Israel (49 page)

His mother was pleased that Herschel wished to pursue his education. She explained to him that there were two decisions he would have to make.

Was he willing to leave Palestine in order to go to school? Was he willing to resign from Degania if the membership, which had the authority to veto the kibbutz children's career plans, failed to agree?

Herschel thought hard. He knew that their money had been wisely managed over the years; paying for an education abroad was not a concern. But if he left Palestine there was no promise that the British would allow him to return. Besides, how could he resign from Degania? He told his mother that he would remain in Palestine and abide by the kibbutz's decision.

Permission was granted. Herschel would attend Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The kibbutz decreed that Herschel should stay on until there were youths old enough to take his place in the defense of the settlement. The delay chafed at him, but it
also worked to his advantage, for Hebrew University at that time focused on graduate-level research. The older Herschel was, the better he would do there.

In 1934 Rosie accompanied her son to Jerusalem. Degania granted them both leave, insisting that she go along to look after Herschel, so she said. Herschel suspected that his mother encouraged him to choose Jerusalem over Haifa as much for her own benefit as his. She seemed as excited as he. She would paint, she told her son, take classes, talk with other artists and stretch her mind and talent. New surroundings would inspire her. Degania was her home, but she needed a change.

Herschel welcomed his mother's company. The harsh demands of settlement life matured him beyond his years, but in another sense he led quite a sheltered existence within the rural family atmosphere of Degania. He knew how to track his way across Galilee and how to kill, but the thought of an urban maze of cobblestoned streets dismayed him. How could he haggle with a shopkeeper? No money changed hands at Degania. Farm life had afforded him an eyewitness understanding of the facts of life, but the girls on the kibbutz possessed the passion-numbing familiarity of sisters, and Herschel had never had a girl friend, never been in love.

But it was not merely a matter of finding Jerusalem intimidating; he wanted his mother with him for her sake as well as his. Since the death of his grandparents and the sale of the family home in Jaffa, his mother was feeling very much alone. Some of her brothers and sisters had left Palestine and some had stayed, but all were occupied with their own lives and families, and all had grown apart from Rosie since she moved to Degania.

Herschel was, quite simply, the only family his mother had left. He relished the role and the responsibility that went along with it. In that expectant, happy time, Herschel
assumed that he and his mother would forever be happy in one another's company, watched over by his father's ghost.

The bus to Mount Scopus groaned to a halt before the ponderous castlelike buildings that made up the university. News of the terrorist attack in the Arab quarter preceded Herschel. Several students collared him as he stepped off the bus, demanding to hear the latest.

Herschel told them he knew nothing, even as he itched to correct the rumor that the lrgun had blown up a coffeehouse filled with “innocents.” Nearby a student anxiously wondered when the police would make an appearance on campus. The university had only recently returned to normal since the last sweep. In that one the police, many of whom were fascist veterans of the repressive Black-and-Tans sent to quell the Irish Rebellion in the twenties, arrested Abraham Stern and David Raziel, former students and lrgun founders. An overzealous police inspector named Cairns ordered both men tortured when they refused to be interrogated. The lrgun issued Cairns a warning and then put forth his death warrant. Soon after that Cairns and another police official were killed by an lrgun bomb.

“The British will be coming up here again,” the student said worriedly. “They'll arrest someone—anyone—just to have a culprit.”

Herschel wandered away, heading for the shaded limestone courtyard behind the science building.
“They'll arrest someone—anyone
. . .” The ramifications of his actions were beginning to dawn on him. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving him tired, anxious, remorseful and angry at himself for suffering the weakness of uncertainty.

He entered the courtyard and sat down on a bench before pulling a book from his pocket. Pretending to read so as to avoid being disturbed, he tried to sort out the
jumble of conflicting thoughts and emotions washing over him.

Raziel and Stern were rotting in jail under torture, he reminded himself. Any action was permissible to protest such injustice, the atrocities committed against Jews and the British government's white paper, which capitulated to Arab demands that Jewish immigration be curtailed and that the Jews be forever condemned to minority status in Palestine. He ought to be proud of himself, not mired in this confounded funk.

