Reading the first volume of Rebel and Statesman: The Jabotinsky Story by Joseph Schechtman has reminded me that it is now almost twenty-five years since I met Vladimir Jabotinsky, when in 1938 he visited our home in Kimberley, during a South African tour. I was then a boy of about eight years old; and it has become as rather a shock to me to realize that I can remember something which happened well over twenty years ago. And much of it I can remember vividly, for it was my first meeting with anyone whom I knew to be without question a great man. My father had told me many times how great a man Jabotinsky was.
The program—as I remember it—for Jabotinsky’s stay in Kimberley was that he was to arrive on the morning plane from Johannesburg, that he would be met by a small reception committee at the airport, and then come to our house for lunch. In the evening he was to address a public meeting in the Town Hall; he was to leave the next day for Cape Town. Kimberley is a small town, and no doubt Jabotinsky did not attach any special importance to his stay there; indeed, for the children in our family the awareness of our own unimportance helped to intensify our gratification at his visit. Nothing ever happened in Kimberley, we knew; yet it was to Kimberley that Jabotinsky was coming! And not merely to Kimberley, but to our own workaday commonplace house, which in its very familiarity was the obvious antithesis of anything which might have the name of greatness.
And in expectation of Jabotinsky’s arrival, the house itself became less familiar. It was cleaned, swept, scrubbed; the lawns were mown and watered and the flowerbeds were turned over; the front stoep and the cement path that led to the garden-gate were dyed with a special red substance which was brought to a high polish by the African houseboy. In the kitchen a new dinner service was unpacked out of straw and paper, and the back yard was swept and raked. My father and mother discussed at length the menu for lunch, and John the houseboy and Martha the cook-girl were coached again and again in the serving of the meal. We had had visitors before whom my parents had been anxious to please, even some Zionist notabilities among them, but never before had the preparations been quite so elaborate, and never before had my father been as meticulous about them as he was for this visit. To me all this seemed not in the least surprising, for, as I can remember telling Martha, “The man who is coming here has talked to kings.”
What kings, if any, Jabotinsky had talked to I do not know: perhaps I will learn from the second volume of Mr. Schechtman’s biography. At the time I did not bother to ask. It was enough for me to know that a man who had talked to kings was to talk to me and my brothers, and to my parents, and even perhaps to Martha. Our house shone for the visit; I wished that dusty, drab Kimberley would do the same. But I knew it never would. The burden of meeting the luminary with light was all our own.
In fact, the burden of greeting Jabotinsky was all my father’s. So far as the New Zionist Organization—as Jabotinsky’s movement was known—had a branch in Kimberley, it was my father. There were a few other “New Zionists” or “Revisionists” in the town, but their adherence to the movement was lukewarm, whereas my father’s was passionate. I suppose the differences between the “New” and the “Old” Zionists are pretty much forgotten by now, even among Zionists; but twenty-odd years ago these differences were, in our house at least, matters of passion, of my father’s passion. The Old Zionists, we were brought up to believe, were pitiable, narrow, cowardly; the New Zionists alone had courage and vision and understanding. The New Zionists boldly demanded not the vagueness of a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine, but nothing less than a Jewish State in an undivided country. They insisted that if the British mandatory power would not accede to this demand, then Britain had to be fought, physically if necessary, inside and outside Palestine. And if the Arabs rose in opposition to the Jews, then it was the duty of the Jews to abandon their defensive policy of havlagah, and lay claim to the country by the strength of their arms—not by the piety of their methods of settlement. The New Zionists campaigned too for a mass exodus of the Jewish communities in Europe, whom they declared to be threatened by imminent death. And of all this, and for all this, Jabotinsky was the instigator and spokesman.
I shall return later to these aims and claims, and will try to describe a tiny fragment of what they helped to lead to, twenty years later, with a world war, a European holocaust, a campaign of terrorism, and two brief Palestinian wars between. At the moment I merely want to say that as a result of being a follower of Jabotinsky, and holding the views described above, my father had suffered something like a minor boycott in the small Jewish community of Kimberley. He had lost those communal positions he had held before he had announced his views; he had of course resigned from the local Zionist society; and there were certain leading figures in the community who would not greet him when they passed him in the street. Out of all this my father undeniably wrung a certain satisfaction; and it is just for this reason that I cannot help wondering what would have happened to his admiration for Jabotinsky if he had known him for longer.
