CHAPTER 7 - Finding Wild Wheat, Aron's House, Friends & Enemies
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| Dawn on the Slopes of Mount Hermon |
We should imagine this scene with Rifka’s violin music over. A kind of apotheosis. The horses are tethered under a tree, with Abu Farrid carrying a spade and other implements.
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| The slopes of Mount Hermon from Aron's Botanical Diary |
Aron walks up the craggy slopes beyond the snow-line, struggling as the climb gets steeper and rockier. He climbs higher until he seems to disappear into cloud. He stands on a precipice on snowy Mount Hermon. Below him dense mist as the sun breaks through the low cloud. The light falls on a stem of wild wheat like a ray from a Botticelli annunciation.
Aron’s hand as he cuts a stem of wild wheat: “This is it, Sarati - Triticum dicoccum, wild Emmer, the first wheat.”
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| Mount Hermon with Snow |
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| Mount Hermon with Wild Geese |
The sun rises over the mist and cloud, staining the snow deep pink, like a Renaissance epiphany. For this is the zenith of dear Aron’s first hopes. You see, I too can be an artist, perhaps even a film maker like Alex! A preserver of those holy memories. The benefits of heavenly hindsight and a poet’s temperament...
****
That old friend and rival of Aron’s, Friedrich August Körnicke, in his last, silver-bearded years, believed that that holy grail of primitive grain grew in the Mount Hermon area and, since he was already old and could not obtain support for a scientific expedition to that area, he had asked Aron to search for this wild wheat in the area he had indicated. And so it was that Aron found his Eureka moment, first in the Upper Galilee settlement of Rosh Pina in the north of Israel, and later on a field trip to the slopes of Mount Hermon near Rashaya in what is now Lebanon. His famous diary shows a view of Mejdel esh Schems, a small village of scattered and desultory homes, on the slopes of Hermon, where as he explains, that illusive wheat was found...
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| Mount Hermon with Wild Poppy and Daisies |
‘Suddenly I noticed in a crevice of a rock of nummulitic limestone an isolated plant which at first sight looked like a stool of barley, but which on closer inspection proved to be a wheat, the ripe spikelets of which could be detached from the brittle rachis by the slightest shake. I could hardly believe that it was really the plant for which I was looking...
I could not at that time remain longer at Rosh Pinar and so left the next day for the north. On the way from Rosh Pinar to Rasheyya - three days on horseback - I looked for wild wheat, but could not find any. At Rasheyya, too. I spent a great deal of time botanising in the vineyards in the hope of finding the Triticum there, but also without success. But when I began to extend my search to uncultivated lands, along the edges of roads and in the crevices of rocks. I found a few stools of the wild Triticum. Later I came across it in great abundance, and the most astonishing thing about it was the large number of forms it displayed. The sample specimen from Rosh Pinar, however, was the finest one. This plant had made a very vigorous growth and bore heads the stiff, rugose beards of which were nearly or quite 6 inches long. At the foot of Mount Hermon the stems were longer but fewer. Instead of being 2 feet high, as at Rosh Pinar, this wild wheat at Rasheyya was more than 40 inches high!’
These observations are borne out by photographs - Plates. II, III, and IV - with that nice image of a plump spike of Triticum dicoccum/dicoccoides in all its hirsute and virile glory.
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| ‘Triticum dicoccum - The First Wheat’ |
A year later, he found that this wild wheat grew abundantly in the southern Levant, in the north east of Palestine, northwestern Jordan, the south west of Syria and south eastern Lebanon:
‘In 1907 I ascended Mount Hermon and went around to the other side. I intend at some future time to describe this trip, as its botanical and geological results may interest the scientific world: but here I shall speak only of the Triticum. On this trip I was able to show conclusively that Triticum dicoccum dicoccoides is indigenous to the regions of Mount Hermon and the northern part of the Trans-Jordan. The idea that it is a plant escaped from cultivation can not be entertained for a moment. In the first place, Triticum dicoccum is not cultivated anywhere in Syria and Palestine. I have not been able to discover any hybrid or mongrel between this wild wheat and the cultivated forms. Second - and this is the important point- our Triticum dicoccum dicoccoides rarely appears on soils which have been cultivated for any purpose. It grows only upon the slopes of the most arid and rocky hills and in places exposed to the hottest rays of the oriental sun...’
