The mass movement of Jews from Europe and their ingathering in Israel goes forward month by month. In these two pieces of personal reportage we are given vivid glimpses of the sight and feel of this extraordinary moment in Jewish history, together with some sense of the emotions it stirs in the hearts of the “diaspora” beholder-who is also part of the story. The first account, a report on a typical embarkation from Europe, was written by Robert and Martha Levin, though it is told as through the eyes of Robert. Mr. Levin, a graduate of City College, has published in the New Mexico Quarterly and Collier’s. Mrs. Levin is a graduate of Hunter College and has taught English in the New York City high schools. Juliette Pary, who describes the scene in Israel, in the report that follows, is a French journalist who, after a long stay in Israel, has just returned to Paris. Her article has been translated from the French by Ralph Manheim.
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For hours I have been wandering through the port of Haifa, under the broiling sun, looking for an obscure address; finally I meet a passerby who knows his way around. After giving me directions, he leans towards me with his wrinkled, sunburnt face, and, addressing the obvious newcomer like a member of the family, asks in that tone of affectionate mockery which belongs only to Yiddish: “Woman, why do you look so unhappy?”
“Because I’ve been sweating in this sun for three hours.”
“Pooh! We’ve been sweating in the sun for thirty years and we’re still going strong.”
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In the streets, in the buses, cafés, public places, you find much less politeness and much more real warmth and helpfulness than in other countries. It’s an ill-mannered family, but it’s a family.
Those who have been living here a long time welcome the newcomers, the olim, like younger brothers. They bully you a little, but they take care of you just the same. And together they settle down in the abandoned paternal home, sweep away the wreckage, remove the spider webs, nail things together, paint the walls, and josde the awkward bystander.
When you debark in Haifa along with some five hundred immigrants, and leave the port with your bundle of possessions on your back, there is always someone to teach you the value of the coinage, to hoist you up on the bus, to fling some insult at you for gazing into the air instead of taking your turn, to make some younger person give you his seat:
Let her sit down, don’t you see she’s just arrived. What’s she going to think of the people of Eretz?
Who cares what she thinks!
We do! Give her your seat!
He gets up, grumbling; the whole bus participates in the incident: “Where are you going, lady? You have relatives in the city? Or children in some kibbutz? Friends? In which one? Oh, I have a cousin there.”
Everyone has a cousin everywhere. And if you dig a little, you find you’re related to everybody. . . . Aren’t we all David’s grandchildren?
And that is what creates this familiar, mocking, gruff, and cordial tone, this mixture of arrogance and comradeship. Each man feels called upon to educate his neighbor. The country is a vast rehabilitation center, a sanatorium for returned exiles, a cooperative of reclassified workers. Nowhere else in the world do people take such an interest in the affairs of perfect strangers. But how can one speak of strangers? Why, we’ve known each other for three thousand years; we’ve been separated for two thousand years, but now we’re together again. . . .
At nightfall we are standing in line, waiting for a bus. My companion, who has children of her own, catches sight of a very young woman with a tiny infant in her arms. Without preamble, she assaults her: “Are you out of your mind, keeping a newborn baby out at this time of night?”
Under my breath, I ask my friend: “You know her?”
“No.”
“She’s going to tell you to mind your own business.”
But in this I am mistaken. The young woman answers in a tone of humble apology: “I wanted to show him to his aunt and it got late. . . .”
“Don’t let it happen again!” my friend decrees.
“Oh no, I’ll never do it again!” Just like a child promising to be good.
I whisper to my friend: “But Rachel, what business is it of yours?”
“Why, of course it’s my business. The health of the children of Eretz is everybody’s business.”
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In a taxi taken by six of us collectively—people who have missed a bus sometimes group together and take a cab—an old-timer notices that there are some new arrivals among us and does us the honors of the city, “Go slow,” he tells the driver. “Pass by the places of interest. We have to educate them, don’t we?” The driver—a German intellectual, as one might expect—is most cooperative.
A pretty young passenger complains: “Na, I don’t like your Palestine. The people aren’t friendly, you’ve got to work like a dog. I tried to work as a waitress in a café, but tips are forbidden, so where’s the percentage? If my husband weren’t here, I wouldn’t stay!”
The volunteer guide opens the door: “Do as you like, lady. We won’t keep you. We don’t need cranks. Go and have your nails polished somewhere else.” Frightened, the lady huddles in her corner. “Oh no, I didn’t mean. . . .”
The guide turns to the others—and, like a deputy seeking the approval of his electorate, asks: “Was I right to put her in her place?”
“And how!” replies the spoken chorus. “If she doesn’t like it here, she can clear out.”
