THE SETTLERS

IN HIS first night on the Zuckerman roof in Eretz Yisroel, Yankel Chaimovitch did not sleep well. Bad dreams sifted through his mind; he stood in a ship made of reeds like a basket, and water poured in through the cracks; the ship was going down, and small birds with sharp open beaks pecked at his shamefully uncovered head; he stood in the synagogue, called up to read the weekly portion, and his son Reuven the eldest snatched the tallis from around him and he was naked.

Before dawn Yankel arose, took his tfillim bag, carefully brushed and put on his round hat, and crept down the outside stairs with the thought of finding in the narrow lane a little shul they had passed the day before. Hardly had he stepped from the hotel when there in the grayish light stood a pious Jew with a small, pointed red beard and red-rimmed eyes, a prayer bag under his elbow, offering to guide a Jew to a shul.—A newcomer in the land? He spoke with a Litvak intonation. Beware of red-beards and of Litvaks, Yankel reminded himself, but already this Yidl had found out how many were the children in his family, had blessed each child by name, and remarked understandingly what a problem it would be to provide for such a huge family, and the children nearly all of them still small ones, may they thrive each and every one! Out of interest for a fellow pious Jew with such problems, there occurred to the red-beard a timely opportunity—a full-bearing orange grove requiring only the smallest cash investment, and providing a good living—a bargain to be snatched up, since land was leaping every day higher in value.

The Litvak kept nudging closer, as though he had divined the moneybelt and wanted to get a heft of it. He himself, praised be the Name, had seven mouths to feed and so he could understand a Jew’s problems. To settle in a new colony? In the Galilee? There came a shrewd smile and an inspection from his blinking eyes.—Why be dragged away to the ends of the earth and wait seven years until a tree grew and bore fruit? And the heat! It was a gehenna there in the valley. And the fevers! Three out of four died. Here in Jaffa even if a Jew did not possess enough capital to finance a full-bearing grove, he could make a decent living in the town itself. There was an excellent little shop—implements and building materials—that could be bought just now from a Jew leaving to join his wealthy brother in America.

They were already inside the little shul, and without leaving Yankel’s elbow, the red-beard, Reb Nussbaum, whispered to him about this one and that one in the minyan, influential Jews in Jaffa, some wealthy, some with good connections, and while racing through the prayers, he threw in a few words under his breath. After the Kaddish they would take a droshke, he would pay half out of his own pocket, and they would visit the widow who owned the orange grove—God grant her grove was not yet sold, it was only partway to Petach Tikvah, no distance at all, it would be just like living in Jaffa itself.

—No, he was not taken in by this Nussbaum, Yankel told himself—A luftmench, here in Eretz Yisroel too they were to be found. If you wanted a king’s palace, he had it for sale in his pocket. A husband for your daughter?—behold, he was a bit of a matchmaker too. But still even from such a type, if a man was careful, he could at least get an idea of how things stood in this land. Yankel was not yet ready, he told himself, to be led around by the nose by his son, to be dragged off God knows where to a wilderness of fever and heat.

If only he had come here in his youth as he had dreamed, he too would now be the possessor of a fine house such as he now beheld, with fig trees in the yard, and a bower of vines, and with his daughters sitting in the house practicing on the piano while matchmakers came to propose excellent suitors descended from the Gaon of Vilna. Instead, here he was a homeless man with a flock of children and only a few gold pieces sewn away.

There was indeed a widow, though she greeted Reb Nussbaum rather icily—a woman’s humors. Stiffly corseted in a black gown, she squeezed out a smile for the newcomer, and led them to a parlor with red velvet chairs with tassels, brought, she said, all the way from Berdichev. An Arab woman at once appeared with almond cakes and a pitcher of a cool milky drink with a wonderfully refreshing taste—lebeniyah, she called it. Ah, the widow said, everything looked fine and easy now; her husband might-he-rest-in-peace had been a Lover of Zion, and she told the whole tale of how this pestilential swamp had become a paradise. Three children they had lost. Only one daughter had survived; she was married and lived in Paris. There the widow wanted to end her days, close to her grandchildren. “Enough, enough have we suffered in our lives, enough we have given to this land of our heart’s blood—”

Feeling somehow an impostor, when the price was mentioned, Yankel still tried to maintain the air of a man of means. But the widow surely had sniffed him out; her eyes narrowed and her voice was harsh as she said something quickly to the red-beard. She did not offer to accompany them to inspect the grove, nor did Yankel even get to see it, for at the gate there stood his son Reuven.

“What are you doing here! I had to come looking for you!” Reuven cried. “We are expected in Dr. Lubin’s office!” He had arranged for the chief of the settlement bureau to see them, the entire family, “And you, you run off with this parasite, listening to his grandmother’s tales! Bobeh meises! A ready-made estate! A little baron with Arab serfs, is that what you came here to be?”

Luckily, at the shul, Zuckerman the hotelkeeper had overheard the conversation and sent Reuven after the red-beard, one of the most notorious swindlers of Jaffa, just now swarming with their kind.

And on the way back Reuven continued: Did his father know what troubles there were in Petach Tikvah? And around that very widow’s grove! Yes, bitter strife in which Turkish police had been called by Jewish landowners to club and beat up Jewish workers who asked for nothing but a day’s work! Did Yankel know that before taking back a single Jewish worker the Baron’s little barons had forced them to sign a paper that they would not smoke on the Sabbath?

At this Yankel had to hide a smile in his beard. Perhaps indeed he should live in Petach Tikvah. But his son raged on. What sort of homeland would be built, what sort of human freedom—

In one thing Yankel agreed. He too did not want to have serfs, Russian or Arab. He wanted to work his fields with his own hands, his sons laboring beside him, his daughters milking cows in the shed. Only, Reuven need not imagine that Yankel Chaimovitch was about to appear before the head of the Zionist office in Jaffa wearing that wagon-driver’s cap!

Seizing the hour, she had hurried to the Poale Zion office and there luckily found Avner, talking to yesterday’s newly arrived chalutzim. One thing at least Avner was able to tell her—Moshe had got to Constantinople and stayed there a few nights; then he had taken ship for Odessa. All this was in a letter that had just been brought from a good Turkish Jew whose house served as a way-station. But none of the new arrivals had seen or heard of Moshe in Odessa. This was worrisome, certainly. Avner was never one to belittle a situation, yet he was not one to panic. These new arrivals were not actually Odessans, they had only passed through. It could be that for certain reasons Moshe was keeping out of sight. At least no bad news had come.

“Leachkeh—” only the tall, gangling Avner seemed able to sense how feminine and helpless she often felt—“Leahleh, you don’t imagine we haven’t already done it?” The instant there was news, good or bad, he promised it would be brought to her even if he had to walk himself from Jerusalem.