A search rewarded, the discovery which will make Aron known all over the botanical world. And one of the most singular examples of botany and espionage creating the perfect match.
Now I shall take a figurative back seat and hand the story back to its very able protagonists...’
****
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| Triticum dicoccum dicoccoides |
Aron studies a grain of wild wheat with a microscope. Sara sketches and then paints the green stem with its pale fronds and golden wheat ears and labels it ‘Triticum dicoccum - The First Wheat’.
Aron nods delighted with her work and picks Sara up, swinging her around in his excitement.
“To save the world from hunger and transform this land! To give us a place in the holy annals of science!”
Sara’s flying shoe bumps over the jam jar of water into which she has been dipping her paint brushes. A stain spreads across the pretty sketch smudging those golden ears and pale stems.
Sara smiles wryly: “Never mind, I’ll make another one.”
Aron is contrite: “Sarati, how good you are, nothing makes you angry!”
Sara laughs: “Only injustice! And small-mindedness.”
Aron: “With my temper and your temperament, we can do anything together! Even the Americans will thank us, you’ll see!”
Sara smiles at her brother: “Oh, Aron, I dare not hope - ”
“Hope nothing, until I get confirmation!” but Aron’s voice is full of hope.
****
Confirmation comes flooding in as confirmed in an article written for the Washington ‘Policy Studies Organisation’ which informs us of Aron's many successes: ‘After his discovery Aron turned his energies to the creation of insect-resistant, gluten-rich wheat, sesame seeds that produced more oil, olives more resistant to disease, five new strains of barley, an early-ripening grape and superior mulberries - from which he intended to begin a silk industry. He discovered exotic dates from Egypt, introduced improved production techniques, cover-crops for his citrus orchards, plants that kept sand-dunes from shifting and wind to power his agricultural station..’
We hear too that his wheat discovery brought him to the attention of David Fairchild who managed the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was through Fairchild’s intercession that Aron was welcomed by the department ‘where he would make a searing impression on everyone he met.’ As Fairchild would later write, ‘I soon discovered I was in the presence of an extraordinary man.’
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| Aron Comes to the Attention of President Woodrow Wilson |
Most tellingly, William Bullitt, adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, said of Aron: ‘He
seemed a sort of giant, an elder day-like Prometheus. He was the
quintessence of life: of life when it runs torrential, prodigal and
joyous. Many men, no doubt, are as great as he was intellectually,
though I have never known his peer, but if they are great
intellectually, they are not also great emotionally, as he was: great in
courage, in sympathy, in desire, in tenderness, in swift human
understanding; great at once in dealing with statesmen and children,
with scientists and artists, great at once in humour and constructive
imagination. He was, I believe, the greatest man I have ever known..’
So, were the accolades heaped upon this Palestinian Jew.
As that report observes: ‘During the next year his correspondence with botany professors, agricultural experts and government agents in the United States, Ceylon, South Africa, Egypt, Germany, and Hawaii reached the thousands. More than a venue for sharing advice and literature, the connections resulted in a brisk seed-exchange that fostered international agriculture - and advertised the Jewish presence, each letter emblazoned with the logo: ‘The Jewish Agricultural Station in Palestine.’
Hope is everywhere!
****
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| Rifka & her Violin |
Back in Zikhron, Rifka practises her violin, perfecting her piece - the new anthem ‘Hatikvah’ - ‘The Hope’, the lyrics written by Naftali Herz Imber, born in Galicia, now, unhappy Ukraine. When he was twenty five, he set out for Palestine, carrying a notebook in his pocket, with half-finished poems, including ‘Tik-vateinu.’ At night Naftali Herz performed his poetry for the locals and in the day, while they worked in the fields, Naftali Herz would rifle their wine cellars. The writer of our great anthem was actually a ne’er-do-well alcoholic.
The melody itself arrived courtesy of a Romanian Jewish immigrant named Samuel Cohen, who based it on a Moldavian folk song, ‘Carul cu Boi’ - Cart and Oxen. In 1897 it was played at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, even though Theodor Herzl disliked it immensely. One of his objections was the unconventional figure of Naftali Herz himself, who would sadly die of alcoholism and the effects of a dissolute life on New York’s Lower East Side. For others, it was the non-Jewish, peasant origin of its melody that proved distasteful, as well as the tune’s strong similarity to Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s ‘Moldau’ verse of his symphonic tone poem, ‘Má Vlast.’ In fact Smetana had drawn on the same Moldavian song as Samuel Cohen did. Some Jewish composers wrote new melodies for Naftali’s lyrics but the haunting folk melody won out and the fiddle of many a settlers’ joyful, fireside Hora dances would continue to remember the Old Country in the older still, land in which they now lived.
