Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
When Rebecca felt the labor pains approaching, she went to Jaffa. A few
hours after she came, Ebenezer was born. It was a warm day in early spring
and a few days later, Nehemiah came, his face was joyful. He looked at his
son, the first son of the settlement, looked at Rebecca and saw her chilly
smile and looked at his son again. Doctor Hisin refused to let him hold
his baby, but when he looked at his son, he perceived, not how much he
looked like him, since the infant didn't yet look like anybody, but how
much the baby didn't look like Joseph. He examined every centimeter in
his baby's face and was then appeased, kissed Rebecca, and said to her:
Suckle the young lion, Rebecca, and she shut her eyes, picked up the infant, and reluctantly began suckling it.
About a month later, her milk was still flowing but her heart was cold.
She was returned to the settlement on Saturday night and the next day, the
rabbi was brought from the nearby settlement and circumcised Ebenezer Schneerson, and Rebecca stood there and watched the rite of circumcision
as if they were circumcising a stranger's child. And around Ebenezer, the
first in Judea, stood barefoot houses charred by the beating sun. Rebecca
hadn't imagined such a shrill light. She searched for corners of shade and
found a baby running around between her legs. Nehemiah's sublime ideas
didn't withstand malaria, typhus, and robbers. Heat waves would blaze and
the hot wind plowed furrows in the ground that hadn't been worked for
hundreds of years. The water was drawn from a nearby well, and when the
well was destroyed more wells had to be dug. Trees born beautiful and
green looked withered and weary. Rebecca observed her son, her house, and
began weeping the tears that had stood behind her eyelashes the day she
came to the Land of Israel. Eight years, Rebecca wept nonstop. A very little
bit of the ardor of Nehemiah's speech clung to his acts. The house he built
listed to the side, the nails would come out on the other side of the wall, the
saplings were never planted in time and were never trimmed in time, the
water came late to the ditches he didn't know how to dig properly.
The Baron's official, smelling of eau de cologne and wearing charming
clothes, came with the Arab workers and the workers uprooted what was
left of the citrus fruits. Instead they planted more vineyards. For some
time, the synagogue turned into the official's residence. Little girls from
distant settlements played a piano there that had been brought on a cart
and the playing filled the broad street of the night with a dull melancholy.
The flies multiplied feverishly, the pipes rusted, the roofs didn't stand in
the wind, two girls from the Galilee went to live with the official in the
synagogue and didn't come out of the house for a week. Drunken shrieks
were heard even in the distant fields. One night, a flock of vultures was
seen waiting for corpses. People were scared and started praying, but there
was nowhere to do it. They prayed in the street, in the field, on the carts,
in the barns where the cows refused to give enough milk. Nathan went
outside and yelled: Not yet, not yet, and Nehemiah went to drive the vultures away with a stick he had cut from a hollow old fig tree that collapsed
and died. The vultures didn't flee. Every morning, one of the farmers had
to clean the house of the official who kept spitting black watermelon seeds
all over. At night, the men gathered and Nehemiah persuaded them to
rebel against the official and throw him out. The official discovered that
Nehemiah was fomenting a rebellion and incited the farmers against him. At night, Nehemiah was called to the official's house to clean the latrine.
Nehemiah refused to go. He was ordered to leave the settlement. Everything was mortgaged and he had no grounds to claim his plot of land. The
Arab police came with the Turkish modir and the white-clad official accompanied them. He tried to smile in French. The Turk was hypnotized by
the splendid French and kissed him on the mouth. One of his choked girls
groaned, Rebecca laughed through her tears and went into the house, looked
around, and said: This isn't our house, Ebenezer. Nehemiah and Rebecca
packed their belongings, the members stood ashamed but didn't lift a finger. Anybody who dared help Nehemiah could expect to be expelled. At
that time, Nathan was in the nearby settlement in the middle of an argument with the local rabbi about the year of shemittah when the land must
remain uncultivated and the pointlessness of following its commandments.
