the Kinnereth was by this now foredoomed, consented.

When she came out, to Tibor’s banter—he was up and working now, but Shimek still lay ill and offered his boots—she didn’t dare look at Moshe. At least she had on her own blouse! But while she lifted her arms to tie a kerchief around her hair, Leah felt Moshe’s eyes on her as though he too knew it had all been decided. She felt his gaze on her breasts, upraised in the movement, and as her nipples, become stiff and aching, pressed against her shift, she knew with startling clarity that this must be the aching in the stiffness of a man.

—Emancipated and modern as they were, could they really entirely free themselves from those backward ideas of sin, Reuven wondered, as he walked behind Moshe and his sister in the trousers. A love affair was certain now, and to their mother he had promised that he would watch over his young sister, and what did he himself know of love? Work, work to exhaustion was the only way to rid himself of the image of Avner’s Rahel that tormented him every night. Even when he lay down, with his body, his very bones, dissolving from exhaustion, still the sexual torment came, as though his sexual organ was not part of that body but a fierce adversary that waited untired for the night, perversely strong when the rest of the body was exhausted, and would not let him sleep.

Moshe—who really knew Moshe? He did not boast of his women among the chevreh, but only gave a wise smile when certain names were mentioned. Yet could one say to a chaver, stay away from my sister? To speak intimately to Leah, Reuven knew, was now his duty, but this had become dreadfully difficult, as though she were an older and not a younger sister. Perhaps—walking ahead of him the two of them looked so fitting together—perhaps this could be a good love for her with Moshe? Reuven wanted Leah to have the joy of love as he knew she wanted it for him; she was always pointing to girls for him. And also, since they all believed in the freedom of love, how could he raise questions when it was his own sister and with their own chaver?

So as he and Leah were laboring close to one another planting the slender tree-stalks in the mud under the knee-deep water, at one movement their eyes met and both began to speak, almost together, “Reuven” she began, flushing, while Reuven said, “Are you in love with him, Leah?”

“I want terribly to be close to him all the time,” she gasped in a half-wail, sucking in her lower lip, like Saraleh.

All at once Reuven felt an overwhelming wish for their mother to be here and take from him this burden, take care of her daughter. He straightened up and they looked at each other, and a girlish, somewhat silly smile came over his sister’s large round face. At least there was no estrangement between them, Reuven felt, with some relief. But what should he now say to her? Forbid her? “Leahleh, you know all that is said about Moshe. He runs after every woman he sees.”

“I know,” she wailed, and Leah’s simple, good face had a contortion as before tears. “And I know there’s no one else for him to look at here, so even a big horse like me—”

“No, no!” Reuven declared almost sternly, “Leah, you are beautiful! You are a big beautiful girl!” His voice dropped a bit lower. “I have to admit the two of you looked handsome together.” And he felt a pang of guilt. It was as though he had just given his sanction to his sister.

If it was to happen she would have wanted it to happen here on their own piece of earth in a beautiful way. But when the restless urge was on her at night and she felt Moshe sleepless too, on the other side of the hanging, it could not happen in that way, for everyone would know they were slipping out, her brother would know, she would not be able to face them all.

Not yet. It must happen perhaps, but not before the eyes of all.

* * * *

When their first crop, a stand of fodder, was cut and brought in, and the intoxicating scent from their hillock of fresh hay filled the yard, Saraleh picked up a song she had heard somewhere, about the haystack, the goren.—“In the goren, in the goren”—the song went—in the goren, couples made their nests, and passing by you could not see them but you could hear their twittering.

Once each week on his donkey there came Gedalia the Carrier, a shriveled, parched-looking Sephardi who brought not only the post but messages gathered along his route, and small purchases he had been asked to make such as medicines, or needles and thread. This time he brought a letter from home, from Mameh. Her brother Simha still wanted them all to come to America, she wrote. If things were not well, Mameh knew Reuven would never say so, but Mameh counted on her, Leah, to be sensible and remember that whatever happened, they could always come home to gather new strength. Gidon would soon be Bar Mitzvah; he had grown. He rode horses and was strong. Dvora too had become a young woman and longed for her older sister.

How homesick she was for them! No, not too much for Cherezinka, but for the family, her father too, ununderstanding as he was. Leah longed for the sight of Tateh with his fringes dangling over his trousers.

For Moshe, Gedalia had a note given him in Sejera. On Thursday, when the kvutsa usually sent the wagon to Yaviel for the week’s supply of bread and other things, Galil would be there for a meeting. It would be well if Moshe brought along Reuven, too.

“Go, go along with them, Leah,” Saraleh urged, “if only for a change of faces.” So on Thursday morning she put on her white blouse and mounted the wagon.

It was on that ride, as he handled the mules, that Reuven fell to brooding, while the two of them, Leah and Moshe, sat behind on the wagon-bottom. The certainty came to Reuven that the whole family must come here, or else his young brothers and sisters would be lost to Eretz, they would surely at some time go to America. But his father, in the middle of life, what could he do here, what use would he be? A thought had been forming. There were rumors that new villages were soon to be established. A combination had been made between the two great Barons who had been settling Jews on land, Baron de Rothschild here in Eretz, and Baron de Hirsch in America and Argentina. Millions had been spent by Baron de Hirsch to transport Russian Jews to Argentina instead of to Eretz. But now these funds would be used in Eretz as well. And in the new combination there would be a different atmosphere. No longer would supervisors peer into every family’s pot. The new villages would be for families pledged to work their own parcels of land; the Zionist office was even to have a hand in selecting the candidates. Perhaps in this way the whole family could come. For himself, though Reuven believed in the principle of the kvutsa, in sharing all and not owning anything, there had nevertheless come problems. Each day, he had difficulties with Max. All their ideas for developing the land were divergent. Every idea Reuven wanted to try was “a dream,” “needless,” “premature,” a waste of their scant funds and energies. Though Reuven demanded of himself that he should live by the decisions of the group, he had come to think of Max as short-sighted, domineering, even hateful. It was wrong to feel this way toward a chaver, but what could he do? And besides, was not a family something like a kvutsa? Everyone sharing everything? Even if he had difficulties getting along with Tateh it would be no worse than with Max. Thus, his plan was forming.