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The buses are always full to bursting: people are always on the move in Palestine. Everyone has a son or a daughter in a kibbutz, a relative in the army, another who has just landed. They are all perpetually visiting each other, bringing each other provisions. People of all ages are on the move, all laden with bundles: “We’re going to see our children on the farm,” or “We’re bringing a chicken to grandma in Tel Aviv.”
But too many chickens and eggs are diverted to rich customers who pay fantastic prices for them, and the government has set a limit to the amount of farm produce that one is allowed to carry; every bus is stopped on the road by policemen who search the passengers’ baggage like customs officers. I was unaware of all this, and when a bearded individual asked me politely: “May I put my packages beside you?” I replied innocently: “Why not?” I was surprised that no one else had acceded to his request. With his long beard and long caftan, he looked very medieval and picturesque.
“Is that your package?” the policeman asked me.
“No, it belongs to this gentleman.”
“Oh, it belongs to this gentleman. But he’s got other poultry with him.” And turning to my bearded neighbor: “All right, get off.”
The policeman triumphantly brandishes a basket full of cackling chickens, the passengers all exclaim at once, my medieval friend, on his way off to pay his fine, looks daggers at me and cries out with a gesture worthy of King Lear: “You have murdered me!”
But public opinion in the bus decides: “She was right not to encourage the black market!”
A constant intimacy is engendered by the general lack of space. A hotel room costs at least a pound, so you take a bed for thirty piasters, in a room with two or three other people; you sleep, eat, wash, and dress in company; you live constantly in a dormitory, in an atmosphere of boarding-school, inn, and barracks, all in one. You feel like a conscript, constantly harried by those drill sergeants, the old settlers.
Immigration dominates the scene; every dwelling must be ready at all times to take in new arrivals. Every bed has a cot hidden under it in the daytime. Extra pallets are a necessity, not only on the collectives but in private homes.
All sorts of people can arrive at any moment, and they are as likely to spend the night as a visitor in a European home is to accept a cup of coffee.
I am visiting a family of friends at Kiriat Amal, a working class suburb of Haifa. There are five of us sleeping in one room: the mother, her sister, two babies, and I. All of a sudden the husband arrives, a Soldier on pass, and brings another with him. Now there are seven of us. Extra mattresses are brought out. The double bed holds three. And somehow we all get to sleep.
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The plane from the Negev lands at two in the morning, and we are loaded into a truck. Those passengers who know where they are going get off along the road.
“Where are you getting off?” some soldiers ask me.
“I have no idea, I don’t know this part of the country.”
“You have money? You know the town? No? Well come along to the transit camp with us until tomorrow.”
At the camp, the night guard doesn’t content himself with giving me a pallet and two blankets. “You must be hungry. Half of my supper’s left over, and there’s all the bread you want. Tell us what’s going on in the Negev.”
The transit camp is supposed to be a military establishment, but amid the snores of the soldiers, I hear the whimpering of babies and the groans of old men. In the morning, the officers raise hell but they arrange transportation for everybody. It’s just a family matter, after all!
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I arrive at an isolated kibbutz where I have a friend; they don’t even let me say his name: “You’ll tell us later whom you want to see. First sit down and eat.”
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To conceive this mode of life, you must remember the size of the country and the population figure, which has not yet reached a million.
From the top of a water tower on the plain of Kfar Saba, I can literally see the whole land of Israel. My glance takes in the entire breadth of the new state from the sea to the mountains: I am amazed at the dwarfed proportions of this narrow band of earth. So many fires smouldering on so small a hearth.
They tell a story which for being Palestinian is no less Jewish:
In the middle of the morning an Israeli sees a friend in traveling dress and asks him: “Where are you going?”
“I’m making a tour of the State of Israel.”
“And what are you going to do this afternoon?”
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So it goes without saying that the State of Israel is a small world. Wherever you go you’re sure to meet an old friend, from Russia or Germany or Switzerland or France, someone you’ve known in an internment camp, a youth hostel, a “school for occupational readjustment. . . .”
Early one morning I am wandering about in the deserted vineyards not far from Tel Aviv.
An angry voice halts me. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m taking a walk.”
“Oh, she’s taking a walk. Isn’t that fine! We’re taking a walk at five o’clock in the morning in a country that’s still at war!”
It seems that I have strayed into forbidden territory, and the sergeant insults me in Yiddish and Hebrew. . . . Suddenly, taking a closer look at me, he cries out in pure German:
“Good lord! Don’t you know me? We were interned together near Toulouse.”
“You look better than you did then, Herr Meyer!”