The family was waiting, and her mother saw something in her face. “No, no, I can’t explain to you,” Leah told her as Reuven hurried them through the lanes, but her mother even asked, “You heard something? Of the one you told me about last night? Moshe? What has happened?” Leah shook her head mulishly, and Feigel felt stricken. With the first one, her first daughter, she had already failed. She had not been able to protect the girl.

The stairway was crowded. Here in this little office, then, was the compound result of all the orations, the journeyings and the gatherings, the World Congresses, the fervid discussions in Vilna and Bratislava and on New York’s East Side, the bribes and the subterfuges, bringing Jews into the land wearing white helmets as travelers, or even garbed as monks and nuns, or, some said, carried in as sacks of potatoes—building the Land brick by brick.

Up the stairway clattered the Chaimovitch family, the girls with their shining hair, neatly braided, smelling a bit of lice-killing kerosene, the boys, as Yankel had insisted, with the dust cleaned from their shoes. Even on the stairway, settlers and chalutzim made way for the family—they stood pressed against the wall to watch the troop move upward, led by the father in his fine capote and round hat, followed by Big Leah whom everybody knew and greeted, and a whole flock of younger brothers and sisters and at last the mother, wearing her finest gown and a crocheted shawl, still a noble-looking wife.

So they entered the inner office. A neat, small man, stoutish, clean-shaven, and cultured one could see at a glance, a Jew who addressed them in German instead of Yiddish, he already knew of Reuven. “Your son is an outstanding worker, known in the settlement,” he told Yankel, beaming, “and your daughter too! Ah, if we had ten thousand like them!” And he related with relish the tale of Reuven and the Herzl trees replanted by Jewish hands.

Then, still beaming, Dr. Lubin placed his hand on each smaller child’s head in turn. “Altogether how many sons and daughters? Seven, eight?”

“Nine,” Dvoraleh whispered to Leah, having divined her mother’s condition, and Leah, even in this tumultuous moment, oddly felt a kind of jealousy—the same jealousy she had felt when she heard that Saraleh was pregnant.

—Not every day did such a family arrive! the official went on. For such a family special efforts should and would be made!

And even before Yankel could put in a word, things had been arranged as Reuven wanted; they would leave with the first wagon, tomorrow, for the Galilee, for the new settlement being built by the Jordan.

The official scribbled a few words on a bit of paper, a folded note—a pitkah—the whole country, Reuven smiled as he put it in his pocket, was being built by pitkah. And still with a thousand questions to ask—What about a shul? What of a cheder for the boys?—Yankel found himself moved benignly out of the office without the German’s even pronouncing a blessing for the journey.

There were two wagons going with supplies to the Galilee; in one of the wagons, implements and tins of kerosene and even, underneath all this—Reuven caught sight of it—Max Wilner’s huge iron plow from Germany, marked for the kvutsa. That stubborn Max with his deep-plowing obsession! Reuven was so furious he could have thrown it off the wagon, but Leah calmed him; the chevreh had after all voted on it. A waste! he fumed all the more angrily because he was curious as to what the results would be. They didn’t even have the animals to pull it! A steam pump was far more necessary!

The other wagon was entirely for the family, laden with the large trunk from the port, and all their bundles. Young Gidon sat up with the driver, the pockmarked Kalman the drayman, wearing his old Russian cap, the kind Reuven had bought for Tateh. Already Gidon assessed the mules correctly, remarking that the right pulled more strongly. And Kalman promised to let him try the reins along the way.

So they rode out. How would they manage to live until crops came, Yankel worried. The loan that had been mentioned in the Zionist office would hardly be enough for many months, but Reuven had at once agreed to it, before Yankel could put in a word.

Meanwhile the children were excited beyond measure by Leah’s description of the Sea of Kinnereth with fishing boats and with flocks of wild geese coming down to sit on the water. Shaindeleh—Reuven and Leah had already changed her name to Yaffaleh—wanted to know whether they could raise white geese on their farm, and Schmuel wanted to know the size of the fish caught in the lake.

And Jerusalem? Was a Jew, Yankel muttered to Feigel, not even going to see Yerushalayim? Not even going to utter a prayer at the Wall? Jews journeyed all the way to Eretz only to shed a tear before the Wall, and here, having come this far at such great cost and with such hardship, to what wilderness was his unbeliever of a son dragging him without even a sight of Yerushalayim?

“It’s only another ghetto full of beggars,” Reuven responded. “And Yerushalayim won’t run away, it has stood there for some time.”

“We’ll go, we’ll go to Yerushalayim, but better first to get settled so we can go with a peaceful mind,” Feigel calmed Yankel. And counting in his mind the money it would have cost to take the whole family first to Jerusalem—and truly what did it mean to his children, atheists the lot of them—Yankel subsided. He would make his own voyage, he promised himself; perhaps he would take Gidon if Reuven meanwhile didn’t succeed in making an atheist out of him as well.

Beyond Petach Tikvah there was only a narrow, lonely wagon road. When, after stretches of wilderness, of high briars and weeds, they passed an Arab village with bits of cultivation around it, and saw a few women walking with jars on their heads like Rebecca in the Bible, all the girls excitedly asked Leah if she had learned to do it. “It makes you graceful,” Dvoraleh cried and, before anyone knew what was happening, she had jumped off the wagon and was walking along trying to balance a teapot on her head.

Yankel frowned, and Feigel said “Stop your foolishness,” while Leah began to lecture them all on the dreadful backward state of Arab womanhood. It was nothing to laugh at, she told Dvoraleh and little Eliza; a woman was a mere chattel, a slave. A girl of ten could be sold by her father to a toothless old man of sixty. Some Arabs owned two or three wives and made them do all the work in the fields, while the Arab himself sat in a cafe smoking his narghileh.

For long stretches they saw no one. Then out of the emptiness there appeared two horsemen, thundering alongside, daggers in their belts. The girls huddled together, but Leah and Reuven cheerily called out an Arab word, Marhaba, while Kalman the drayman even held a conversation with the two. One of the riders stooped down, received a cigarette, and said something to Yankel laughingly, before they thundered off.

“With them it is the other way around,” explained Kalman. “A daughter is a good investment. A pretty one is worth ten camels.”

And so the sun shone on them. Reuven pointed out wild bushes that he said were the castor plant from which castor oil could be made; the children made faces because he said the plant grew everywhere and perhaps it could be useful. Experiments should be made. Then he pointed out places with Biblical names, and Yankel was nevertheless pleased that despite his godlessness his son spoke so much of the Bible. How then could he be an atheist?

Then the wagons halted while Feigel spread their meal and they shelled and salted their eggs. Even Yankel was in good humor.

Before they reached Chedera, at dusk, a somber weariness had come over them all. Feigel, with their youngest, Avramchick, asleep sprawled across her lap, felt that the weight of the child somehow protected the new one unborn within her from the jolting of the wagon. No, she would not lose this one, he would cling to her womb waiting to be born in Eretz Yisroel.