The scent from the haystack behind each house enveloped them as they arrived. Those from Sejera were not yet there. Leah sat with the wife and daughters of the mukhtar, Yona Kolodnitzer, in whose house she was to sleep. For a while they sat on the doorstep talking idly, and when the mother and girls went in, Leah sat on, her whole being filled with a kind of intoxication, as though she sensed the breathing of every infant in the village, every calf in the stables, and she knew she would not pass this night without being changed.

In the wagon from Sejera there was also a young woman. Tiny, wearing glasses. Leah at once knew this must be the famous Nadina the Firebrand. She had just returned from a voyage abroad on some mysterious mission, and already one could see that there was something between her and Galil. Nadina too was well-educated, the daughter of a wealthy Jew of Smolensk. A social revolutionist as a young girl, she had led a strike in her father’s factory. It was Nadina, people said, who had smuggled in from Germany the pistol used in the assassination of Plehve, the “minister of pogroms.” When an informer betrayed her revolutionary cell, she had luckily again been in Berlin, and for her own safety had been lured to Palestine by the pretended sickness of her brother, a Zionist, who was an engineer in Haifa. Then the land itself had made a Zionist of Nadina. It was whispered that she was the one woman accepted as a member of the secret Bar Giora.

As Leah approached, it was Nadina who cried out, as though not she but Leah were the famous one. “At last we meet,” she cried.

Much was to be done. From the Bar Giora had come the first watchmen, riding the rounds. They had received the watchman’s contract at Mescha and had formed a cooperative called the Shomer. But Galil wanted to organize the whole Yishuv to be able to defend itself. Presently Shabbatai Zeira galloped up in full regalia on the Shomer’s magnificent white stallion. Zeira wore a kind of Cossack coat, with not only bandoliers but belts of bullets, and he flourished the longest rifle ever seen.

The steed was the only one owned by the Shomer. It had been purchased with the last dinar each chaver could muster, and even this would not have been half enough but that Shabbatai’s wife had produced a small secret hoard of napoleons that her mother had given her on her marriage. Shabbatai Zeira himself had gone to Damascus and bought the mount, and when the farmers of Mescha had seen that the men were equipped with such a fine steed, they had finally broken their contract with the napping Circassians of Kfar Kana, though the dismissed watchman of Kfar Kana grumbled and made threats.

Galil led the discussion. The entire Yishuv must be protected. Isolated points such as the kvutsa at Kinnereth, for example, must be able to defend themselves. Weapons would be needed.

As a start, Nadina had brought back a small sum from her voyage to Europe for purchases. And from a knitting bag she carried Nadina produced a six-chamber revolver, handing it to Moshe. Presently, Galil took Moshe and Reuven aside to teach them the use of the weapon. Despite his principle of pacifism, Reuven agreed that to be able to defend was necessary. For defense, even women should learn.

In the dark, as they emerged from the meeting, everyone was suddenly gone, Galil disappearing with Nadina, Reuven going to sleep at Zev’s. And as Leah walked slowly toward the Kolodnitzer house, Moshe came alongside her, making talk for a moment, and presently she walked with him, as one drugged, toward the goren.

It was as though she were explaining to her mother: in your day you walked forward to stand under the wedding canopy; as you said, you had only once before seen Tateh, when the matchmaker brought him to the house, and here I am walking to the goren with a man I have worked with side by side in the fields, a chaver. Is this worse? It is as though my whole life was planned for me to come here and join myself to him on the fodder reaped from our ancient earth.

So her thoughts mounted, and as they fitted themselves into their own little nest in the soft hillock of produce, Leah treasured to herself each small movement in her bridal night as though each movement between them were a picture she would keep in the album of her heart.

But then the sensations were so rapid, sensations like fish darting through cupped hands, she could not hold them, and she still had to sweep away traces of shame in herself. A great inner triumph she felt, too, that she was daring to rise beyond all girlish fears, all ghetto admonitions, and to be a free woman, to be like Nadina, like Rahel, and to love. His mouth was so completely joined to hers that the sensation in her lips was one with the sensation below. It was all one. It was how you saw God, she suddenly felt, their joining, and the way of creation, and the melting together of the universe in a single unity, love, God, one flesh. This is my beloved and I am his. Why was her mind thinking? Let her only feel, only feel. Love.

Then he lay back. She still glowed, and tried to keep out any ignorant questions, and so as not to ask them Leah turned and buried her face on his chest, her lips on the fragrant warm skin. Presently Moshe’s arm came around her and stroked her hair, and she heard from him the word that sanctified what she had done. “My beloved.”