****
Aron tells Sara of his many plans and his hopes for Rifka to study in the United States.
“And I must have a house of my own,” says Aron.
“And a wife, you must have a wife,” smiles Sara.
“No, no, Sarati, it’s you who needs a husband!’ he ripostes.
Rifka enters carrying her violin.
“What’s this about a husband? Who’s getting married?” she asks in a tone of faux naive bemusement.
Aron and Sara burst out laughing. Rifka looks embarrassed at her mistake, two deep red spots appear on her pale face.
“Well, I only thought - ” she says, quick tears welling up in those large pale eyes.
But Aron saves the situation with a great, sweeping gesture that indicates all his dreams for them.
“Everything is possible! And you, little Rifka,” he says, “Will go to the conservatoire in New York to be with Alex. That is if you practise enough! ”
Rifka flops down on the sofa, overwhelmed, and begins to cry.
Aron: “What?! Don’t you want to go?!”
Rifka: “It’s just that, I’ll miss my cat and I’ve got so much to do. Packing, clothes, shoes, boots, my violin!”
Aron: “You don’t need to be in such a hurry. First we need Alex to make sure America is just as you wish it Rifkele!”
****
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| Alexander in the Service of the US Department of Agriculture |
So Alex left for America to enter the service of the United States Department of Agriculture, on the recommendation of his brother who as we know, headed the Jewish Experiment Station at Atlit. Alex received his naturalisation papers a few days after arrival and obtained work with that Department. But agriculture was not his subject and mainly he used his extensive powers of persuasion and charm to meet US donors to support the Station. And this, naturally required a great deal of schmoozing, fund raising campaigns, dinner parties and meeting the pretty daughters of the august donors.
He returned home in June 1913 intending to make some motion pictures as a basis for a lecture tour in America. This was actually at Aron’s request, an exercise to spread our point of view to the United States and with an eye to making a documentary on the conditions back home. In the interim Alex had becoming fluent in English, albeit with a strong North American drawl and had fallen head over heels in love with Yankee culture, food and its delightful, young ladies. By the time he returned home, Alex was a smooth, cosmopolitan young man, able to converse in many languages and being familiar with both American and our native societies, could move easily between them. He also he did not look ‘obviously Jewish’, which was perhaps something of an asset.
Two months after his return Alex was informed of an attack on a well-respected Jewish doctor by four of our local denizens and the savage rape of a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl.
Alexander’s shocking account of the founding of the Gideonites is as follows: ‘I determined to build up a fraternal union of young Jewish men from all over the country. Two months after my return from America, an event occurred which gave impetus to these projects. The physician of our village, an old man who had devoted his entire life to serving and healing the people of Palestine, without distinction of race or religion, was driving home one evening in his carriage from a neighbouring settlement. With him was a young girl of sixteen. In a deserted place they were set upon by four armed Arabs, who beat the old man to unconsciousness as he tried, in vain, to defend the girl from the terrible fate which awaited her. Night came on. Alarmed by the absence of the physician, we young men rode out in search of him. We finally discovered what had happened; and then and there, in the serene moonlight of that Eastern night, with tragedy close at hand, I made my comrades take an oath on the honour of their sisters to organise themselves into a strong society for the defence of the life and honour of our villagers and of our people at large..’
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| Alex & the Gideonites |
He vowed to form a powerful defence group that would protect the life and honour of our villagers and particularly our womenfolk, which is where the Gideonites entered the picture. He returned to discover that HaShomer, the Watchman’s organisation had taken over in the area of self-defence. Alexander was actively hostile to the labour movement and to HaShomer. Aron himself was not against the socialism of the rival movement, but considered such differences and divisions were dangerous at this crucial time in the Yishuv’s history. The Yishuv being the name for the Jewish population of Palestine which had now reached some eighty thousand souls.
Alex’s Gideonites were full of intrigue and secret meetings, everything was enigmatic and conspiratorial - and therefore attracted the town’s interest and indeed disapproval. But Alexander was the boss and insisted on certain esoteric initiation rituals cemented by promises of eternal fraternity. Aron to be sure, was involved only with his work and had no time for Alex’s organisation or clandestine activities and the Gideonites had a short-lived moment before they fell into disarray.