A silence had fallen. Where, how much further, would they be going? How did people live, alone so far away in this emptiness, a whole day’s distance from other Jews?

One room in the khan was for women, and there a few cots could be had for the girls; Gidon and Schmulik declared they would sleep on the ground in an open shed in the yard with Reuven and some chalutzim gathered there.

Halfway into the night, the barefoots, as Feigel had learned they were called, were still chanting their songs in the yard, Leah and Dvoraleh among them. The same songs as on the ship:

Who will build Galilee?

We will build Galilee!

We! We!

Perhaps, Feigel hoped, Leah would dance out of herself whatever was troubling her.

Then, going to the outhouse, Feigel passed a tiny room without even a door; here too, as in the lodging in Jaffa, a young man lay ill on a pallet. As she passed, a sound came from him. She went in. Even in the dark she could see the water jug near his pallet, but he was too weak to reach it. Feigel held the jug to his lips, and he babbled, “Thank you, Mama.”

“What is your name, my son, where are you from?” she said, brushing the damp hair from his forehead and putting her hand there. How it burned!

Matityahu, the name she had been thinking of, the name of her father’s father. From the sunken eyes a dark flicker seemed to float out toward her, and Feigel had to exorcise what came to her mind. Nay, she had already chosen this name in memory of her grandfather. “Live,” she said, “live and be well.” Let it not be drawn from this boy.

When they emerged from the valley to the opening onto the great plain, Reuven told the boys this was where Saul and Jonathan fell to the Philistines, and when they crossed the plain he told of the Ten Tribes taken away; in the afternoon, the wagons rounded the bend at the foot of Mount Tabor, and Leah told Dvora of her namesake, the prophetess who had preached on this hill. As they neared the village of Mescha, also called Tabor, Leah began to call to everyone they passed—everyone knew her. Yankel saw there were householders no younger than himself coming from the fields with implements over their shoulders. Perhaps his son had not misled him after all.

At the gate of the village, housewives, children, the whole town gathered around the two wagons; what news in Jaffa? The drivers handed out packages—a roll of oilcloth for one woman, spices for another. For this one, Kalman the drayman remembered a message, for that one he had brought a pitkah. More men were arriving from the fields, some astride their mules, one with his little girl, the age of Shaindel-Yaffaleh, who had run out a distance to greet him, sitting delightedly before him on his large Belgian farmhorse.

There, pumping water into a trough, Leah caught sight of Dovidl. He was wearing high boots far too large for him, and even a bandolier—Dovidl a shomer! Something about him always gave her the impulse to laugh, though one couldn’t laugh at Dovidl, he was too clever. She ran toward her good friend—had he heard anything of Moshe?

“How would I have heard anything you haven’t heard of Moshe,” he asked, “when you are just coming from Jaffa?”

Solemnly, Dovidl shook his head. There were no secrets from her among the chaverim.

“Yes,” Dovidl declared resignedly. Avner was overworked. He needed help with the new journal, Unity.

“But that will be wonderful!” Leah cried. “Someone like you is needed more there than here.”

Dovidl sighed again as though he saw his true life flowing away, the good life of the fields, of productiveness and gratification. “You really think I should go?”

Just then a young woman hurried toward them calling, “Dovidl, the boots!” It was Bracha, the wife of Shabbatai Zeira, the Kurdish watchman. While pulling off the Shomer’s only pair of boots, Dovidl continued his speculations: could he really be of more use in the headquarters than on the land? Must he enter a life of organizational work and politics? “You know, Leah, the Shomer is making progress, we already have two horses,” he said, handing the boots to Bracha. Unlike the boots, he said, a shomer’s horse could not be used both day and night, so for the night-watch they had borrowed money and bought a second steed. And in a moment the boots appeared on Zeira as the dark Cossack figure rode out, erect and fierce.

Gidon was staring, mouth agape, at the mounted shomer, and Dvoraleh too could not take her eyes from the horsemar.

“Then if the riders need the boots day and night, perhaps you should leave them here and go to Jerusalem,” Leah said to Dovidl. He always made her feel brighter.

Over the last part of the way, Zeira warned, the wagons must stay together, and he would ride with them until beyond Kfar Kana. Last week even Dr. Rachman had been waylaid on the road to Sejera, and his horse had been seized from under him.

“No!” But Dr. Rachman was known in every Arab village, he always went when they called him, even across the Jordan!

The mukhtar, the mayor, of Kfar Kana himself had brought back the horse when he learned from Galil of the affair, Zeira related. Half the children of that village owed their eyesight to old Rachman. Still, the glimpse of a good horse made the bandits forget themselves. They would seize the steed of the Messiah himself!

The village was passed without incident; in midafternoon the wagon mounted the last ridge of Mount Yavniel, and Reuven felt the old exaltation rising up in him. “Look!” he cried as the lake was revealed below them, his Kinnereth, his shining bride, as beautiful as the first time his eyes had beheld her. “See how it is shaped like a harp,” he repeated to the young ones. “From that, it gets its name.”

Leah saw how her brother’s eyes were glittering. She began to sing, and though Reuven rarely sang except when he stomped the hora, now he joined her. The younger children picked up the tune “Yahalili” and, as the wagons creaked downward, even Yankel hummed in his beard.

This, all of them understood, even to little Schmulik, was a moment of joy and unity they might not reach again in their entire lives, a moment each must cherish forever. Indeed even two-year-old Avramchick sensed everyone’s joy and began jumping restlessly on Feigel’s knee.

Catching their excitement, Kalman the drayman looked back on them, smiling, on Eliza the beautiful little girl, on Dvora with her breasts already high, on Yaffaleh, on Schmuel, on Avramchick, on Big Leah the chalutza.

Deep into her soul Mama Feigel breathed this moment, telling her son yet to be born that she had carried him from Cherezinka to Eretz Yisroel, to his destined birthplace here beside the lake of song, the harp-shaped Kinnereth.

But was this all? The wagons halted in a yard before a small old khan of black stones—was this the vaunted kvutsa of Leah and Reuven? And not a soul to meet the wagons, Kalman grumbled, after plaguing him to haul the big iron plow! Had they all been butchered? Were they all dead in there?

Leah had already hurried inside. Max Wilner lay with his face to the wall; he did not even turn. On another pallet lay a chaver she had never before seen, the lad who must have wandered in during the last few days; he too was in fever. Then Max muttered, “Shimek went for help.”

“I’ve brought your German plow,” Kalman announced. “I’ve got to get on while there’s light.”

At the mention of the plow, the shivering Max sat up. “Can you,” and somewhat shamefacedly he included Reuven who was in the doorway, “Can you bring it in here? It will be safer.”