Moshe was not insincere. He had spilled, to be fair; his very first girl in his student days in Odessa had insisted that he should in this way protect her, and he still considered it the safest way for himself as well. This time the little spell of after-melancholy had hardly made itself felt, submerged in the triumph of a virginity. Perhaps Leah would indeed be the one, the one who would com plete and hold him. For until this time, even with a virginity, as for example with the sweaty Nahama and her fears and tears, the after-melancholy had taken seat for long spells.

The largeness of Leah, the strong bones, fitted to his body. He had not felt so good since Katya, a student revolutionist, a real Russian girl who, he later comprehended, had almost commanded him to her because she wanted to feel how it was with a Jew.

Moshe was from Poltava; his father, an estate manager, had sent him to a cousin in Odessa to study medicine. He had not taken to it and had tried to read philosophy, somehow managing a year, but it was life that absorbed him. From childhood he had known he was a favored one, growing tall, with an appealing brightness in his face. All the mothers clucked out the same word, “chenevdik,” which meant that something in him sparkled to them. In adolescence the girls turned their heads to look at him and hurried away giggling. Moshe was fine with boys too, a champion hand-wrestler, and he liked everybody. Still he was somewhat uncertain when the fellows turned to him as a leader. In Odessa his cousin, a far better philosophy student than Moshe, let him lead their little circle, but somehow Moshe usually got from his cousin a feeling as to which way he should lead.

In their student-circle discussions, Hegel and Marx were a bore to him, though he could repeat the essentials and was for the revolution.

When they turned into activists, Moshe was given the leadership of a small unit distributing leaflets on the Odessa docks. In his unit was Katya. Moshe found himself more and more possessed by the need to be in the company of girls and one of these, a married woman, took him during the day to her bed. Despite their free-love philosophy Katya showed jealousy and left him, taking up with his cousin. The married girl dropped him because her husband became suspicious, but by then Moshe had learned to detect the already experienced and willing ones from the way they looked at him. Still, arid spells happened, and a few times he even went with the lads to prostitutes.

When the dockers’ strike came and arrests were made, Moshe had luckily already left that circle because his cousin had pulled him to a meeting of the Jewish Self-defense group. It was after Kishinev. A brilliant young journalist whose articles they all read, Vladimir Jabotinsky, had addressed the meeting, stirring up a great fervor, and Moshe found himself volunteering with his bespectacled cousin to carry clubs and defend the entry to a Jewish courtyard. The boys selected him as captain.

It turned out they were all Zionists. Moshe had never paid much attention to Zionism, but now his cousin converted him, and also one of the Young Zionist girls took to him. He had never yet known a Jewish girl who would be completely free. Basheh was quite short, with thick legs, and it irked him that she always wanted to walk with him in the street. Alongside him she looked a dwarf. Yet Basheh had her own room and she would prepare tasty things for him. And—where she had learned them he did not know—Basheh sought out all sorts of lewd tricks to arouse and please him. It was all getting somewhat dangerous, Moshe feared, for how would he have the heart to hurt her, to break off—and also she did not want him to spill, she clutched him fiercely to her at the climactic moment, she might even become pregnant so he would have to marry her.

Four boys were going to Palestine. His father, and even his mother, urged him to go, for they still trembled that Moshe would be arrested. His cousin wanted to go but was determined first to finish his course in medicine. The girl, Basheh, just then was acting worried and would not discuss the reason. So in a way Moshe had fled.

But he told himself he was nevertheless sincere in his Zionism and Socialism. Once in the land Moshe felt wholly a chalutz. As to the girls—here it was not so easy; the chalutzoth were few, and like Nahama with her mustache, were not as attractive as the daughters of the grove-owners who looked at him with lighted eyes but not with that other look, the look of the experienced and willing. In his longing to be in the company of attractive women he wasted many hours walking with these virtuous daughters, holding hands, reciting verses of Lermontov. They kissed tenderly, even passionately. There was that sweet one in Rehovot, daughter of a well-off planter—Moshe had even thought he might marry that one, but then how could he face the scorn of his comrades? Marrying a pardessan’s daughter! But now, with Leah, things might turn out quite good.

For Leah there followed many glowing days. Her brother knew at once, she was certain, and looked more tenderly at her. Even so, she could not speak to Reuven of it as she might have to a sister who divined what had happened. Yet because it had hap pened for her, Leah wished more and more strongly that it would happen for Reuven, wished that she could help him find someone, and with Saraleh she went over and over the names of virtually every chalutza in the land, perhaps to invite this or that one to visit the kvutsa?

Saraleh had sensed about Leah at once, and with her at least Leah could now exchange profound womanly insights. The whole kvutsa too soon understood and accepted the thing that had happened, accepted it as long expected, and with true comradely decency—no one made remarks. When sharing out the food, she had to restrain herself from giving bigger portions to Moshe, though after all he was a larger man and needed more nourishment! But Saraleh confessed that in her turns at serving she felt the same impulse for Araleh, telling herself he was the hardest worker. And they laughed happily together.

It was strange to Leah that, although younger and a girl, it was she who came to know physical love before her brother. But Reuven did not appear unhappy. On the Sabbath he had started the habit of going off by himself seeking for various plants that were mentioned in the Bible. Or sometimes, climbing to the Arab village, Dja’adi, examining their crops in the field, he even managed to talk a bit with the fellaheen—Arabic was not far from Hebrew—and would bring back samples of their wheat, kernels that were small and poor—he said they suffered from a blight. Reuven collected one strain and another and planted the samples in little squares. From across the Kinnereth, on the heights, the wheat was excellent.