Then he remembered the look of fear in the eyes of that Arab in suit, and fez, and his resolve to be a “good soldier” once again began to waver. To kill in a fair fight was one thing, but his spirit could not endure the thought of any more bombing attacks. It was true that Herschel wished to avenge his father's death, but bowling bombs into the midst of unarmed, unsuspecting victims hardly honored his father's memory.

If only Frieda were here, Herschel thought wistfully. I could do with some of her strength, her certainty.

They met during the spring of 1936, during Herschel's second year of school. He was lazing on the grass, his back against a tree and his nose in his calculus text, when he heard his name called. He looked up from his numbers and equations to see a pretty girl grinning down at him. She had a scattering of freckles across her apple cheeks and a bushy mane of coppery, wiry curls beneath a bright blue kerchief.

“You are Kolesnikoff, the English Jew?”

“I am descended from the English on my mother's side,” Herschel coolly allowed. He tried hard not to be mesmerized by the points of her nipples showing through the gauzy cotton of her blouse, but her grey-green eyes followed his fidgety stare, and she smiled, obviously reading his thoughts.

“B-but I was born here in Palestine,” Herschel continued, flustered and sounding it. “As was my mother.”

“A sabra!”

“What?”

“You never heard the term?” she asked, incredulous. Then she plopped down beside him, sitting crosslegged, carelessly hiking her calico skirt high above her knees.

Freckled also, Herschel thought, his pulse pounding, her thighs are freckled too.

“I'm Frieda Litvinoff.” They ended up talking for an hour discussing politics, school and their pasts. Frieda had come to Palestine in 1933, the year of Hitler's rise to power, when the Nazis were just beginning to blame European Jewry for the world depression. Frieda emigrated without her parents as part of the Youth Aliyah program financed by Hadassah. Now she was studying to be a nurse at the university hospital, also funded by Hadassah.

Herschel told her of growing up at Degania. They talked of his renowned grandfather and his paintings on exhibit at the university. It was during a lull in the conversation that Herschel remembered. “Frieda? Before, you were calling me by name. You were looking for me.” He smiled. “I'm glad you found me, but why—?”

“Many students here know English, but not so well as you, I've been told.” She tugged a packet of papers from between the pages of her nursing tomes and passed them over to Herschel. “Read them later, at home, in private,” she commanded.

“What are they?”

“Later, at home. Be sure no one sees them, understand, Kolesnikoff?” she repeated, her green eyes suddenly hard. “Those writings need to be translated into Hebrew, but not just any Hebrew—The language must be passionate, as fervent in expression as the English is now. It will take someone fluent in both languages, and perhaps somebody
with some understanding of how those English words of exhortation came to be written.”

Dumfounded, Herschel nodded.

“You can meet me here tomorrow at this same time to let me know if you'll do it.” Frieda patted his hand and stood up.

“Wait,” he called as she strode away. “Where do you live? How can I get in contact with you?”

“You'll see me tomorrow when you let me know,” she called over her shoulder. “Then we'll see, yes, Kolesnikoff?”

That night in the privacy of his bedroom while his mother cooked supper, Herschel read the documents. They were propaganda fliers from the Irish Republican Army demanding that the British leave Ireland and that it be declared a free state. The most recent was dated 1920, but Herschel was astounded at how up-to-date and relevant the words sounded when “Palestine” was substituted for “Ireland.”

By the time Rosie knocked on his door to tell him the food was on the table, Herschel was halfway through a Hebrew version of the first leaflet. After the meal he finished the work and then slid it between the scribbled pages of his lecture notebook. He hid the originals deep in his closet—safe, he hoped, from his mother's eyes. Then he went to bed, but he found himself wide awake. The passionate words he'd translated swirled endlessly in his brain, gradually melding with another sort of passion. When he finally dozed, it was to dream of Frieda. The night passed in a giddy half-sleep in which he and Frieda danced and laughed, in which they tumbled endlessly as his trembling fingers traveled her length, learning all the secrets of her body.