It was so that Max could lie there gazing at it, Reuven knew. The hardhead! The stiff-neck!—As stiff-necked as I am, Reuven thought, and went out to the wagon. With Gidon and the driver Kalman, he dragged the clumsy iron structure through the doorway. “Yallah! Behold thy beloved!” He forgave Max, though it still rankled that Max had used his own vote. Yet, for planting bananas, deep plowing might show results.

“I’ll make tea,” Leah said. She would have to remain here with the sick chaverim. The family could continue on to the new settlement; it was less than an hour away, Kalman said, if the ford across the twist in the Jordan was not too high just now.

“When did Shimek go?” Leah asked. They should have encountered him on their way from Yavniel.

“He’s coming back with a whole new kvutsa. Seven fellows from the training farm.”

“What else was there to do? Call in Arab workers? Give up the place? Desert?”

“Moshe goes off! Araleh and Saraleh leave! You and Leah are away for months at a time!” In feverish anger all Max’s old resentments poured out.

Bleakly, Reuven felt, was it still his place? His kvutsa? Where he had dreamed of a Garden of Eden for his comrades? After all that their group had gone through here, and after the first crop and their triumph together—to give the place over to a whole new group of strangers?

From the wagon his father called testily that night would catch them on the way. “I must stay here with them,” Leah repeated, her eyes telling her brother she understood all he felt, but that he must not yet decide.

Beyond the kvutsa there was scarcely a set of ruts. Desolation, rock-strewn soil reaching as far back as the high ridge they had crossed. On the opposite side of the Jordan, the late afternoon sun began to color the sheer wall of rock in its purplish red; beyond, up there, lay the plain of Golan. With each day’s passing, Reuven had been in the habit of gazing across on this glowing rock wall, in never-failing awe at the beauty of creation. But on this day the cliff seemed harsh, oppressive; all earth was estrangement. All the elation of the family’s first view of the valley from the Yavniel heights had departed, except in the boys; the parents’ apprehension and anxiety had returned.

“Caves!” Gidon cried out, pointing up the Yavniel ridge, and little Schmulik demanded to know who had lived there. The fighters of Bar Kochba?

“Christian monks once lived in them,” Reuven answered distractedly. “Around this sea their religion began.” Even this remark heightened the tension in the wagon. His father’s face grew livid. Was this the moment for Reuven to discourse about them!

But at last the wagon rumbled onto a bypath: in a moment they would reach the new settlement, their home.

On a flat area halfway up the hillside the wagons halted. A few men in long saffron robes, Sephardim they must be, sat on the ground, tapping on blocks of black stone. There was a wooden cabin, such as one saw on construction sites, and a shed for work-animals. But where were the houses, the barns of the settlers?

From the cabin the overseer emerged, in riding breeches and clean boots—Kramer again! He glanced at the wagons, at Reuven. “There are no trees planted here as yet for you to pull out,” he remarked, but without hostility.

Reuven cursed himself for not having come before to inspect the site. But when could he have done it, sick as he was, and with only four men left in the kvutsa? And he had not even known Dr. Lubin would really send them here. Reuven handed Kramer the note from the Jaffa office.

“I’m sending you the Chaimovitch family,” Kramer read out aloud. And then he gazed at the wagonload of immigrants. “What family? Who family? Are they out of their heads there in Jaffa?”

“To join the settlement,” Reuven repeated, as though the settlement would materialize simply by his speaking of it.

“But I heard even before I went to Zichron to the hospital that permits had been granted for the houses here,” Reuven began. “They said that Dr. Lubin himself went all the way to Constantinople and bribed everyone up to the valet of the Sultan’s bedchamber to get the building permits.”

“Maybe he greased them in Constantinople, but he didn’t grease them in Tiberias,” Kramer snapped, “or in Damascus either.” And did Reuven know there was a whole turmoil in Constantinople, that the Young Turks were rising, and that meanwhile a new governor had come to Damascus?

Who didn’t know this? The entire yishuv was arguing whether the Young Turks might not change everything if they came to power. Surely they would open the doors to progress!

But as a man who is not obliged to explain himself to every passerby, Kramer shrugged, and in his habitual way turned his back, marching to his hut.

On the site Reuven now saw the outlines for several houses had been laid out, with one or two courses of stone. “But nevertheless you are building!” he cried. “How long will it be until a house is ready?”

Kramer paused before his door. “Stones we are permitted to cut,” he said. “To build a house with windows and a roof is another matter.” And he pointed with his chin to a tent. Emerging and staring at them was a Turkish policeman, planted by the Kaymakam of Tiberias to make sure that no roof was laid until an order came from Damascus. Again baksheesh, for the new governor there.

“In any case,” Kramer remarked, “all these houses are already bespoken; the owners are coming from Roumania.” And waving to Kalman the drayman to unload the materials, he entered his hut, closing the door behind him.

Where would they even spend the night? It was now that Yankel broke out at his son with every bitter disappointment of the voyage. “Where have you brought me! Where have you brought us with small children to a wilderness of murderous Arabs, infested with deathly disease! You, my son full of enlightened knowledge and wisdom! Come, he writes his father, come, bring the children, everything is ready, all is prepared!”

Yankel was shouting so that all the workmen heard. His face was livid, and there was spittle on his beard. Reuven, as an equal rage rose up in his own self, clenched his fists until his nails cut into his palms. However unjust the accusation, he would not raise his arm against his father…. If only Leah were here!

“A curse on you and your lies!” the father shouted. Feigel stood, her face showing her great distress; the children had fallen back. “A curse on this place!”

They gasped. Yankel lowered his eyes. Kalman the drayman stepped toward him. “Shah, shah, Reb Chaimovitch. It is only a mistake such as we have here in the land every day—” but as Yankel turned his face of bitterness on him, Kalman went back to his unloading.

Gidon had walked off a small distance so as not to look at his father in his rage; little Schmuel was halfway to his mother and the girls, his cheeks red and his eyes furtive as though he did not know where to run.

The mother waited, a woman who knew the way of her husband. This bitter anger of Yankel’s, did she not know it? His curse was not a true curse, it was a cry to God to witness that it was not he, Yankel, but others who were at fault for his misfortunes. This was the rage that came after each partner deceived him in business, it was the rage against her brother who had used him to draw the anger of the peasants, and now it was against his own son, so that whatever went wrong, Yankel would not be to blame.

In her soul she did not despise him, for in her soul Feigel knew Yankel was a good man who wanted only to provide a decent life for his family, and who labored without end. But he was not a clever man, and also he was honest in his heart and by religious training; thus, when he had disappointments and failures, he always needed someone to blame for his victimization. Then, when before the Above One he had called out his rage and laid the blame elsewhere, he would turn to overcome his misfortunes with some remaining unknown strength, and somehow he always managed.