Thus on the Sabbath Reuven would leave Leah with Moshe. Their arms around each other’s waist, they strolled along the shore of the Kinnereth; the whole shoreline became their bed, and through the reeds they would gaze out at the little fishing boats that sometimes came down this far from Tiberias. Leah made Moshe see how graceful was the movement of the fishermen when they cast their nets.

It was Araleh who suggested that they too catch fish, at least for their own table, but Max Wilner as usual was opposed, on the calculation that investment in a boat was not justified. The argument raged for two night-sittings and became acrimonious when Saraleh offered the point that they could also use the boat for pleasure. Were they here for pleasures? Max sneered. At this barb Saraleh burst into tears, Araleh got angry, and Leah for the first time felt that a hidden bitterness was in the men, even in Max, for having to live without women.

Somehow Araleh secured a small half-broken boat which he patched and caulked after his working hours; he had traded a pair of Saraleh’s hose for it to an Arab fisherman, and one moonlit evening the married couple took the boat out a distance on the water, and sat there quietly. They were still keeping to themselves the knowledge that Saraleh was pregnant; only to Leah had she told the secret, under the strictest promise that not even Reuven, not even Moshe, would be told until Araleh agreed. A woman simply had to confide in another woman, and this her husband understood. But they were perplexed. A baby, in a kvutsa? What problems this would bring! Leah imitated Max Wilner tightening his lips. “You should have first brought it up for discussion. It is not in the plan. We are not yet ready for such luxuries.”

Araleh’s little vessel meanwhile belonged to all, and on another night Moshe and Leah, lying on its bottom, drifted under the moon. The boat fitted like a seashell around them, Leah whispered, and then it rocked gently with their clasped movement. And this time, this time something happened within herself that came as an overwhelming surprise, as though an enormous wave rose up inside her and carried her on its crest to an infinite pinnacle and then sweetly ebbed her down. She gasped, she was in awe at such joy. Moshe held her fiercely, exultantly, and Leah knew what she felt was at last like what the man felt. And at the same moment Moshe had given his seed in her, let happen whatever might happen. And Moshe did not turn away afterward nor did she feel that instant of strange misery in him; even in his voice to her a change had come. It was not as though, in that mysterious unspoken struggle of mating that went on between a man and woman even in love, Moshe had given in, but as though he had admitted to himself, this was she, he need seek for no other. Leah was content.

Then came the day when Reuven pronounced the wheat ready for cutting. That night he hardly slept, and he was up before the others, stoning his scythe, and one for Leah as well. The entire kvutsa went out to the field, even Saraleh standing in line with the men, though for her a sickle had been provided, as she was not strong enough to hold a scythe and besides everyone understood now that she was pregnant, though the problem had not yet been brought up.

When tall Moshe cried “Now,” the whole line swung in unison and made a step forward.

The sweat soon came, and songs came; for a time Reuven restrained his step so as to keep in line with the others, but when Moshe moved ahead Reuven swung faster and kept up with him. Now Araleh stepped ahead and the cutting became a bit of a contest. Leah showed them what a woman could do, and kept up with the foremost.

Toward breakfast time, all were nearly in line again, and turning they saw Saraleh, who had gone back, now bringing their food on the donkey cart across the cut field. All the harvesters drew up straight and gazed back on the expanse of their labor. “Ours.” It was an elation. This was not only the grain of the land but the grain of the workers. A new way was being cut across this field, and Max solemnly declared, his face for once shining with pleasure, “Chevreh, we have made history.”

That night in a long sitting they went over their calculations; Max had kept the accounts, and even when the crop was estimated at a low price, it was certain that they had covered the entire loan of the Keren Kayemeth for the mules and seed and their food, and could calculate for their labor a wage one-fourth larger than they might have earned on hire. With enthusiasm Max foresaw how a kvutsa such as theirs could settle on a piece of land such as this, and how they, the workers themselves, without owners and without the Baron’s experts to tell them what to plant and what not to plant, could develop their cooperativa, with their own cattle, their own fowl, how they could enlarge the farm, and bring farming machines from America, and resettle the land! “Chevreh, do you know what we have done here? Not only have we produced a good crop—we have produced an instrument! No more will the chalutz have to stand in the slave market and depend on the whim of the planter for a day’s work. No more do we have to bring ourselves down to the standards of the fellaheen. We can set our own pace, our own development, and the fellaheen can learn from us if they want to. We have shown that the kvutsa is the solution! We don’t have to wait for villages to be built and owners to arrive to reclaim the land. We ourselves can go out on land that belongs to the whole Jewish people, and reclaim it!”

Now Shimek slowly repeated the thought. Not private, a farmer on private land, but socialist farming on land that belonged to the Jewish people. This was the way!

Reuven was inspired to still another vision. With socialist farming, experiments could be made such as no private settler could undertake. Not only crops of the usual staples, barley and corn and chickpeas could be grown here. From the Jordan they had ample water for irrigation. With a pumping station, they could develop intensive farming, and support a much larger population.

Araleh too had a plan; to construct a sluice-gate to regulate the waters of the Jordan. Suddenly everyone had a plan …

“Wait! Wait! Stick to reality!” Max objected. “All this is in the far distant future—”

“Why?”

—With irrigation, Reuven went on, orange groves could be planted, and bananas as well. In this climate they could grow every fruit and vegetable on earth. A Garden of Eden could be developed here—And higher and higher went their enthusiasm until it burst into song, burst out into a hora in the yard, while Max vainly summoned all to sleep, as the harvest must continue at dawn.