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In the event, Jabotinsky’s visit was not an unqualified success from my father’s point of view, though there was nothing that went wrong with it publicly. As I have said, the burden of organizing the visit was all his; and he carried it out efficiently enough. He was confident that Jabotinsky’s name was sufficiently well known to warrant hiring the Town Hall, the biggest hall in Kimberley, and he did so; he saw to it that leaflets were printed and distributed, and that advertisements went into the local press; he arranged for the mayor of the town to greet Jabotinsky on his arrival; he inspected the room in the hotel where Jabotinsky was to stay overnight. And our own house, on the day, was all that he wanted it to be.
The whole family went out to the airport as part of the reception committee. Apart from ourselves, there were three or four fellow Revisionists who had given some help to my father, the mayor, the local rabbi, and a reporter from the Kimberley daily. Jabotinsky was the first person I had ever met who had come in an airplane, but I hardly wondered at that; it seemed to me no more than fitting that he should come from the sky, in one of those planes which were then still rare enough to be stared at when they lumbered over the town. In a way, I was less impressed by the airplane than I was by the fact that the non-Jewish mayor of the town had felt himself called upon to join in the welcome to be given to our visitor.
Jabotinsky was small; he was dressed in a gray suit with a pale stripe; he seemed calm and self-assured, and more interested in us than I had expected him to be. But what struck me most of all about him was that he had some powder on his face. It was, I suppose, some kind of talcum powder which he had put on after shaving and which he had not bothered to wipe off; but then it seemed quite mysterious to me, and not a little embarrassing. What was even more embarrassing was that the mayor could not pronounce Jabotinsky’s name. The reception took place in one of the waiting-rooms of the airport, to which my father had conducted Jabotinsky from the barrier, and the little room seemed crowded by the time the mayor began to speak. He spoke hesitantly, poorly, I thought, but he went beyond what I had thought could be Kimberley’s worst when he called Jabotinsky “Mr. Jabber—Jabber—Jabbersky” every time he had to say the name.
I didn’t know which way to look; I tried particularly to avoid meeting the eyes of my brothers who, like myself, were scrubbed, combed, and in their best suits. But eventually I looked at Jabotinsky. To my surprise, he seemed undismayed at what the mayor was calling him; he stood calmly and gravely, his head inclined a little, listening to what was being said. Then in reply he spoke a few words; I can’t remember what they were, but I do remember feeling a little disappointed because he spoke with a “foreign” accent, like any other Jew of his age. I believed that all Jews who were not of my generation spoke like “foreigners,” but I was expecting Jabotinsky to be remarkable in every respect. He was not in this one.
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In what other respects he may have been remarkable, I can’t tell from my single meeting with him, for my memories of what passed after the reception at the airport are vague and disordered. I think that after the strain of meeting the visitor I became bored and overwhelmed, and as a result was able to take in little of what was happening around me. I know that my elder brother was so overwhelmed that no sooner did we get home than he climbed on his bicycle and simply rode away. Lunch was delayed in expectation of his return; but we ate the meal with an empty place at the table. I can remember Jabotinsky inquiring just before he left the house about my brother, and my mother assuring Jabotinsky that she was not worried, and was sure her son would be back. He was, at dusk, exhausted after his ride, and ravenously hungry. Of the lunch the only vivid recollection I have is the expression on my father’s face when John served up the dessert in the wrong bowls. Later in the afternoon my father took down the photograph of Jabotinsky which hung in our living room, and removed it from its frame; Jabotinsky then inscribed the photograph in a beautifully neat hand. And for the rest I remember the unfamiliarity of the house, with its shining stoep and garden path, the servants glistening in their starched whites, and the talk and the smoke and the bottles and glasses in the living room, where the grown-ups gathered after the meal. I did not go to the meeting in the evening, and I did not see Jabotinsky again, after he had left the house. The meeting, I gathered the next day, had been extremely successful. Jabotinsky’s name had been sufficient of a draw to more than fill the Town Hall with Jews and Gentiles, and my father was glad that he had charged an admission fee, to go to New Zionist funds, though others had advised him against it.