Nehemiah walked with his belongings to the edge of the settlement and
at the collapsed dead hollow fig tree, he built a hut. Nehemiah called the
hut Secret Glory after the son of Rachel Brin, and only later on, when the
haggling was over and the official dismissed, did Nehemiah return to his
house and Secret Glory was forgotten and turned into an area overlooking
the path of the cemetery, where the first members of the settlement who
died were buried, even though the first dead woman was buried in the
nearby settlement, but then Nathan still fought the idea that death could
live with the builders of the new Land of Israel. Rebecca went on weeping and in her mind's eye she saw the splendid carts of America and a future full of baskets of flowers and American officials equal to her beauty.
Her tears didn't stop even when Nehemiah drove away the vultures, and
their improved house was nicer this time and Ebenezer started crawling on
its floor.
At that time, a new official came who was more audacious than his predecessor, didn't spend time with young girls, but hated what he called
those ignorant farmers with a blind hatred. He had big plans to bring ships
up to Jerusalem to ram its wall and make it a big and fine open city, but
nobody heeded his ideas. He came to the Land because he heard songs of
a man who would sing in the cabarets of Jewish intellectuals in Poland and
his name was Joseph Rayna. In Ha-Tsefira he read that the Crusaders had
brought a ship up from Jaffa to Jerusalem and used it to ram the wall, he
also read in a Russian newspaper that Jesus was then seen on the Mount of Olives, and after a week-long procession around the city, the wall fell.
The official hired fifty Arabs who tried to bring a rotting Greek ship up
from Ashkelon to Jaffa and from there to Jerusalem, but in Ramle, the Arabs
ran away and because he was left without a ship and without employment,
he was sent to the settlement that embittered the lives of the officials. He
was chosen for that purpose by an official who met his orphaned comrade
on his way from Jerusalem to Jaffa. He was so bored by the monotony of
the road that he refused to look at it. The official heard Nehemiah lecturing at the community center on the citrus fruit that was to make the place
flourish and discovered that, in litigation over the land of his hut, differences of opinion were revealed in favor of the Turkish side. He brought
police from the splendid house of the Kamikam in Wadi Hanin and arrested Rebecca and Nehemiah and a few other people, put them in handcuffs, and took them to Ramle. Three Arab mukhtars, who had previously
received a decent bribe, swore honestly that Rebecca Schneerson had
whored with them in the fields near Hakhnazarea. The Arab mukhtars,
who received a decent gift from a Sephardi Jew from Jaffa, who was urgently brought in a wagon hitched to four horses along with a drunk old
German doctor named Dr. Kahn, tried to change their testimony, but were
beaten in the courthouse and testified again what they had testified before. Rebecca looked straight at them, stopped weeping, sharpened her
beauty, and they were filled with a fear that chained their body and they
felt they couldn't move. Then, they opened their mouth and, in the eyes
of the witch, they said: We were wrong, kill us, but we were wrong, that
woman didn't whore with anybody, we lied. The big governor who came
from Jerusalem didn't want to roil the waves and acquitted Rebecca. The
Arabs were afraid but he also acquitted them. He delivered a venomous
speech, but since he was tired and weary from a pleasant leave in Beirut,
he delivered his speech in blunt words but with eyes shut with fatigue. He
said that Zionism is a crime, that the Jews want to banish the masters of
the Land, and why all of a sudden did they come to a land that wasn't
theirs? Did they decide to crucify messiahs here again? he asked. Since
most of those in attendance had no idea that the Jews had ever crucified
messiahs they looked at the governor's moving lips with vague awe. The
Jews, he said, were a superfluous people, wherever they were they caused
trouble and wanted to start a world revolution. They are ruled by the El ders of Zion who sit in a secret house in Jerusalem and direct the world.
They want to rule the whole globe, he said, and Rebecca woke him from
his fantasies and said: Maybe the whole cosmos, but since he didn't understand the word and was very tired, he laughed. And when the governor
laughs, all the Turks laugh too. Before he left, the governor told Rebecca:
After all, that Jesus was also one of yours, and only Mohammed came in the
desert and not from some hole of a Jewess. But then a rich man from the
Jaffa center arrived with a Turkish modir, whose bribe amounted to a fortune and the matter was settled, and Nehemiah's lands were returned to
him and he built a hut on the land, and the house that remained empty
was turned into a chicken coop that Rebecca fixed up afterward.