“Never mind! We’ll be ready! We’ll be ready!”

News of the kvutsa’s success spread quickly to the training farm at Sejera, and chalutzim began to arrive to lend a hand and see how it all was done, and by the end of the harvest there came Rahel, sent down by Avner from Jerusalem, to write of their feat for the new journal of the Poale Zion. A long table was set up in the yard, there was a feast; Dovidl and a whole wagonload of chalutzim from Mescha arrived with a few bottles of Zichron wine; Nadina and Galil arrived, and Nadina made a speech. “Chaverim, you have proven here that our new way of life will succeed! Not only will our Jewish movement in Eretz embrace this socialist way of life, but the downtrodden Arabs too will learn from us and throw off the medieval yoke of the effendi! And one day”—she took off her glasses, tears were blinding her—“one day over the vast steppes of Russia, communards will go forward, to harvest as you have harvested, for the benefit of the workers themselves, and one day even in capitalist America it will be the cooperativa that owns what it produces from its own toil on its own soil. Chaverim and chaveroth, you may be proud!”

Such a glow of love embraced them all at that plank table, it was as though they had grown and reaped the first grain known to man, and all their little animosities and grievances were melted in this joy, and Reuven, gazing at Rahel with Avner, felt released from his long secret desire, felt it was indeed true that an over-love existed, a comradely love that was purer than sexual love between men and women, and suddenly from his lips there came the song of Elijah bringing Messiah, but not with the melancholy Diaspora-tone of suffering and longing. The song of Elijah came bursting out in joy.

Leah and Moshe leaped up to dance, the singing rose, and quickly the whole crazed circle of them were stomping on their harvest floor, their bare feet in this way beginning to thresh the grain, all of them roaring and feeling inexhaustible, earth-demons, earth-angels, children of the giants that once walked the earth here in this place, prophets with the word of universal love and truth and plenitude flowing up from their limbs.

Surprisingly, after this triumph, the kvutsa again began to break up. First came a violent dispute over Saraleh’s pregnancy, now too visible to be ignored. A remark of Araleh’s at a sitting that they could now afford to get a cow to assure their own milk supply unexpectedly brought a sarcastic response from Max—Saraleh could assure her own milk supply. As Araleh leaped up in anger, Max withdrew any offensiveness in his remark; but after all the kvutsa had not been consulted about their having a baby, and the kvutsa was yet in no state to support child-raising. In a communa this too should be planned and consented to by all.

Leah was flushing. She had luckily not become pregnant, but perhaps the boys were wondering whether she too—? And suddenly it came out that the womanless men had indeed been thinking and even talking of this problem amongst themselves, and that several agreed with Max’s argument.

After all, he pointed out when the sitting became more calm, in Plato’s ideal society the children were raised by the state. In their communa there was no personal property. The idea that a child was the personal property of the parents must be aban doned. All children would belong to the whole kvutsa. Therefore their conception must be planned.

“Shame!” cried Saraleh, and Araleh had to soothe her. It was the theory of it; by nature a child would have ties to the parents, even Max would agree.

Certainly, Max said, but as everyone in the kvutsa would be contributing to the support of the child—of its children, as in time there would of course be others—then such questions as upbringing, education, and the place in the community must be settled by all, not by the parents alone as in bourgeois society.

Araleh balked. Surely the parents would have the deciding word!

They would have their vote like all other members, Max maintained.

The discussion became heated. Leah felt upset, both sides seemed right, and yet—if you had a child…. Saraleh sat mute. Moshe with a rather foolish look rose to remark, really what decision could they make? The child was already well on its way and surely things could be worked out. Perhaps next time they would have time to discuss the principe.

“It seems to me the principe is clear,” Max said. “No one is forced to agree. Ours is a free society. Those who cannot live by our beliefs can always leave.”

Only a few days later came another nasty moment between Araleh and Max. The kvutsa’s clock had broken down, and as Araleh was the only chaver to possess a watch, a wedding gift from Zuckerman, he had been leaving it lying on the table. But that day, as he was plowing alone far afield, he picked it up to take along. “Leave it here,” Max said in a voice more commanding than comradely. “The rest of us will need it.”

“But it’s my watch.”

“Your private property?”

Certain things were personal, not community, property, Araleh retorted. The watch was a gift from his father-in-law.

“So now we have bourgeois sentimentality?”

Araleh burst into a tirade. “My watch is not mine, our child will not be ours, next it will apply to my wife!”

The story was repeated and the chaverim resented it that one of their own number should have stooped to the same slander spread by outsiders against life in a communa. They were going through enough deprivation without having the lucky bastard who had his woman make such remarks.

This time the breach was not easily healed. Araleh and Saraleh stayed up in their room, failing to come to sittings, and mutterings even arose about the privileged ones with their private chamber.

In the meantime another clash came; now it was between Reuven and Max over a question of plowing. Max had received a German catalogue of farm implements in which deep-plowing was declared to yield a doubled harvest. Though it would strain the kvutsa’s funds, he insisted they must order the heavy plow—the soil must be deeply turned over to tap its full resources. Reuven, though also given to the most advanced agricultural methods, in this instance argued that the light Arab plow was better adapted to the stony soil of the area. Besides, grain crops did not tap the deep soil. What was really needed first was a pump to raise up water to the fields for irrigation.