At this time, rumours began to spread about certain lascivious parties in a certain summer house, none of which could be proved. But it was definitely true that Alex was a magnet to the town’s pretty young ladies, if they could be called ladies. Most were no more than girls...
****
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| Aron's House with Tower |
Aron’s new house takes shape adjacent to the original family house built in 1884. Builders pile and dress stone, tile the roof with scalloped roof tiles of russet red, lime-wash the walls in a shade of deep ochre-pink to match the desert sands, and a busy whistling carpenter with a limp, who carves a simple design of twin ears of wheat on a decorated panel around the living room door. Furniture deliverers struggle as they heave and lug in a huge, carved, mahogany bed, a giant wardrobe and a capacious chest of draws - everything decorated with the carved wheat motif. Sara regards the new house with its pink shutters and crenellated roofing, which will hitherto be known as ‘Aron’s house’ in order to distinguish itself from the older, less distinguished Aronson family home - built thirty years earlier by the parents - or at least by the workers hired by them at the time.
It is Aron’s dream made concrete - a long low series of interleading rooms, across the courtyard from the old house, built in Ottoman style, with a double volume, crenelated, stone facade, with circular windows set high up and long, pink-shuttered, arched ones below, and its white fretted Edwardian-style porch through which scientists, politicians and other important guests will be welcomed.
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| Aron's Pink Painted House |
Sara stares in happy awe. It is her first visit inside the new house, her brother having kept the interior decorations secret until this revelation. And the builders, masons, carpenters, plasterers, roofers, tilers and the new plumber - the first having not been up to scratch - having delayed this joy for some seven additional weeks. Aron leads her proudly, through the front door into first, one room, than another. The study is a bibliophile’s dream - Sara’s eyes widen with joy as she runs her hands along the spines of the hundreds of books, from agronomy to botany to theology, politics and Sanskrit, which line the walls. But Aron doesn’t allow her to linger. Excitedly he shows her his huge inlaid desk in black and cream marquetry in the Damascus-style with pen and brass inkwell, piles of cuttings, samples of fossils, bones and seeds, crowded onto shelves.
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| Aron & Sara at the New House |
A bottle of the Baron’s best champagne sits on the desk and soon releases its cork in a spray of perfect, spherical rainbows caught by the Mid-Eastern light, and Aron pours its swirling golden contents into two flutes which repeat and reflect the rainbows. They toast each other - a wonderful moment - Sara will remember it till her last day and Aron will go down to his watery death still tasting the sweetness of those tingling bubbles when hope was still a living, breathing organism.
Sara’s buttoned boots cross the blue and red, patterned, quarry-tiled floor, clattering on the freshly laid lozenges of stone like a coded semaphore message. Aron pulls a heavy bureau out of the way - rolls away the rug, revealing a concealed trap-door, which he lifts to expose a steep metal ladder, descending into the earth. Sara’s eyes open with wonder at the deep tunnel. Yes, Aron has taken every precaution.
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| Aron's House - Damascus Inlaid Mother-of-Pearl Furniture |
But Aron is not done yet - he has more to show her. Sara regards the living room with happy surprise - a symphony of the New Style of the Secessionists of Austria-Hungary with Ottoman accents. A long light room, with a green and red glass window, filled with oriental prayer rugs of exquisite vintage, worn by years of barefoot devotion and knee-scraping piety, and walls hung with beautiful, silk hangings recording the flowers and plants of the land - the inlaid, dark wood of Damascus furniture, old-fashioned high-backed chairs with eastern-style embroidered cushions and a glistening mother-of-pearl and ebony coffee table, with a Syrian coffee set in brass and silver; all of which combine to create an opulent Middle Eastern flavour.
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| Aron's Pistol, Bullets & Silk Purse from the Nili Museum |
Aron opens the sliding wooden panel on the left-hand side of the living room door. It is decorated with the design of the first wheat that has enabled all this to come about. Like a Durer wood-cut, the lines are grooved into the young wood. Each line like the wrinkle in the old carpenter’s face conceals a secret. It contains a false panel from which Aron takes out a revolver-shaped silk purse with a brass clasp, from which he removes a small revolver.
If Sara is surprised, her face, dappled with red and green lozenges of coloured light, from the long window with view onto the street, gives nothing away.
