No Time for Tears (13 page)

Chavala’s happiness could scarcely be contained as the wagon slowly made its way back toward Jerusalem. There had never been a day in the past year she had not dreamed of this moment.

When they finally arrived she all but ran up the long flight of stone steps and threw open the door. At the sight of her father she could not hold back the tears. Holding his frail body close, she was shocked by the change in him … he had aged so. Backing off to look and smile at him, she saw that his face was creased with what seemed a thousand folds. His back was more bent, his hands gnarled with painful arthritis.

“You’ve come home, Chavala my children have come home, my prayers have been answered …”

Chavala swallowed, knowing that they had not just returned for him … but for her … and that they would soon be leaving again…

Sheine looked knowingly at Chavala, and in spite of herself took pleasure in her sister’s obviously guilty feelings of pain … she knew they were going on to Zichron. Chavala had mentioned it in the letter that had come four days ago. “Yes, papa has indeed prayed, welcome back,” she said smiling, “and Dovid, you’re black as an Arab. But look at you, Moishe. You left a boy and came back a man…”

“You’re the only one who hasn’t changed, Sheine,” Dvora answered with anger close to the surface.
You’re as spiteful as ever, you haven’t forgiven us for leaving
, she wanted to shout out, but for the sake of her father she held her tongue.

Raizel could have told Dvora that she was wrong, that Sheine had in fact changed more than any of them … Quite by accident Raizel had found a diary Sheine kept, and although she knew it was very wrong to invade Sheine’s private thoughts, once she’d begun it was impossible to stop. Page after page was filled with her love and longing for Dovid … how she dreamed of him making love to her in the night. She alone knew the source of Sheine’s bitterness, understood it, and so tried to please, even appease her poor, tormented sister. No question, Sheine suffered, had suffered, in her fashion, more than any of them.

The following week’s parting was even more traumatic than the first. Avrum wept, beyond consolation. He took his children to him, hugged them with surprising strength … the strength of profound fear … Would he live to see his grandchild? Only God knew the answer for sure. At least Avrum, in blessed mortal ignorance, could hope.

I
F IT COULDN’T BE
America, at least Zichron Yaakov was a village that Chavala could understand. True, these pioneers had come from another part of Europe, but the settlement looked as though it could have been transplanted from the
shtetl
she had left in Odessa. Small stone houses stood clustered together, each with its own small vegetable garden, and palm trees dotted the landscape. There were marketplaces in the square, and benches where the women sat and exchanged bits of gossip. The ritual baths and the
shut
truly made Chavala think she was home. Of course if Chavala had seen it twenty-five years earlier, her disenchantment would have equaled that of earlier arrivals…

The original founders of Zichron Yaakov were a handful of humble tradespeople who had come in a group from Roumania in 1882, and among them were the parents of Aaron Aaronson, a man who would play a central role not only in the life of the Jewish nation, but in the lives of Dovid and Chavala. They knew little about Palestine. What they found was a remote, neglected Asiatic province in the vast Ottoman Empire. They knew nothing about agriculture or colonization. They knew not one of the languages spoken in Palestine. But they’d come out of love for the land of Israel, a desire to reclaim its soil to enrich their lives and the lives of their children.

When their ship entered the port of Haifa they were faced with this newly issued edict: “Jewish immigrants are forbidden to land on the coast of Syria and absolutely forbidden to live in Palestine. This prohibition is final, any infraction of this law will result in imprisonment and the intruders will relinquish all monies and personal belongings.”

The sultan, suspicious of European “philanthropists”—especially British—trying to buy large tracts of land in Palestine allegedly for Jewish settlements, worried that the European powers were merely using the Jews as a front to get a toehold in Palestine. He was, of course, right about that. But this handful of Jewish pilgrims were hardly aware of such political shenanigans.
They
were sincere, driven, and now the door to Palestine was closed to them. They stood on deck, silent and bewildered. There seemed nothing to do but return to Roumania.

Except Ephraim Aaronson thought otherwise. He was a large man, and with a determination to equal his size, he said, “We have not traveled this far and given up so much to return defeated.” The Turkish government never officially lifted its restrictions, but a few, including the Aaronsons and their friends, made it into Palestine and eventually to Zichron, a place steeped in the disease and neglect of centuries. The only signs of human inhabitants on their hilltop were a dozen or more huts occupied by the Arab
fellaheen
, who, left to their own devices, grew only enough to feed their emaciated bodies.