Another raging sitting ensued, with half the men siding with Max, half with Reuven; Moshe for the plow, Shimek against, Leah asking if there was no money to buy a cow, how they could afford this expensive plow, Tibor jesting, “A cow or a plow, that is the question.” Araleh and Saraleh had returned to the discussions, and Araleh argued that it would take two pair of mules to pull such a plow, something they surely could not afford. The vote came, the sides were even, and Max announced he would therefore cast his deciding vote and order the plow.

Soon after this, Saraleh quietly told Leah she and Araleh had made up their minds to return to Jaffa for her child to be born. And Araleh had a quiet talk with Reuven. Perhaps the kvutsa was not the final way. He had been thinking of another way, a “semi-cooperativa,” as it were. All would be owned together; the crops, the livestock, and labor would be shared as here, but each family would live its own life. He had heard of a new settlement being planned not far from here, further along the river, and perhaps if Reuven was interested, he would make inquiries at the Zionist office in Jaffa.

“No, I don’t know, as for me,” Reuven said. For a homestead, for one thing, you had to be married.

But the thought came back to him about bringing the family from home.

* * * *

Then, when they went out to plant another stand of eucalyptus, Reuven fell ill. Leah was the first to notice it, for he made no complaint. But in the evening she saw it in his eyes, his unfocused gaze. She felt his hands; they burned.

Almost, Reuven welcomed it, as the burning brand that Eretz put on you. Only when you had passed through the fever were you truly a part of the movement of redemption. And so he lay on his planks, his eyes glazed, hardly able to lift an arm while his sister sponged sweat from his face, taking kitchen work so as to remain near him.

When the tremors came, Leah grasped him and held him to her; Reuven’s muscles became hard and rigid and the whole body began to thrash not like a human body that belonged to itself, but like a thing, a thing overwound with tight steel springs. Like the kvutsa’s old clock when she had wound it too tight, and suddenly felt the whole thing spin backward, loose and lifeless. Reuven’s eyes had yellowed like when you turn down a lamp. It seemed to Leah there was no longer the glaze of fever in her brother’s eyes, but the glaze of death. “Moshe!” she cried wildly, letting down Reuven’s rigid body and running in panic to the field. Moshe was far, everyone was far, the bare field seemed endless, but at last Moshe came running. Reuven was pouring sweat, the tremor was over.

In an hour it began again. Moshe decided to ride for Dr. Rachman in Mescha, but Leah was so fearful of the day of waiting until he brought back the doctor that instead they harnessed the wagon, putting a bed of straw on the bottom. Reuven had become so weak that Moshe had to carry him in his arms to the vehicle.

Dr. Rachman saved him, of this Leah was always certain. Though Reuven was already filled with quinine, the old doctor got more into him. With Leah he stayed by her brother’s side all through the night. Twice more the wrenching tremors came, and the second time Reuven was in a delirium, trying to rise and go to work, crying “I must get up! I must get up!”

“Help him to stand up,” the doctor said. Leah helped him. Reuven stood, tottering, his teeth knocking from the tremor, while she held onto his burning hand to steady him. Oh, how she then wanted to engulf him and give him her strength. “Beloved, my loved one,” Reuven plaintively repeated, “appear to me, appear.” It was as though he awaited the Shechina. Tears ran down Leah’s face.

Moshe had been dozing fitfully in the wagon; now he stood in the doorway, wordless, sorrowful. Then the seizure was over and Reuven lay on the cot.

The doctor patted her hand. Oh, what a good man he was, to have come here with the earliest settlers, to have remained here through the years, riding to Sejera and Yavniel when needed. Now he told her to try to rest. He had a leather couch there, an old leather couch he had long ago brought all the way here from “home.” She lay down. The doctor went to the other part of the house, to his wife.

In the morning Reuven awoke with the sweetest smile. “Now I have the land in my blood,” he said to Leah and Moshe. He had crossed over to the side of those who had engulfed the kadahat.

Though he had passed the crisis, Reuven’s face was hollow and his limbs were reeds. As the mules were needed at the kvutsa, Moshe had to return while Leah remained with Reuven. Her brother’s strength did not seem to return; she could barely coax him to forego his vegetarianism and sip a bit of chicken broth. A month of convalescence was needed, Dr. Rachman said; Reuven must not go back to the deadly heat of the Jordan valley. He had best be taken to the convalescent home in Zichron Yaacov, and the doctor wrote a note for her. Luckily a villager was driving as far as Chedera, and could take Leah and Reuven in his wagon. From Chedera, Zichron was but a few hours away and they would manage to find another ride. Once in Zichron, Leah was determined to get work, so as not to burden the kvutsa with keeping her brother in the convalescent home.

Zichron Yaacov sat on a hill from which the salt marshes of the Mediterranean shoreland could be seen and the sweep of the sea. Just as they arrived, the western vista was under such a sunset sky, with such purple clouds undershot with fire, that Reuven breathed in the beauty of the world once again and Leah felt heartened. He would get well here. On the horizon they made out ruins, a Crusader’s castle called Athlit; they must one day go there, Reuven said.

This village was one of the Baron’s best, with a large wine press and a street of goodly houses, and in a wooded nest on the crown of the hill was the rest home kept by the kadahat expert, Dr. Hillel Jaffe, who at once put Reuven into a whitewashed room on a bed with sheets.

But how would she find work here? The settlers of Zichron were known for their avoidance of Jewish labor; they had an entire village of Arabs at the bottom of their hill, and even when it came to housework and the kitchen, the Arab women had long ago learned the laws of kashruth as well as the fine points of Roumanian cooking. “Don’t worry, don’t worry, my girl, I am not worried, so why should you worry? In time you will pay me,” the doctor told Leah. But as she would not rest, and went from house to house, he put in a word with a leading family, the Aaronsons, and told her to try there.