“If you should ever need one, little sister,” he hands her the gun.
“Why should I need one, big brother?!” she replies, before handing it back to him.
“We have many enemies, Sarati,” he puts the gun back in its silken bag, clicking the clasp shut and and replacing it, closes the panel with another firm click.
She doesn’t answer. It seems superfluous. Brother and sister have long shared a close-bonded, silent, sibling language. ‘Sariti’, he calls her. ‘Araleh’, is her name for him. After the others, Alex, Sam and Zvi had left home - it was Sara who shared Aron’s interests in botany and biology. And little Rifka who they call ‘Ubi’, for reasons unknown, was just too young and silly to quite keep up - a source of incredible irritation to the younger sister.
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| The New Bathroom |
Aron gestures for Sara to follow to see his pride and joy. The new bathroom with real plumbing, brand new lime-washed walls, more red quarry tiles, an enamel bath with delicious art-nouveau legs - imported from France - no less - and its own rust-red, cylindrical, wood-burning boiler to heat the bath water and keep the bathroom warm in the cold, wet winters which made one long for the long, sweltering summers. Under the curved basin is tucked a French bathroom scale, with trembling needle and Roman numbers - which every evening in the privacy of his ablutions, Aron stands upon, staring at that red line, in the vain hope of reducing some of his too, too solid flesh.
He turns on the tap and after a spluttering start, water spurts out - brownish - then it clears to a translucent ribbon - pouring out in a steady, even stream. Sara’s laughter as she puts her hand under the tap, letting the water run through her fingers, is like the sound of a river running down, at last, to the sea.
The magic of it. No more filling buckets at the well, no more carrying of those heavy buckets down the hill. No more heating of that water in a huge outdoor cauldron by the little maidservant, on a smoky fire with their diminishing supply of precious wood.
“Ayla will be pleased not to have to schlep buckets and boil water in a pot!” smiles Sara.
“The bullets are here, dear one,” Aron says as he removes a tile from under the bathroom scale and brings out a small cardboard box where the bullets are stored.
Sara opens the box and takes out a single bullet. She holds the dull gold, metal projectile in her palm as if weighing its possibilities.
****
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| Sara on Horseback |
A shot rings out, ricocheting across the hills.
Sara on her black horse with her rifle, hits a target hanging in the trees. Aron nods approvingly from the back of the white mare. A born horsewoman and an excellent shot, competing and often beating her brother in shooting and horse races. A marvellous picture captures our heroine at her most confident and beautiful. She is sitting side-saddle - though of course, she never rode like that, preferring a boyish posture with booted feet firmly on both sides, gripping the flanks of her wonderful, glossy stallion with its saddle polished to an ebony sheen by the ever obliging Abu Farrid and the dark green, velvet cloth beneath that saddle, embroidered with the Bey’s own monograph in gold thread.
Sara herself is no less splendid. Her posture upright, her grip on the reins firm, her hands gloved in leather hold a curved cane used judiciously and without harm to urge her beast on, for she loves speed and the wind in her hair. In this photograph her hair - dark again - is carefully pinned beneath a black velvet rider’s cap, with a narrow, rolled brim - a toque, it would properly be called in Paris - which sets off her oval face and her delightful features to perfection. The blouse is Edwardian - white broderie anglaise, copied from an English fashion plate, large leg-of-mutton sleeves taper to her slim wrists. Her boots - we cannot see them as they are on the other side of that beautiful horse - are new. Her eyes are clear and dark, looking straight ahead into an imagined distance.
Aron looks thoughtful. Yes, he has a new role for his sister.
****
It is not long after this, a few months perhaps that Aron is at his desk, a copy of the local newspaper open on the headline: ‘Germany states its intentions to get the Ottoman Empire to join its side..’
A jar of wheat ears at his elbow - this is Rifka’s contribution - Rifka has taken to calling herself ‘Rebecca’ - her full name, of course, the biblical one - but she thinks rather of Ivanhoe’s one true love - being a fan of romantic novels and such girlish pastimes - she refreshes the vase daily and adds field flowers and herbs at will - rosemary like Ophelia and sweet-smelling wild lavender, fuchsia-pink camel thorn or Persian manna and wild purple statice, when she can find it.
If one looks over his shoulder, Aron is drafting and redrafting a letter, with many scratchings out, to the ‘US Department of Agriculture’.
Sara sits opposite hemming a garment - a khaki jacket in green, camouflage material.