In the beginning the Jews, like the Arabs, lived in huts made of branches covered with mud and roofed with straw mats. Their first permanent stone houses had to be built furtively, with the help of judicious bribes, since it was against Ottoman law for noncitizens to build. But their problems had only begun.

The land bought for them was rocky and arid, impossible to till, and the plain that stretched between Mount Carmel and the coast was nothing but swamps, breeding ground for malaria. Funds in Roumania that had been pledged dried up when those who intended to follow became aware of the hostile Turkish government. The pioneers in Zichron were forced to fight against a corrupt, hostile government alone.

In that first year everything went against them. Turkish restrictions demanded bribery and more bribery. The limited possessions they still had were all but exhausted. Gold wedding bands were no longer on the fingers of their owners. Rations of food became more stringent, and the small amount of money that trickled in from Roumania was too little to fend off the gluttonous appetite for
baksheesh
that the Turks demanded.

The meager crops failed, malaria took its toll, and no matter how Ephraim Aaronson debated with himself that this settlement would someday be self-supporting, he knew that their only survival lay in the hands of the French philanthropist Baron de Rothschild, whose plantations were already established in Palestine. Pride at this moment was a bitter thing to swallow, but it was better than certain death.

Aaron Aaronson was six when his parents first came to Palestine. Zvi, Shmuel, Alex and the two girls, Sarah and Rivka, were all born in Zichron, by that time settled with a hundred families.

The Aaronsons were considered the leading family … indeed, there was a strange mystery about them, in spite of their friendliness. The style of their lives was unlike any in Zichron. They lived in a rambling, two-story stone dwelling with a wide portico surrounding it. Huge palm trees sheltered the house from the brutal, burning sun. Lace curtains and wooden shutters hung at the windows.

In Zichron Malka Aaronson created a culture all its own for her large family. In a place of honor stood a grand piano, where her two daughters entertained the family with the duets she had taught them. Bookshelves that lined the walls included volumes of Shakespeare, and Aaron’s own special library consisted of the oldest and latest editions of scientific agriculture, geology, Latin and botany.

The Aaronsons grew up on their high hilltop, passionately devoted to each other and to the wild country that had become a part of them. Inspired by the Bible, and their parents’ ideals, the Aaronsons created a world removed from the grim realities surrounding them. They did not see themselves as children of struggling farmers living in a decadent Ottoman Empire, rather as heirs to an ancient people and a noble heritage. Their ambitions were not for themselves but for the future of Palestine.

Aaron was the idol of the family, and his genius was recognized early, at the age of ten. His curiosity was insatiable, the whole world had hidden secrets that he felt driven to explore. By the time he was twelve he could identify every plant. His quick ear caught the echo of the ancient Hebrew names which the Arabs used. By the time he was fourteen Aaron was the most extraordinary young man in Zichron. His personality, even at that age, was powerful, and the baron became aware of him. At eighteen, under the auspices of his mentor, the baron, he was sent to agricultural school in France. Grignon was heaven to Aaron, a place to gain the knowledge which would allow him to create new agricultural methods in Palestine. Two years later when he returned to Zichron he came back with a degree in agriculture, botany and geology. Aaron was then sent to become an apprentice instructor at the baron’s new settlement in Metullah, up in the wild hills of Galilee. For a young man of twenty, Aaron knew that his was an opportunity few were privileged to. Except he soon found that the agricultural instructors the baron had hired were arrogant types from his French-African colonies, their minds closed to all Aaron’s knowledge. Aaron knew this country better than they, as well as most of the people who lived there. He couldn’t be quiet in the face of their contempt for the Jewish settlers, their indifference to Palestine and their misunderstanding of its needs. Inevitably he was dismissed, in fact denounced as a thief. Rumors were started that he’d stolen much of the scientific data he claimed was his own. Still, the next few years were the time of his greatest scientific discoveries, and they claimed international attention. He was appointed agriculture inspector by the pasha. Now he was able to devote his time to the new settlers and tried working with them, but there were only a rare few that could appreciate and take advantage of his expertise. Besides, a man of science was an oddity in a movement that featured philosophers, religious scholars and writers. Every leader was at least a journalist, if not a writer, and all were orators with idealistic speeches. Committee meetings and conferences were the daily bread of the movement, and to manage
any
agreement before passing a resolution was a major victory. “The committee sickness,” Aaron called it. His approach was different from that of the intellectuals who had come from Russia and Europe. Backward as Palestine was at the beginning of the century, it at least was a land of wide open spaces. Aaron was like the great American pioneers whose vision and ambition had stretched roadways across mountains, and created cities out of desert wasteland. The surveys he had taken of the natural resources of Palestine could be used for plans to develop the country. He spoke out against leaders who could only think in terms of buying small tracts of land and building a few houses on them.