Kramer had opened his door. “The men sleep down there,” the overseer said, motioning toward the riverbank, where they saw two square stone huts. “Tomorrow we’ll see what can be done.”

Reuven had already started downward, with Gidon behind him. From the wagon Kalman called: What was he to do with the huge trunk? Should he drop it off here?

“In a deep hole in the earth!” Yankel cursed, and then said, more quietly, “Bring everything down there.”

Near the river, some hundred paces apart, stood two hovels made of the local black stone, abandoned since who knew when. Atop the first, Reuven saw, rushes had been laid to form a roof; inside that one, the stonemasons had their pallets.

The second hut was doorless and roofless except for a few dried rushes over one corner; within hung a stale odor of ancient dung and accumulated filth. Still, there remained a shred of daylight and it could be cleaned. He kicked at the rubbish. Gidon, stepping inside onto the earthen floor, also kicked at the rubbish. “Along the shore there are plenty of reeds.” Reuven said, “Do you have a knife?” Gidon pulled out an enormous clasp knife, opened it, and started off.

Feigel came in. At the base, the walls jutted out to form benches, and on these, bedding could be placed. “Dvoraleh,” she said as Dvoraleh sniffed, “perhaps in the other hut they have a broom and a pail?”

Now Yankel entered and gazed around. “Tomorrow we will see what to do,” he declared. “Tonight there is no choice but to lie here.”

Together with Dvora, there returned a middle-aged man wearing the long yellow-striped gown of the Sephardim and carrying a pail of water and a home-tied broom; he was from Tiberias, a stonemason; Dvora was laughingly trying to understand his words, spoken in Ladino, the Spanish Yiddish of the Sephardim.

Yankel engaged him in the holy tongue, loshen koidesh, using the Ashkenazi pronunciation as in his prayers, though here in Eretz, as he already knew, it was the Sephardic that was spoken. The mason managed to understand Yankel’s Biblical Hebrew. Soon they were immersed in a pietistic discussion, while the family made the hut habitable.

—A worthy ideal, the Sephardi said, to come and revive the soil, though as for inhabiting the Holy Land, his own family had lived here in Tiberias for many generations. So the land was not uninhabited. In Tiberias there were several thousands of Jews, even Ashkenazim as well, latecomers from only a generation ago. The city was not far distant, less than two hours with a donkey, if it was not a lazy one. For his Sabbaths he went home.

Reuven and Kalman carried in the large trunk from the wagon, and Feigel had them set it in the center of the hut. Opening the lid, she at once found her red velvet spread with the tassels, and arranged it over the trunk—a table. Presently the Sephardi brought over his own kerosene lamp, insisting the family make use of it—there was another one among the men. Feigel gave him a thousand thanks, and set it on the “table.” In a moment he had returned again, carrying a large circular pittah such as they had seen in Jaffa transported on wooden platters atop the heads of young girls. It was soft and thick, and kept edible longer than the small rounds that quickly became dry. And in a twist of newspaper, their friend had also brought a pinch of coarse salt; it came, he said, from the Salt Sea.

Uncountable blessings Yankel poured on him and on his children forever. Feigel was near to weeping.—On Sabbath, said the Sephardi, who bore the distinguished name of Abulafia, Yankel must come to Tiberias to their synagogue, which was near the tomb of Maimonides.

Feather quilts and bedding were unfolded on the stone benches, making a long line of sleeping places around the walls. Already Feigel had settled Avramchick for the night. Gidon, with Schmulik jumping up to hand him the withes, had soon lightly roofed over the hut; in slivers between the reeds, the night sky could be seen. Dvora’s spirits had risen. It was romantic, she said, and she and Eliza made secret wishes on a star glowing between Gidon’s rushes, disputing who had seen it first. Shaindeleh-Yaffaleh was asleep, wearing an expression of contentment.

Yankel went out and stood before the doorway, gazing at the opposite hills, now a black wall. Edom, was it? Of Reuven he would not inquire.

Yankel felt as though God’s will had manifested itself. Thus he had been brought here to this corner of the beginning of the world. As it was written, In the beginning, so it was for him now a beginning, even if in the middle of his life.

Feigel too had emerged. Because they had arrived here, and the trunk was safely in the house, and there were beds around the walls, Yankel quietly said to her, so that she would know that he knew, “Feigel, you are carrying?”

“If it was ordained,” Yankel said, “then it is well that it will be in Eretz Yisroel.” To bring a new life in this land would be a mitzvah.

Just so, perhaps, it had been with Abraham and Sara late in life, after the angels appeared at the door of their dwelling and told of a coming birth.

As for Reuven, when the best that could be done had been done in the hovel, he would not stay, not under the same roof or pretense of a roof, for the angry words his father had hurled at him still boiled in him with their injustice. Reuven walked up the hillside to where the fields would have to be cleared, and he sat on a stone under the stars and gazed out over the mirror of lake in the distance to his left, a black mirror. A black day it had been. He did not know if he should return there at all to the kvutsa, as, with the new chevreh arriving, he would not be urgently needed. Nor could he simply walk away from here and leave his father with the whole family to struggle in all this uncertainty.

He stretched out with his head on the stone. How could he demand of the kvutsa that the decisions should always go his way? It was true that with Moshe and Araleh they had often left Max and Shimek defeated. If he accepted the communa as a principle, a principe, and he did accept it, then he must learn to be one with all the chaverim, and not place the judgment of some, or worse, of himself, above any others. It was hard, hard to learn a just way of life. Perhaps he was meant to live alone.

Leah’s tea strengthened Max and also the new young chaver; perhaps they had only felt miserably alone and discouraged. The new one had indeed come as a wanderer, having heard so much of their kvutsa; it was a way of life that appealed to him, he said. Ephraim was his name, and he came from the village of Motol, near Pinsk, the very village of a new Zionist leader who had sprung up since Herzl’s death, Chaim Weizmann, hadn’t they heard of him? Never mind. From young Weizmann he, as a boy, had learned, “Build, build, don’t wait for others to do it for you,” so he had come to build, and here instead he found himself a burden, a sick man.

“Don’t worry,” Leah encouraged the enthusiast, “now you have had your kadahat, the land has entered into you—that’s what my brother says.”

—Had she had any news of Moshe? Max Wilner asked. Then from a corner he brought a half-broken straw coffer. It was Moshe’s, he said, he had found it under the bed-boards; perhaps it should be in her care.