“I’ll bet I do. There’s no Pétein here!”
Herr Meyer, who was a sergeant in the Germany army in 1914, is in seventh heaven to be back in uniform. He shows me through his camp: “Would you like to see the Arab village? It’s off limits, but between old friends from France!. . .”
And in the purest Berlin dialect: “The Arab chief around here was a fine guy. Why, Solomon Rabinovitsch was his blood brother. He left against his will, the English made him leave. Solomon and he opened up their veins and mixed their blood. That’s right, Solomon’s the one who was in the camp at Castres where there were so many lice back in ’42. He’s a soldier now, I’m a soldier and so’s my son. Come and see us, my wife’ll make you a good cup of coffee, we’ll talk about Berlin and Toulouse. . . . It’s only a couple of steps, see, over there-the little white house under the palm trees!”
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According to the needs of the moment, I say: “Einenni medaberet beivrit, ani itonait tzarfatit (I don’t speak Hebrew, I’m a French journalist),” and the “French” even more than the “journalist” brings me help and sympathy; or I represent myself as an immigrant who has just landed, and explain myself in a harmonious mixture of German, English, French, Russian, and Yiddish. This gets me some rebuffs, but in other circles I am immediately accepted: she’s one of us, no need to give ourselves airs.
I look for work—not to gather material for some article on “A Month with the Workers of Israel,” but quite simply to make some money. Piloted by a friend who was formerly a bookseller in Nuremberg and Paris, and who now raises chickens in a German colony known for its model hen houses and surnamed “Kfar Cocorico,” I go from farm to farm in search of work.
Of all my friends, the bookseller is the only one who takes my thirst for manual labor seriously. Perhaps he has not even read Gordon, who early in this century preached regeneration by manual labor to the first pioneers of Zion; but to make up for it, he has read and sold to other readers the finest in European literature; he knows Mallarmé and Stefan George by heart; out of habit he has on his table, among other things, the very latest work of Hermann Hesse and the literary magazines of Paris and London, which he takes great delight in not reading; his bony frame, his brickred face present the phenomenon of full vigor at the age of fifty-five; after a century of intellectual strain, his body has come into its own, and my friend the bookseller goes about in khaki shorts attending to his rabbits, his chickens, his kitchen garden, hires out for extra days of work with the neighboring farmers, and tells me, without a word of theoretical justification: “I am happy.”
Like a good many German Jews, he became a Zionist only thanks to Hitler. In Palestine it is not a movement or an idea to which he has become attached, but the earth: adama. He does not deify it, he simply loves it and this love transfigures his being. It gives him substance, base, anchor, such as he never obtained from his intellectual labors. His sunburnt skin is the same color as the earth; lovingly, he points out to me the deep red color of the clay in which he has dug trenches (for the front is barely two miles from the village and men of all ages go to the front); and forgetting his Western European refinement, he takes me by the lapel like a plain Polish Jew: “You’ve got to dig in this earth, you’ve got to batde with its weeds, you’ve got to live with its redness. Then you’ll know what I feel.”
Unfortunately the farmers are not of his opinion; they look me over contemptuously. “Neither muscle nor experience. We need experienced women if we can’t have strong men. Come back for the orange harvest, that’s about all you’re good for.”
We keep on looking in the German colony: “Good morning, Mrs. Bloch, how is your egg-plant doing?”—“It’s been too dry this year.” Mrs. Bloch, quite chic in her freshly ironed apron, stands in the middle of her model barnyard and says, “Lieber Freund, won’t you try some of my feed for your chickens?” It is exacdy the same tone in which eighteen years ago she would have said: “Lieber Freund, won’t you have another cookie?”
The bookseller introduces me to his brother, a physician, who gloomily predicts that like so many European women I shall catch some tropical disease if I start working in the hot sun without going through a period of acclimatization. . . . The two brothers get into an argument on the subject of manure. “I tell you, Gottfried, we’ve got to manure that potato field right now.”—“And I tell you, Hellmuth, that for the present it is not scientifically necessary. . . .” Little by little the conversation turns to the history of the German colony, the origin of the Hebrew place-name, the Greek roots that occur in the Hebrew language. “I tell you, Gottfried, that from a strictly philological point of view this name is of Greek origin.” “And I assure you, Hellmuth, that according to Pauly-Wissowa. . . .”