It fell out well. This was clearly one of the most substantial places in Zichron, Leah saw, with two dwellings, one quite large, on either side of the courtyard. In the center stood an enormous shade tree, and behind, you looked out over a rich valley called Faradis, or Paradise, so named, Reuven had already told her, by the Crusaders.

Mother Aaronson reminded her of her Aunt Minna, wife of her mother’s rich brother Kalman; she wore a fine ruffled shirtwaist over a high-boned corset, with an elaborate ritual wig topped by a lace cap, as though she were living in the city. As it happened, her Arab woman had chosen Erev Shabbat to have a baby, Mother Aaronson declared, not as one who complains so much but as one who is patient with the foibles of the simpler folk. The Arab woman had sent up her twelve-year-old daughter, a primitive who had never held a dish in her hand and had already broken a French porcelain bowl. As to her own daughter, Mother Aaronson complained with a touch of pride, her Sara was a modern girl who didn’t even know how to light a fire in the kitchen stove.

Leah soon saw the daughter—plumpish, a few years younger than herself—as she crossed the yard from the smaller house, eyed her and at once announced that Leah must never go into the cottage—as though Leah had any thought of it—for that house was the laboratorium of her eldest brother Aaron, the famous agronomist, and he was away in the United States of America on an important mission, and above all his books were not to be touched!

Leah could scarcely feel offended, for the girl babbled on in evident adoration of that brother who even as a young boy had been selected by the Baron’s agent, Jacques Samuelson, and sent to the best academy in France, in Grenoble; he had returned and made important discoveries which soon would be announced to the world. He was now in Chicago where, Leah must know, the most advanced agricultural machinery was made, and Aaron intended to bring back such machinery to Zichron.

—Fine and good! Leah thought of the chaverim having to decide between a cow and a plow, and of Reuven with his dreams of agricultural experiments, and his self-taught agronomy learned from a book seized here and there, and pored over by candlelight after twelve hours of labor in the fields. And yet she could not feel envious, and even found herself telling this girl that she too had an older brother interested in agronomy—he was recovering just now at Dr. Jaffe’s, a chalutz.

—Oh, a barefoot, the girl said, but with interest, so that, unable to suppress her matchmaking instincts, Leah even glanced again at Sara Aaronson—in a year at most she would bloom. “If he is convalescing,” young Sara offered of her own volition, “and is so interested in agronomy, I might lend him some books if he will be careful. Can he read French?”

“No,” Leah said.

“Or German or English?” Sara Aaronson’s own brother of course read them all.

“A little German, but the best is Russian.” All there was in Hebrew he had read, and Yiddish was no longer mentioned.

“Oh,” Sara said. There were a few works in Russian, but the best were in French. She would see what she could find.

There was also a younger sister named Rifka, who aroused in Leah a longing for little Eliza, and there was another brother who dashed off on his horse every morning. The father she liked; he went off early to his vineyards and labored there himself side by side with his Arabs.

In the second week, when the Arab woman returned to the kitchen and Leah saw she was no longer needed, and when Reuven, though discharged from the convalescent home, was advised still to rest in this hill climate, it was Father Aaronson who bethought himself of a place for them, the watchman’s hut in his vineyard.

* * * *

The hut was raised on posts so that one could look out from it over the rows of vines that flowed down the slope, and one could look out to the vista of the sea. The grapes were already fat, clusters hanging like full goats’ udders from under the vines. Reuven hoped to be strong enough by the time the gathering began to be employed in the cutting; perhaps Aaronson would employ both of them, among his Arabs. For though Dovidl had sent word from Jerusalem that Reuven was not to worry about money, that the sick fund would pay for his care, he did not want to draw a copper from the fledgling fund. Reuven was worried, too, that they were needed back in the kvutsa, and shyly he let Leah understand that he realized he was keeping her from her Moshe; perhaps now that he was well enough to manage, she should go back.

How hard it was to be away from Moshe she herself had not expected. What if meanwhile some other girl should appear and attach herself to him? No, Leah told herself, for then it would not have been real love with Moshe, and it was best to know this sooner rather than later. But if that which they had felt together was not real love, then what could be real in life?

Suddenly Moshe himself appeared in Zichron. At the sight of his form, glimpsed from the perched-up hut, a kind of glad shame added itself to her wave of joy, partly sexual shame and partly the shame of having doubted him.

But her Moshe had come with news to which he tried to give, as he told it to her, a regretful tone, even while Leah saw how it excited him.

The movement had chosen Moshe for a mission back home; he was to establish training farms and show young Zionists the kvutsa way of life, then bring back to Eretz with him the first such group of new chalutzim.

“And chalutzoth,” Leah bravely jested. For why had they picked the Handsome Moshe if not to deal with the shortage of girls?

“Yes, girls for the others,” Moshe laughed. For example he would keep a sharp eye out for the right girl for Reuven. “After all, I myself am satisfied!”