Tape /-
To bring order into things, a famous tea agent was brought who would
write fiery articles about Zionism as a spiritual center. And the wise old
man, who was the first Jew who saw Arabs in the Land, wrote a fiery article
and for the first time since Nehemiah killed prophets in his room at night,
he hit a beloved and admired person. The matter was forgiven. People said
that Nehemiah suffered enough when he saw foreigners vilifying his wife,
who hadn't stopped weeping. A Jew from the committee argued with the
agent and the official who wanted to bring a ship up to Jerusalem. They
stood next to the well the official had taken for himself and distributed
its water according to his own malice. He stood there wearing an officer's
uniform unidentified with any known plan, a woman held a parasol over
his head, but the argument ended to everybody's satisfaction. The water
was transferred to the authority of the committee, the house was sold,
and Nehemiah won the official tenancy of his house. One youth slaughtered himself at the well in torments of malaria. Those who came to his
funeral were arrested and taken in handcuffs to Ramle. Rebecca saw a
Turkish shavish approaching her as she went to visit Nehemiah, who was
one of those arrested. After a hefty ransom was paid, they were all released. Rebecca didn't forgive the shavish who looked at her and lusted
for her. When he approached her in the garden of the Russian church and
tried to lift her onto the mare, she kicked him. He chased her to her
house in the settlement. At the house Rebecca shot the mare and the
shavish thought he had been shot himself and lay on the ground a whole day without moving. The fellow who slaughtered himself lay dead in the community center, and the men decided to cancel the excommunication of
Rabbi Nathan and mark the plot of Secret Glory as a cemetery for the
settlement. Horowitz said: If Yashka died (that fellow who committed
suicide), we're all liable to die and it's impossible to bury everybody in
another settlement, since we can't have one settlement all for the living
and another all for the dead. And after they dug the first grave, they put a
fence around the plot. Nehemiah delivered an excited speech about the
torments brought by the purification of salvation and resurrection. Excited
by Nehemiah's impressive words, the men sat and argued what to call the
cemetery. The names "House of the Eternal" and "Cemetery" and "House
of the Next World" didn't appeal to them. Nehemiah thought there was no
need to give it a name. It's enough that we know, he said, that we'll be
buried there. But Jews yelled and somebody suggested calling the place
"Roots." Nehemiah said: Absolutely not. Anybody who calls his first cemetery "Roots" calls the Jewish state that will rise here "Hill of Graves" and
that's forbidden. But his words fell on deaf ears and the name remained.
The official left one day and didn't come back. The synagogue was renovated and was once again a place for prayer. The citrus fruits were also
planted and flourished. The new authority was more enlightened. The
Turks were busy with the Young Turks' revolution and were bound by
secret letters that would come in the middle of the night from anonymous and veiled emissaries. Nehemiah again gave speeches in the community center and in Roots. Rebecca didn't stop weeping, and between her
and Nehemiah grew Ebenezer. The Turks, who were waiting for the end
of the revolution, said: The Jews will kill each other all by themselves and
that will save us gallows and expensive bullets. From pogroms we came,
Rebecca told Ebenezer, who didn't yet understand the meaning of the
words, and to pogroms we shall return. Between the speeches, Nehemiah
had to fertilize, chop, plow, and sow. He was delicate and fragile. The climate of the Land was hard for him, and he struggled with it in a silence
produced by a lover's envy. The farmers did win a certain freedom but still
felt like slaves. In Nehemiah's house, Rebecca's depressed spirit prevailed
and a foolish child got underfoot. The drought that year was worse than the
last year and some of the new citrus groves died, but in the winter the new
saplings that had been planted grew as high as a child and the rain came in time and then came the Bedouins and started grazing their flocks on the
young saplings. When the farmers resisted the Bedouins, they attacked at
night. The Arab guard ran away and appeared the next day accompanied by
Turkish police and asked for the money he was owed. Within a few days,
the area was devoured by the black goats. The carts that went to the distant fields were attacked by the friends of the guard who didn't get his
gold, even though the Turks got what was coming to them to ignore the
place. One day the young farmers hid in the cart, with sticks in their hands,
covered themselves with straw and sacks, and when they were attacked
by the Bedouins, they burst out of the cart, about twenty of them, and
beat the Bedouins roundly. The next day, Nehemiah made a long speech
into the night: our force is our reply, he said, blow for blow.