Another immigration … Russian intellectuals, young men and women who came to create by their own labor a new society in Palestine. They had grown up in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Many of them had taken part in the first abortive attempt, and they no longer believed, as did many of their comrades who remained in Russia, that the overthrow of the Czarist regime would better the position of the Jews. They now were convinced that the Jewish problem was worldwide and could only be solved when the Jewish people had been rooted in Palestine once again, and as an agricultural people.

There ought to have been a bond between Aaron and these young people, but mostly there was an unbridgeable gap. Although they called themselves “the workers” and were known as the “barefoot ones,” they were far from humble. They were steeped in the new socialist ideology, were convinced that they and they alone knew the solutions and should control the means for building the Jewish national homeland. Above all they believed that Jews must not be dependent on native labor, like the French colonists in Algeria, and the British. The whole economic structure had to change, as well as the psychology of the old Yishuv. They had to become workers in every branch of the national economy, dependent on no one’s labor but their own. Each settlement would conduct its own destiny. The old settlements, like Zichron, that had grown up on the baron’s bounty, epitomized the evils of the old society. Well, they’d no longer allow the settlements to maintain themselves on cheap Arab labor. The most outspoken was Dovid’s old casual acquaintance, David Ben-Gurion, who in a few years became the standard-bearer of the workers’ movement. His and Aaron Aaronson’s goals were the same, but their methods very different. Aaron continued to believe that the only way to organize the country was on a scientific basis, but he also couldn’t ignore the growing movement of socialism, and he found himself veering closer to it. The thing he most admired about Ben-Gurion’s people was their unity. Well, if a national revival was to be a reality, the two factions would have to work together. With science and Jewish labor they would succeed, and with that connection Aaron turned to America for financial help.

For his station Aaron secured funds from such wealthy Americans as Samuel Fels, Julius Rosenwald, Jacob H. Schiff and Nathan Straus, on the indirect recommendation of President Theodore Roosevelt himself … the president had been impressed by the young scientist when he’d come to America at the invitation of the Department of Agriculture. Aaron’s station at Athlit was under the protection of the American government and he shared the results of his experiments with the United States Department of Agriculture.

Aaron’s success at Athlit was so great that Sultan Abdul Hamid II decided the Ottoman Empire had better take advantage of him, Jew or no Jew, and bestowed a gold medal on him, assuring him that, “You are now an Ottoman, the doors of the empire are open to you.”

At age thirty-one Aaron was, in a fashion, a kind of founding Jewish prince. The experimental Jewish agricultural station Aaron developed during the next four years was unique in the Middle East, and for his experimental fields he selected a spot known all over the country for its sterility—Athlit… on the coastal plain of Sharon, at the foot of Mount Carmel, its sand dunes alternated with malarial marsh. But all about were signs of past populations, and Aaron knew that they couldn’t have existed if the earth hadn’t been able to support them. The massive ruin of a medieval castle loomed up from the coastline, the last outpost of the Crusaders in Palestine. On the mainland was a rounded hillock that had been a city where the harbor of Athlit had been a place of commerce and seafaring more than two thousand years earlier. The Roman city of Caesarea spread beneath the sand dunes along the coast to the south of the station, and the Phoenician port of Dor lay in between. Behind on the slopes of Carmel were prehistoric cave dwellings, and later excavations proved their inhabitants to have been the earliest known agriculturists, probably the first to have cultivated the wild wheat of Palestine some eight thousand years before.