Yet it came to her, lying at last again in his arms, under the vines, it came with the contentful sigh ending their first love making, that even of this a human soul had to remain wary. How could life show anything more certain than in this joining that a man and woman felt together? Yet even in this, there crept into Leah’s soul a bitterness of doubt that she did not want to acknowledge, no, she had no bitterness. Only, after that time in the little boat on the Kinnereth, a peculiar understanding had come to her: things that seemed fated to be, and that even seemed accomplished, could also turn out untrue. There in the vessel when the new ecstatic convulsion had arrived within her body she had felt that what she had now experienced was conception. Yet a few days later her period had come. Perplexedly, even blushingly, Leah had drawn Saraleh into a discussion of womanly things, until Saraleh, comprehending, had revealed to her the knowledge she had received from her own mother on the eve of her marriage. Only in certain weeks of her month could a woman conceive. And what Leah had felt, like a wondrous discharge of love joining the discharge of the man, was not necessarily conception. It was, Saraleh said, simply the full joy of love.

So she had not conceived. Though tonight she did not know what to feel. To have his child in her would be the old, indeed the unworthy way of a woman’s keeping a man. Yet even without reference to keeping him, even if her Moshe should stray away from her—to have and keep his child, their child, would that not have been what the life-urge intended? And here too something puzzled and disturbed Leah, for she had always trusted in the purity of her life-urge, her inmost feeling, and here she saw that nature too could deceive. For again tonight, even had she so decided and dared it, it was not her time to conceive. Oddly, the maxim of Theodor Herzl drifted through her mind. “If you will it, then it need not remain but a dream.” And on this trust in human will, all they were doing here was being done. Yet a dim sense pervaded Leah of some possible flaw in the working of the universe, so that despite the most pure, the most deserving and innocent effort of will that God could expect of man, even in the truest love, the end could be barren.

No, she was only sad because Moshe was going away.

It was but for a limited time, for a few months, and Leah told herself she must banish the overshadowing of melancholy. They thrust themselves together as though to hold forever joined, their bodies sealed, as at the instant of all creation.

* * * *

To help them earn a bit, Mother Aaronson contrived still to give Leah a day’s housework now and again, especially the heavier cleaning for Sabbath Eve, as her Arab woman had still not regained her full strength. On one such afternoon, when Leah was at the Aaronson house, a young girl climbed up the ladder to the hut; Reuven knew it must be Sara. She had brought two huge books, wondrous French botanical volumes filled with delicate engravings of all the plants of the Levant. “I believe my brother himself would have lent them to you,” she said, as she placed the volumes carefully on the table. “That is why I decided to bring them. He likes to find people seriously interested in studying.” And then she simply gazed at him. Reuven in his eagerness was about to open the books, but on impulse first hurried to the basin in the corner and carefully washed his hands. A smile, an illumination, came over the girl’s face and their eyes met. Why he didn’t know, but she reminded him of Leah when she had not yet grown so tall, and was somewhat plump like this. He realized the girl had come out of curiosity to have a look at him, nothing more. Now he carefully opened a volume, leafing back the tissue paper over a magnificent, detailed engraving of a papyrus plant such as grew in the Huleh.

Could he read the Latin name? she wanted to know.

Yes, he had taught himself Latin nomenclature.

She smiled again. Her brother had discovered many plants that were not even in the books, she said. Sometimes her brother took her with him on his excursions, they rode on horseback, they had explored the whole of Galilee and even the Hauran …

And on and on she talked of her brother, and then all at once, abruptly, she bade him a farewell Shalom and was gone.

Nor did she return. It was as though she had satisfied herself in seeing the chalutz, and that was enough. As for Reuven, the image of the girl remained with him as something fresh, something good that had happened, but surely nothing more.

Now there were pastoral days on the Zichron hillside when the long-bearded, patriarchal Aaronson walked among the rows of vines where the Arab girls and women in their many-colored gowns knelt at the cutting, and Aaronson made certain no stem was injured.

In the evenings Leah would watch her brother, his head bent in the lamplight, his thick hair wild around his ascetic face; he was using a Russian-French dictionary that she had found for him—in Zichron there was even a bookshop.

It was at this time that Leah talked of her longing to have the family here; she too had thought of it. She worried about Dvoraleh, who was of the age when she needed a big sister to confide in, and she ached for their baby brother Avramchick; in each letter Mama had told new wonders of him—of how, even so tiny, he showed consideration for others, not like an infant, but like a person! And Gidon and Schmulik—Leah expressed Reuven’s own thoughts—what would become of them if they remained in Russia? Another tradesman? another fur worker?

Reuven admitted that he too sometimes longed for their own place where there would be no bickering over each thing he wanted to do, where he wouldn’t have to hear Max’s constant refrain, “No, Reuven, you can’t volunteer to find your own time. Your time, chaver, the same as for the rest of us, belongs to the kvutsa.” Sometimes he envied a simple farmer like Kolodnitzer who could bring his own cattle from Holland if he could manage it, and develop a new breed. If Tateh would agree to come with all the children, perhaps indeed they could receive a homestead—surely they would be put at the head of the list. The new settlement being planned would be quite close to the kvutsa, and Reuven had even wondered—he and Leah might stay on at the kvutsa, but with the family farm so close by, he could keep a corner of land there for himself and carry out some of his ideas, on his Sabbaths.

“And what does Tateh have there in Cherezinka? Nothing but a life of insults and falling into debt each time he tries to break away from our Koslovsky and his sugar-beet mill.” On a farm even in bad years a family could manage to live on a cow and their own produce. And think of the boys growing up straight, riding horses, plowing the fields.

“Oh, if we could only get them to come,” Leah agreed.

And so they wrote long letters home, describing to their father the comforts and good life of the settlers in such a village as Zichron, and telling him of the new settlements waiting for families such as theirs.