Supposing one is still looking over that proverbial shoulder, one could read Aron’s firm hand addressed to a very important Professor in America: “It is hoped that cross breeding of Triticum dicoccum will save those regions from hunger - ”
Sara looks up from her work:
“Do you think there’ll be a war?” she asks.
Aron shrugs: “There’s always going to be one war or another.”
Sara caries on sewing for another moment.
“I mean - ” she says quietly, biting off a thread, “Here? Will there be a war here?”
Aron is silent for a second, then he replies apparently lightly: “It may be the best thing that has ever happened to us. If we play it right, that is...”.
He regards his patient, needlewoman sibling and her sewing.
“I see you are ready for war at any event, dear sister.”
Sara laughs: “It’s for you dear Araleh.”
She hands him the finished jacket: “This should keep you safe from any predators - human or animal,” she says.
Aron puts it on. He nods ruefully, rubbing his stomach, as it is a little tight over his all too present middle and they laugh. A moment of sisterly, brotherly intimacy and a little humour in a house not much given to such lightness.
****
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| Waiting for Aron |
The family is at dinner: Efraim, Malka, Rifka, Sara, Sam, Alex and Zvi. A newspaper on the sideboard reveals the headline: ‘Trouble in Palestine. General mobilisation proposed by the discovery of secret excavations under the Dome of the Rock’. A British exploration team with the complicity of certain Ottoman Officials, had discovered the ‘offence’ by a group of over zealous Zionists who sought to prove the existence of that troublesome Temple. Both Christians and Muslims, with their deep distrust of the Jews and their fears of a Zionist takeover of Palestinian land, were galvanised by the ‘violation’ of the Haram al-Sharif. Trouble was coming and there were small scale attacks and skirmishes on the outer settlements. Here indeed, were the roots of the conflict that would continue into our own troubled times.
The heat is oppressive and Malka finds it increasingly hard to breathe with her strangely, increasing girth and the pain in her chest.
“Where is Aron, when he should be here at this worrying time?!” exclaims the Mother wringing her hands.
She looks anxiously out of the window as if to conjure her eldest up out of the air; as if his presence could avert the catastrophe to come. Sara and Rifka exchange a glance but don’t dare contradict their mother’s unspoken thought.
A pair of slim brown hands place a tureen of ruby-red beet soup on the ornate sideboard.
Efraim, with his long beard, in deference to the laws of his ancestors, takes solace, as he always has done, in his prayer book.
“Oh God, God of our fathers, renew our holy Temple and keep us safe from harm and the wicked ways of those who seek our destruction.”
If Ayla registers the news, or Efraim’s slight against the nations of the world, her pretty heart-shaped face remains entirely expressionless as she goes out again into the kitchen. But Malka is distraught, her hand shakes as she serves the ruby red soup. Trembling like a small earthquake she cannot control.
Rifka’s lower lip follows suit. It looks as if she is about to burst into a flood of weeping to augment the threatened earthquake.
“Where is Aron?!” Malka asks again sharply.
“He’s doing his work. He’ll be back soon, Mama,” answers Sara, the calmer of all woes.
“ Anything could have happened in this God-forsaken place!” responds the Mother.
“Aron knows what he is doing”, says the father. “God has given us this land, Malka, after all our travails. A blessing,” says Efraim. “His ways are mysterious. We cannot question them.”
“Sometimes I think it’s a curse! And that you are far too resigned to the ways of the Lord! And to the ways of Aron!”, retorts the Mother.
The family eat in silence, dipping chunks of home-baked bread into the beetroot borscht. Rifka begins to cough, a nervous cough. She clutches her throat. Spills her soup. Tears threaten.
Malka rings the small hand bell in the shape of a camel with a strident ding-a-ling!
“A cloth! Water, Ayla! Water!” she says too loudly.
At which point, Rifka succumbs to the threatened coughing fit, followed by many tears, and the dramatic clutching of her throat.
Ayla hurries in, places a water jug on the table and starts to wipe the pool of scarlet from the table cloth. Malka makes an exasperated sound as the jug goes over. Efraim averts his eyes as if all this is happening very far away and turns back to his worn, blue prayer book - a parting gift from his elderly never-to-be-seen-again father, left behind on the station platform in Bacau. Sara tries to help mop up the mess with her napkin, exchanging an apologetic glance with the servant but Ayla doesn’t meet her eyes and carrying a pile of dishes - a long ago wedding present from Malka’s parents - hurries out towards the kitchen.