Carrying it up to her little chamber on the roof, Leah opened the lid. Inside were personal oddments, even the photograph of his mother and father that Moshe had once shown her—would he have left these things if he had any thought of not returning? A pair of old leather gloves, the fingers torn. She would sew them. Would that be foolishness? And then a scattering of papers, letters, a Hebrew exercise book, all disordered, a man’s way. She would really not have begun on the letters, except that the first sheet that caught her eye under the lamplight said “Beloved Son.” So Leah read on, her heart storming. So much like the letters Mameh had written to Reuven. Admonitions always to wear a hat on his head since it was said that the sun was so hot in Eretz, people died of their brains set a-boil. And Misheleh—she knew how her Misheleh was with the girls, a mother was happy her son was so fine-looking and attractive, but still he must have a care. Even though it was said that the chalutzoth in Eretz were so modern and free, at least let her son not bring her the shame of getting a Jewish girl into trouble—

Further, there was family news of uncles and aunts and cousins, and then of a certain Katya who had written, asking for news of him…. Instantly Leah sensed, this was the one. Could Moshe perhaps even have gone back for her? But no, everything she knew in her body denied it. Moshe had not gone away to leave her.

… They longed for their son at home, he had been away nearly two years. Gladly his father would pay the cost of the voyage if Moshe would but come for a visit….

Suddenly Leah’s heart felt illuminated. Surely this was what had happened. Why had she tormented herself, casting up every imaginable fear, seeing him in dungeons? Moshe had slipped home for a visit.

On one of the envelopes she found the address. To surprise him and write to him there? But instead she wrote a friendly letter to his mother, and so as not to frighten her in case something after all should have gone wrong, Leah said she was an acquaintance of Moshe’s from Odessa and had just arrived here in Eretz Yisroel, and perhaps his mother could tell her where she might get in touch with Moshe? That way, if he had appeared at home, his mother would surely say so. Leah gave the Zuckerman address in Jaffa. And feeling all this was of a deviousness far beyond her, Leah laughed at herself, and lay down to sleep, making his name silently with her lips, Moshe, come to me, dear one, come!

Reuven opened his eyes to the sun rising directly over the heights of Golan. He watched the mist lifting like a bride’s veil from the sleeping lake, and told himself he must make certain that their house would be built in such a way that if he were one day to live in it after all, that each morning of his life as he awakened he should open his eyes to this sight. He would never tire of it.

Lying there, gazing over the water, Reuven recalled a tale of his first employer, Smilansky, that the writer and planter had heard from an Arab teller of tales, about the birth of the Kinnereth:

In the far-off days when Allah created the heavens and earth, he created a lovely pool, Kinnereth, in the form of a woman lying still, with her limbs tucked under her, and nothing moving but the slow ripple of her smooth blue hair. In the same day he created Jordan, a rushing stream, noisy and bold. Allah looked on what he had created, and the clear innocent Kinnereth found favor in his eyes, he loved Kinnereth, but Jordan he saw as a creature of evil. Already, Jordan was winding about Kinnereth and, jealous for the gentle pool, Allah commanded his ministering angels to imprison Jordan in a cave at the foot of the King of Mountains, the Hermon. But Kinnereth they set down in a broad valley, engirdled by protective heights, and fed by springs that break forth from the Golan and the Bashan and the mouths of the valleys.

Then it came to pass in a day of thunders and terrors when the upper powers contended with the lower, that Jordan broke out from his imprisonment, thrusting aside a great stone and bursting forth. Twining and darting down clefts and along ravines, escaping notice, he reached the broad plain and made his way to the heart of Kinnereth.

Then Allah was told, “Jordan is come to Kinnereth!”

Allah’s anger burst forth. At his fury, the whole world was terrified; the earth trembled and the heavens wept, the mountains quivered and the valleys quaked.

Then Allah opened a way southward from the broad plain, and rolled Jordan down, ever downward to the gates of death. “For what you have done, O headstrong one,” Allah chastised Jordan, “unresting shall be your days. From the mouth of the cave you shall tumble down, downward you must ever go, bearing your toil unto death. Into Kinnereth you have come, and from her you shall go forth, nor shall you remain in her even for an instant, for Kinnereth you shall not know.”

And to Kinnereth, also, Allah spoke. “Since you have allowed Jordan thus to encompass and beguile you, without turning away, you shall forever be bound to your place, crouching at the foot of the rocks, licking their dust, never to emerge.”

Thousands of years have gone by, so goes the tale, yet the word of Allah is not changed. Jordan incessantly runs on, knowing no rest, leaping from stone to stone, slipping from crevice to crevice; into Kinnereth he enters, but must not stay; forth he goes, bearing all his vigor unto death.

And Kinnereth? There she crouches at the foot of the rocks, licking their dust, bound hand and foot.

Yet sometimes Kinnereth bestirs herself of a sudden, and storms and rages. She cries out, waves come riding one on another, flinging themselves against the flanks of the rocks which they smother with white foam. Her cries cleave the heavens. Kinnereth lashes herself like a dreadful beast; her blue locks turn white and scatter far and wide in a fury, while a shameful roar bursts from her, the roar of tempestuous desire.

But the rocks stand closed about her as though dead, without moving.

The waves scatter in all directions, break into fragments, and fall back powerless into Kinnereth. Cruel is the silence of heaven.

Kinnereth at last also becomes still. Little by little she subsides into her repose. She is silent and crouches submissively at the feet of the rocks. Again her waters grow smooth and blue and deep. Innocence and modesty are within her, a light mist of sweet breath rises from her soul. Jordan flings himself ever downward without repose.

But he could not lie here dreaming. Jumping up, Reuven began to carry stones off the earth, placing them in line where it seemed to him the field should end. First he carried over the very stone his head had lain on. He could not be certain this segment of the settlement would be theirs, yet he began to clear the field where he had lain, as though, in some vague echo of Jacob’s dream, the field had become sanctified to him.

Then the sun was visible and movement began among the building workers. He saw his father climbing up from the riverside. As Yankel neared, something eased in Reuven, and he even smiled to his father. The old man had put on the working cap.

“What will I do with you?” Kramer grumbled when Yankel stood before him outside his cabin, a ghetto Jew with his tzitzith dangling from under his blouse. Then Kramer decided. “You are in a hurry for a house?” he repeated, including Reuven with Yankel. “Here you have stones already cut. If you know how to build, you can put up walls.” He would even pay the regular wages.

On his father’s wages alone, Reuven saw, the whole family could not possibly be fed. And within an hour Kramer would have seen that Yankel Chaimovitch was no stonemason. “To lay stones, I know how,” Reuven said; had he not labored on the new Bezalel house for Professor Schatz in Jerusalem? And he would show his father how it was done. Kramer shrugged. It could even be seen that the overseer was not displeased, as it would be told in Jaffa that he had already settled a whole large family on the new site.

Below the very area where Reuven had begun to clear the field, a first course of stone had been laid out, making the outline of a house. “If the Turk interferes, tell him it is a stable,” Kramer said. Shelters for animals needed no permit.

Yankel seized hold of a barrow. He would fetch the stone blocks from the Sephardi. Yes, the Above One had made day and night, so that each day could be a renewal.