A virgin, he had yet to be romantically kissed. He hungered for that of which he had only a hazy knowledge.

By the next morning Frieda was his universe. Rosie
complained that he was acting thick-headed and demanded to know why, but Herschel did not tell his mother that he was in love.

That day he gave Frieda the translation and was thrilled at the pleasure she took in it. He began to spend part of every school day with her, and once or twice a week he saw her during the evening.

He quarreled with his mother about Frieda. Rosie at first attempted to reason with her son, warning him that a girl friend would distract him from his studies. When that failed to deter him, Rosie flatly forbade him to see Frieda. Herschel just as flatly refused to obey. Mother and son did not talk to one another for three days. It was the first time they'd ever seriously quarreled.

For all the turmoil Herschel's relationship with Frieda caused his mother, it was for a long while a chaste love. Herschel felt very unsure of Frieda. He was careful how he acted, even what he said. It was months before he even let on that he knew she was an operative for the Irgun.

“I couldn't tell you,” she confessed to him. “Your grandfather was a key figure in Zionism. You yourself were raised a socialist on a kibbutz. How could I expect you to be sympathetic to a revisionist platform that goes against everything—”

“Quiet a minute,” Herschel began, then paused. He'd been on the verge of saying that the differences between Zionist philosophies meant little to him, but he thought better of it. He knew Frieda well enough to realize that disagreement would make her far less angry than apathy.

“You're a nice boy, Kolesnikoff,” Frieda murmured, patting his cheek.

“Boy!” Herschel was stung. “I'm older than you.”

“Chronologically, yes, but that's all. You grew up a sabra. I grew up in Poland. I've been the butt of anti-Semitism, and not isolated hatred for Jews, but organized, government-condoned violent hatred. Believe me, what
Ben-Gurion preaches is wrong. There is no time to negotiate a political solution, not while millions of Jews in Europe wait to escape Hitler's net. Ben-Gurion and his supporters are prepared to accept whatever whittled-down scrap of territory the British see fit to hand us, but there are Jews who believe that the British must abide by their word. They promised us all of Palestine, including the Transjordan, and that is what we need to absorb the millions who must flee Europe. We need it and we shall have it, and now, not later, by force if necessary.”

Herschel was staggered by the intensity of her convictions. He knew of the rift between the mainstream Zionist movement and the fervently nationalistic revisionists led by the renowned Vladimir Jabotinsky. The autonomous Irgun Z'vai Leumi had loosely aligned itself with the rebels, but he'd never known their motivations. Yol and the other elders at Degania only ridiculed the revisionists as fascists. When he explained this to Frieda she laughed.

“Is it fascist to be more concerned with rescuing and protecting Jews than managing rural collectives or maintaining solidarity with the Russian Communists? I say that they are the fascists, not we. I left my parents behind in Poland; you know why? Because the Jewish Agency refused them papers on account of their revisionist beliefs. Only Jews with the appropriate ideological viewpoints were encouraged to emigrate.”

She began to tremble. Herschel, lost in her grey-green gaze, wondered if this was how she might look in his arms. “I love you,” he choked, and felt rising from his loins the glassy, thrilling sensation of his declaration soaring away.

Frieda patted his cheek. “Kolesnikoff, we have something very special. With you I am comfortable as with no one else. You must not spoil it.”

Herschel closed his eyes to hide his pain and then said
the same thing all over again, but in different words. “I want to join the Irgun.”

Frieda cocked her head in appraisal. “Why?” She must have realized, for she tried to be kind. “It doesn't matter. We can use you.”

Herschel's reveries shattered when a chattering group of students invaded the cobblestoned courtyard. They were loudly debating the grenade attack on the coffeehouse. Herschel had no stomach to listen to their views and dreaded being snared into the argument. He shut his book and left.

After a moment's indecision he decided to head for the gallery where his grandfather's paintings were on view. The brilliant optimistic landscapes of the Holy Land never failed to cheer him. Besides, Herschel spent a good deal of time in the gallery with Frieda, who greatly admired Glaser's work.