But Jabotinsky spent a longer time in Kimberley than he had planned to. Or rather, he spent the time near Kimberley. For after the meeting in the Town Hall he declared that he did not want to go to Gape Town the next day; he had no meeting to address there for a couple of days, and no appointments of any importance, and he thought that this would be a good opportunity for him to rest. My father, I understood, had offered him the use of our house, if he wished to leave the hotel; but Jabotinsky had declined the offer. What he wanted, he said, was to be alone, quite alone, in a small place where there would be no one at all who knew him. He wanted, he said, “to think,” “to ponder on certain matters”; he wanted “two days of solitary reflection.” To me the request seemed all that might be expected of a great man; it had an imperious, poetic air about it which I much admired. But my father was disconcerted; he did not understand the request, and I don’t think he altogether believed in its necessity. I could not then see the reasons for my father’s disapproval, but I do now. I believe he suspected Jabotinsky, his hero, his one great man, of being a little moody, a little sulky or contrary; of being determined to show his differentness from everyone who did not need two days for “solitary reflection.” And as a result of the change in schedule, my father had to do much telephoning and telegraphing to Cape Town and Johannesburg.
For his two days of solitary reflection, Jabotinsky went to a little village, Barkly West, which had once been famous as the scene of the country’s first great diamond rush. Barkly West is about twenty miles from Kimberley. For a South African dorp it is an oddly cramped little place, though it has a fine view across the Vaal river, with the rocks in the river-bed shining in the sunlight and a trickle of dark green water running between them. Along the banks of the river, for a distance of many miles, the ground was turned over into heaps by the diamond diggers, during the late 1860’s; some of these artificial hillocks are still bald, others are covered with a thin growth of grass and low camelthorn trees. But for the miles upon miles of these abandoned mounds, there is hardly any sign of human achievement around Barkly West; the veld stretches uncultivated to the horizon, on all sides.
There, for two days, Jabotinsky reflected.
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Time destroys us all and forgets us all; but it never releases the living from the compulsion to act. Jabotinsky must already have been a very sick man during his visit to Kimberley; he had really needed that rest in Barkly West, though he had been unwilling to admit (perhaps even to himself) why he had needed it. Two years later he was dead; of a heart attack, in New York.
Last year I went with my father, who is now in his middle seventies, to Israel. One of the things we did while we were there was to pay a visit to the museum, run by an Israeli political party, which records the struggle of the Irgun Zvai Leumi against the British mandatory regime. A room in the museum is set aside for relics of Vladimir Jabotinsky, for it was to him, even after his death in 1940, that the Irgun looked for inspiration. In the Jabotinsky room there are manuscripts, many photographs (one of them an enlarged copy of the photograph which had hung in our living room); in a glass case there is the uniform and ceremonial sword Jabotinsky had worn as an officer in the British army during World War I.
In the largest room there was the commemorative exhibition of the terrorist campaign, and memorials to the men who had taken part in it. There were photographs of the buildings the Irgun had blown up; models of the explosive devices which had been used; photographs of the young and middle-aged men who had lost their lives in the campaign, either in street fighting or by being hanged by the British. There was a knotted hangman’s rope draped across one board; suspended from another was the collarless overall which the men had worn on the scaffold. Diffidently, proudly, or solemnly, the men in the photographs stared across these ghastly exhibits to others less ghastly. To the photographs of a crowd of people with shocked faces staring at rubble and a corpse in the street; of illegal immigrants penned behind barbed wire on a tramp steamer; of a man being carried away by two of his fellows, his backside torn open by gunfire.
The worst that Jabotinsky had prophesied for Europe had come about; the wars he had anticipated in Palestine had been fought—and won. The State, for whose realization he had expended his life, was in existence. And the museum was deserted. The whole time we were there, only one other visitor wandered into it, a bored, lonely girl with a dissatisfied expression on her face; she looked as though she were passing the time while waiting for her date to arrive. And who could be anything but glad that the people outside avoided the place, with the smell of dust heavy within it and the horrors on display on its walls? The people outside had other things to do, other interests to follow, their own lives to live. And there was no irony in the reflection that that, just that, was Jabotinsky’s reward, the only certain vindication that anyone could offer on his behalf.
As we came out of the museum, it was not just the glaring sunlight and the hooting traffic which dazed and assailed me; it was my own ignorance. I remembered the visit of the great man of my childhood to Kimberley; I remembered my own incomprehension as to what the visit had been about. How much more, how much better, did I comprehend now? I knew at least what I had not known then: that time passes; that men act; that out of their acts a history is made. But to what purpose it was that we were hurled vertiginously through time and history, I knew as little as I had known in Kimberley, when I had stared in wonder and embarrassment at a small gray bespectacled man with powder on his checks and a respectful tilt of the head toward the strangers who had gathered to meet him.
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