At the end of the new day, when Reuven and Yankel, without having quarreled the whole time, came down from their labor, there was Leah arrived from the kvutsa, and the entire family was thus together. Leah had brought seeds, and with Dvora and Eliza, she was already planting her carrots and tomatoes on a patch that Gidon had cleared behind the hut. The new young men, she said, had arrived from Sejera—Shimek had fetched them in the wagon—they were good lads, she told Reuven, and Max had asked for him to come and plan the new crops. Though if he were needed here, he could stay on …

No, no, Reuven must not be angry. They had had a long sitting with the newcomers. It would be a good kvutsa again. And could he imagine who had appeared? Nahama had come back. She had taken over the kitchen at once, and that was why Leah had been able to come here to help the family settle. And did he know that Shimek and Nahama were now together?

That was why the harelip had been visiting every Sabbath in Sejera. Nahama was thinner, Leah said, her skin was clear, apparently a steady chaver was good for her. And Leah gave out a sour little laugh, unlike herself. Reuven remembered about Nahama and Moshe.

But quickly Leah returned to her truer nature. Nahama and Shimek seemed now really in love, she declared. She was happy for them, especially poor Shimek with his lip. And they were naturally being given the upstairs room. She herself had insisted.

Leah’s face remained cheerful, but her eyes turned away. As she stooped there on the ground, poking in a seed with her finger—her way of planting—Reuven put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. “When Moshe returns,” he said, “the kvutsa ought to begin putting up a few dwellings for couples.”

She turned her face up to her brother. “Reuven—maybe I shouldn’t have—I found some old letters from his family, in his box, and so I wrote to them. Only like a friend asking if they knew where I could reach him.”

Reuven nodded. If only in some way he could help—but what did he know of these things, of girls and of love?

Hadn’t she learned to trim blocks of stone in Jerusalem? When Yankel and Reuven went up to work, Leah came with them, but Kramer frowned. A woman. The stonecutters would not accept it.

Who could deny Big Leah? She sat by the foundations of the house and began to tailor the stones that had to fit around the window openings. Hearing the tapping of the hammer, the Sephardi, Abulafia, came over and stood watching. Smiling up at him, Leah showed him a squared edge and asked if he thought it smooth enough. He ran his fingers over it, half-smiled, half-sighed. To Yankel he remarked, “You have a big strong girl. She works as well as a man.” Then he admonished her, “Best you should get married.” And half-smiling, half-sighing again, the Sephardi went off to his own labor.

Still, the big girl was restless. The family hut by the river was crowded. Planks were laid over boxes so as to widen the stone benches, and Leah slept with Dvora, who snuggled in and chattered about the boy she had met on the boat, Yechezkiel—where could he be now? He had sworn he would come to find her! Then she tried to worm the truth from Leah. “And you, Leah, didn’t you have a someone, there in the kvutsa? They say that here a chavera if she really loves a chaver—”

“Dvoraleh,” Leah said, “it isn’t the way it seems from what people say. Our girls are very serious.”

“I know, Leah. Oh, I know. But if a chaver and a chavera really love each other—”

“Then with us it is the same as a marriage,” Leah said. “A marriage is only a formality.” Somehow she could not say what her little sister was really aching to know. That it had been. That to her it was like a marriage. Perhaps best that Dvoraleh should not fall into such an uncertainty. “We mostly have regular marriages.” And she told how Araleh and Saraleh got married and now had a baby.

Her mother she could not deceive. There came a moment when they were alone in the hut, and Feigel half-hesitated before bending to lift up a full pail of water for scrubbing the benches. “You’re carrying, Mameleh?” Leah blurted out. Her mother met her eyes a bit sheepishly, and then, fully as woman to woman, she said, “It happened. And you, Leah—you are no longer a maiden?” There was only an uncertain shred of questioning left in her tone.

At last release came, and Leah blubbered out the whole story, begging, “What do you think, what do you think, Mameleh? I know there are such men, men who feel trapped to remain for always with the same woman. And perhaps that is why—perhaps Moshe felt he had to run away from me?”

Feigel nodded and nodded, trying to bring her daughter’s trouble into her own heart, casting over, though she had had only her Yankel in her life, all the events between men and women that she knew of. She thought of those men who had gone to America and postponed sending for their wives year after year, until it somehow became known that they had secretly taken new wives in America. And there were men also who had in them a compelling need to be conquerors of women, whose entire nature seemed given over to leading astray young girls and young wives, and perhaps each time such men really believed they loved. Yet also as Feigel was trying to find some word to help her daughter, she herself experienced a wave of relief, for there might have been a pregnancy—at least this had not happened. Then too there came to her a puzzlement at herself, that she was not ashamed of Leah, or even greatly shocked. Had it happened at home in Cherezinka, she would surely have been distraught with fear that her daughter’s shame would become known in all the village, but here, surprisingly, even a kind of curiosity rose up in her, as though she were the one who was still a girl finding out things about life. And also there rose up a faint, a shocking sense of envy, for Leah had known how it was to lie nakedly with a man in pure love. (For surely, something within Feigel told her, they had been naked, and not, as throughout all of her own life with a husband, thrusting and receiving darkly among night-clothes under the covers.) Within all of her troubled pain for her daughter, she flushed, seeing this large vibrant girl, this woman her daughter, and imagining the man, even larger, a man so handsome that every girl—and Feigel believed this was as Leah said—wanted to fling herself at him.

What a fine couple they must have made. Feigel could see it, through Leah’s longing words—at last a man who was seemly for her. So it should be, so it should be on earth. Feigel could not find it in herself to utter a word of blame to her daughter, or to think, as Yankel would think in anger should he come to know, that the man’s desertion was God’s punishment for Leah’s wantonness.

“But Mama, what should I do?” The poor girl knelt and put her head in Feigel’s lap, her sorrow of a hugeness with her body. Then raising her eyes, Leah said in the timorous voice of a little child, “I sometimes think—if I should just go and search for him?”

The idea had only now declared itself in her, but seemed to have long been present.

“Wait, wait,” Feigel said. “Wait.” Was this the only word given to womankind? “From what you tell me, if he is such a one that cannot remain with one woman, what good would it do to run after him?”

“Then at least I would know…. And perhaps he is in trouble, Mama, perhaps he has been arrested—”

So they went over and over all the tormenting thoughts that Leah had already examined again and again, and still the only answer was to wait, at least until she perhaps heard something in answer to the letter she had sent his parents. She must wait.

Nevertheless the talk with her mother had relieved her heart, and, the hut being so crowded, Leah decided to return for a time to the kvutsa, where Nahama needed help, and where perhaps they would hear something.