In the end all we find is a job as dishwasher in a collective kitchen (which would almost certainly give me eczema of the hands), a place as maid in the house of a blind old man (“Take it,” the local welfare worker advises me. “In Eretz it’s best to take the first job that turns up. When people see that you mean well, they’ll help you to find something better.”), and finally a brilliant position, at nineteen piasters an hour, delivering milk for the cooperative: this involves getting up with the sun, driving a donkey cart through the village, and leaving a can of milk in front of each house. What could be simpler? I am very much tempted. . . . But since milk is liquid, the donkey obstinate, and I myself unpredictable, I can’t help thinking of the cost of the spilt milk. I decline. . . .
The ex-bookseller is bitterly contemptuous: “You’ll never do anything but write!”
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The moments when a wandering Jew is tempted to remain in Israel (and he would have no Jewish blood in his veins if he were not tempted) are not those when he is subjected to propaganda, or when he watches parading troops or admires the conquests of colonization. It is in the modest, unforeseen moments of everyday life that you think of staying here: in the buses, trucks, shops, barracks, sheds, where you rub elbows with old Jewish mamas from the depths of Poland, with immigrants barely arrived and already armed with a pick-axe or a rifle; with former shopkeepers sweating under the weight of their duffelbags, with those incredibly beautiful Yemenite children and those incredibly ugly Yemenite old men; those swarthy, oriental-looking soldiers who have come from Germany via the French maquis; those blonde, husky farm-girls born in Argentina of Russian parents; those curly-headed, blue-eyed Italian girls born of a Serbian mother and an Algerian father. . . . And this whole atmosphere of laughter, of rough jokes, of favors done with an oath, of thick, savorous bonhomie. . . . It is a Jewish story, and more. It is Jewish history.
For a few minutes I stand motionless watching all these people running, sweating, familiarly accosting total strangers, hanging on to the running board of the bus, insulting and helping one another in the same moment, hurrying without haste, like the members of one big family, returning home after a long day like a multitude of prodigal sons sure of a hearty welcome. . . .
Even when the faces, the silhouettes, the costumes, are strange to me, I still recognize that familiar quality that I have found in the Rue des Rosiers in Paris, in those little medieval shuls, in the shabbes of an old Biblical Jew, in the tales of Peretz and Mendele, in Heine’s Hebrew Melodies, in the songs of the Jewish children returning from deportation, in the sudden mocking, tender, sing-song intonation of assimilated European Jews when they remember their grandfathers.
This is my people, my people in its own house. Here my little Jews are at home. The Levys have returned. True, they’re a litde rambunctious, they put their elbows on the table. . . . Can one reproach them for that? Little by litde they will learn good manners.
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This immigration consists of incredibly heterogeneous elements, yet all in all the amalgam has been successful. True, there is some friction between different sections of the population, the immigrants from Eastern Europe express contempt for the “Yekkes” (Germans), the Yekkes in turn look down on the “Frenke” (North Africans), the Europeans turn up their noses at the Yemenites; but the sense of solidarity is strong: that famous Jewish solidarity which is so much spoken of but which in the dispersion is so often nothing but a phrase.
It is hard to describe the gruff amiability with which the first comer will take you in hand; for one rascal who will try to rob you, there are a hundred who will carry your bags free of charge and waste hours showing you around. We saw a litde of this sentiment in France early in 1945, when the French prisoners returned from Germany. But they had been gone for only five years—the Jews are coming home after two thousand. Only a very old nation can have such an innate sense of historical continuity, and the tender, self-mocking voice that goes along with it. . . .
One sunset there are ten of us, armed with rifles and hand-grenades, in the desert of the Negev, exploring a wadi, a natural stony hollow; we are silent in this immense cavity lined with flat stones, amid the infinite sandy waste. . . .
“Oi, oi, oi. . .” a soldier suddenly chants. He is about forty, the oldest among us, a former Hungarian intellectual. He takes his head in his hands and intones his words, like an old Jew praying: “Oi, Moses our father, you really weren’t so smart! Forty years you dragged us through the desert to bring us to a country like this. You couldn’t have picked Switzerland?”
How passionately they become attached to this landscape which like myself they secredy detested at first: it is their home, just as the shack with the army cot is home. The native-born are eager to see Europe, and when they go they write enthusiastic letters about the dense forests, the snowy mountains, the green meadows; but soon they feel homesick for the harsh, stony land of Israel. They experience the pride of transforming it, of being its creators, of improving on the Lord’s work: every shrub is planted by them, every bit of land is cleared of stones by their hands before it can be plowed and planted. Well yes, it will take three hundred years before the woods can grow up into forests, before the little strips of green can become prairies; but what are three hundred years to a Jew?
Slower, heavier, stronger than you could ever have imagined him in the lands of persecution, where he was all nerves; already remade by the heat of the sun, he toils, he sweats, he clears the ground, he raises up children. . . .
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