All at once, and despite new baksheesh, the Turkish inspector halted the stone-laying on their walls. They should not have been so foolish, Kramer said, as to arch over the door and window openings; they should have filled the walls in solid, and opened the apertures later on. How could he pretend this was a stable? Even the horses of the Sultan had no such stables. For the present they had better stop their construction work. A new effort was being made in Constantinople itself for actual building permits.

But at least the fields were being laid out. A gnomish, self-important personage, Chaikin the surveyor, originally from Bialystok, with a diploma from Berlin, as he let you know at once, quickly made it clear to Yankel that he had come only as a favor to Jacques Samuelson, the representative of the Baron himself; he had laid out all of the settlements. He was now very busy laying out an entire Jewish city on the sands north of Jaffa. But he had come all the way here, for how could there rise up a new settlement in the land but that it was first marked out by Berel Chaikin?

By dint of flattery, and with Gidon running and carrying his instruments for him, Reuven managed so that the area in the chart on Kramer’s wall, penciled Chaimovitch, was the first to be measured off. Yankel and even little Schmulik, trudged out into the field, and small heaps of stones were set up as Chaikin measured the corners. At once, while the surveyor was still writing notations on his map, all the Chaimovitches set themselves to clearing rocks from their land, piling them where Reuven that first night had begun a fence. His stones proved almost exactly in the right line, they had to be moved only a bit.

The next morning there was the entire family, girls and all. It was a sight to see, and even Kramer rode out to behold it. Reuven, bare to the waist, was carrying a huge rock against his chest, and the father with a pickax was prying out another; the sturdy Gidon and his sister Dvora and the smaller girls and the little boy Schmuel, all were swarming over the field, each trying to carry larger and larger stones, clearing their land, and as the mother brought up breakfast for them with the toddler Avramchick at her skirts, the child began imitating his brothers and sisters, wobbling toward the fence with stones in his two hands. They would hardly leave off work to eat, Reuven hurrying back onto the field with a chunk of bread still in his hand. They wanted to plant before the heavy rains.

There they all were again at dawn, an hour before Kramer’s own men began on their jobs, Reuven and Gidon together prying away with a long iron bar at an enormous boulder. It was a bar they had borrowed from the settlement site, but though they should have asked his permission, Kramer let the matter go, watching them exert themselves until their forehead veins bulged out. But the rock was still unbudged. Then there came the father, Yankel, approaching with a mule harnessed to a drag. No—this could not be permitted—without so much as a by-your-leave!—

Indeed, catching sight of the overseer whom he had not expected so early, Yankel showed his uncertainty. “I will take him back in a moment,” Yankel called, “in time for your workers. You promised us a loan to buy our own pair of mules.”

The whole family was staring anxiously at the overseer. Strict as he was known to be, Kramer could not show himself hard-hearted. “See that you do,” he snapped. “And next time you had better ask me.” He rode off.

They managed, all of them pulling and pushing, along with the mule. Looking back, Kramer saw them yelling and slapping at the animal, the older brothers prying at the rock until it finally budged and was torn from the soil. They all let out a scream of triumph, the little girl and boy, Yaffaleh and Schmulik, and the toddler Avramchick, dancing around the stone as it was dragged away. Kramer even waved.

Gidon led back the mule. He took a handful of oats and fed the animal from his hand, pleased with the feel of the careful large lips against his palm.

Only a few days later, the manager called Yankel into his office in the cabin. “What was my part I have done,” Kramer said, and handed Chaimovitch a large document to read and sign. This was his allocation in the settlement that was to be known as Mishkan Yaacov. Yes, a name had been given. For here perhaps was the very site where Jacob had rested after his flight from Laban.

The overseer was beaming. A proud man—after all, he had been raised in the Baron’s colonies where every Jew thought himself a little Rothschild—he too wanted to build the Yishuv. He had kept pressing for their papers, he said—here they were. A loan for a pair of mules, a cow and seed.

Should he go to Damascus to buy the animals? Yankel wondered. Better in Mescha, Kramer advised; he had heard that Shlomo Idelson had a good pair of mules to sell.

On work animals Yankel considered himself an expert. That very day Kalman the drayman, who had appeared with a wagonload of floor tiles, could take him to Mescha on his way back. The next day, there came Tateh, driving his own wagon behind a high standing pair of work animals, and tied to the tail of the wagon was a black ewe with milk-filled udders nearly touching the ground, that Idelson had given him into the bargain! More! In a wicker crate in the wagon, Yankel had two fat hens, and at once Dvora took them in her charge.

As for the mules, they might have been the finest steeds in Arabia, the way Gidon was already currying them. Nor could even Reuven find any fault in the animals or in the price Abba had paid.

In the morning the procession went out to the cleared field. Though Yankel had dealt in horses and mules, he had never thrust a plow into the soil and was somewhat uncertain of himself before Reuven, who had plowed and sown.

From all the land around it, their section stood out, flat and clean, with the stones they had carried off lining the edges. Soon the soil would shine, open and black, the only portion that was plowed.

At the corner of the field, Yankel halted. Mameh too had come, and the whole family grouped behind the plow. This time even Reuven did not show impatience with his father as Yankel raised his beard to heaven and asked a blessing upon their field.

Who first would put his hands to the plow? Yankel hesitated. Perhaps it would be better if Reuven, who knew how—

“You begin, Abba,” Reuven said. “It isn’t difficult. Only hold on, and if you strike a stone, pull back.” On his own shoulder Reuven slung the small leather pouch of seed.

“Nu, God willing,” Yankel said, and took hold of the handles. He had forgotten the reins. He stooped, then put them around his neck as he had seen peasants do. Gidon begged, “Let me hold the reins.” It was such a fine morning. There were clouds but the air did not yet smell of rain. There was a breeze, and even from here one could see that the Kinnereth was rippled. Already birds were circling; the girls were there to shoo them off the seed. Yankel felt kindly, and let the boy take the reins. So they began.

It was indeed an odd feeling to follow the plow, different from what a man had felt at anything else in his life. It pulled you, and yet you were the master. So in the middle of his life he was transforming himself to a man of the soil.

Gripping the handles more tightly than need be, Yankel strode firmly, but almost at once the plow swerved. He could feel Reuven behind him, watching critically. With an effort of his shoulders, Yankel tried to straighten the implement, but the point stuck in the earth and the handles were wrenched from him as the plow stood on its end. Gidon pulled the beasts to a halt. “Slowly, slowly.” Reuven came up and with his mattock dug out a rock. At once the beasts pulled ahead and Yankel stumbled as the plow lurched forward. But then for a stretch it went smoothly and even in a straight furrow; he felt his son behind him, spreading the grain, and turned once and saw with what an expert movement of the wrist Reuven flung the seed so that it fell evenly as raindrops on the opened soil. Feigel and the girls stood behind in a cluster. Tears came to Yankel’s eyes, and this time too he whispered the Shehechiyanu. To have come to this moment!

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