“That girl! You’d swear she’d never seen a jug of water before!” says Malka, while Ayla is still well within earshot.
Sara rises from the table.
“I’m going out Mama. I won’t be late.”
“Alone. At night? On such a night?! You children! Not a moment without worry!”
“I’m twenty two, Mama. I’m not a child and we’re not in Romania any more. I shall go with Toba.”
A world war does indeed looks about to break out - Malka implores Efraim to intercede but Sara is already at the door when the sound of tumbling dishes from the kitchen concludes all conversation.
“My dinner service!” yells the Mother.
Malka’s attention is momentarily distracted and Sara makes her escape after a brief detour to kiss her still sniffing sister and heads for her horse Tayar.
****
It’s dusk at the nearby wadi. Aron and Abu Farrid are on their way, too, to Tel Adas. The dusty pick-up, snakes its way along the rough, dirt track. A vast, empty landscape of dry river beds and desert scrub extends as far as the eye can see. The pick-up is dwarfed by the vast scale of primeval, purple hills. Huge rocks gather at the top of the pass like giant tortoises, creating a narrow passage through which the truck must pass.
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| Bedouin Men at Dusk |
A group of men in Bedouin robes crouch motionless in the shadow of a ravine. They have been waiting here for some hours now.
Aron is driving the truck at speed, Abu Farrid, at his side when suddenly, bullets zing out against the steep cliffs of the wadi through which the truck passes.
The echoing bang makes it sound like the promised war has begun.
Abu Farrid yells: “Watch out Mr. Aron!”
But it’s too late. A loud crack indicates a bullet has hit the glass.
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| Gun-Fire Bursts from the Hills |
Aron swings the truck into reverse, swerves, tyres skidding, dodging gun-fire which bursts from all sides of the dark hill side.
Gun shots pepper the side of the pick-up and a large spider web spreads across the wind screen.
****
‘The ‘Sursock Purchases’, as they were known, were made by Jewish organisations bought from the absentee, landowning Lebanese-Christian, Sursock family, of whom, you will hear more later.
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| Yehoshua & Olga Hankin-Belkind with Map of the Sursock Purchases |
The buyers of this land included my uncle Yehoshua Hankin - my aunt Olga Belkind's husband - who purchased a large acreage on behalf of the Zionist movement, using donations from Diaspora Jews. This land would become the site of the cities of Rehovot and Hadera. In 1908 Uncle Yehoshua joined the Palestine Land Development Company and secured hundreds of thousands of dunams of land for the Jewish cause, including the Jezreel Valley and Haifa Bay. The Ottoman Government had sold the Jezreel Valley - considered the most fertile region of the region - for £20,000. The 'Redemption of the Land' was never going to be without contention. When Elias Sursock sold 10,000 dunums around the village of al-Fula, at the foot of the Nazareth mountains, the locals refused to leave and the district governor of Nazareth, Shukri al-Asali, fought to overturn the sale, refusing to finalise the transaction. The villagers sent a petition to the grand vizier complaining of the use of arbitrary power, claiming that Ilyas/Elias ‘Sursuk’ and a middleman had sold their land to people, whom they called ‘Sionists’ and ‘sons of the religion of Moses’ - ‘siyonist musevi’, who were not Ottoman subjects, and that the sale would deprive a thousand villagers of their fields, olive trees and livelihoods.
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| Arab Women & their Olive Orchard |
Two nations and two faiths, vying for the same land, the beginning of the conflicting Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. One of these settlements, Tel Adas, was located between Nazareth and Afullah, started when the labour-oriented HaShomer group - our deadly rivals - guarded fourteen Jewish settlements including Tel Adas. In addition they secretly began developing offensive capabilities, seeing themselves as the nucleus of a future Jewish army, in opposition to our own Guards. Another fault line in the conflict that would ensue, shattering the land and the next century like the Galilee earthquake which split the country asunder between the Syrian and African Rift Valleys...’
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| Tel Adas Settlement |
Tel Adas, that barely begun settlement, a rudimentary collection of hastily built, huts and fences with prominent watch tower. The wailing sound of fiddles and snatches of the Hatikvah tune waft over with the wind as Sara gallops up on her horse. The sky is purple, clouds sink into the horizon, edged with scarlet. The sun hurtles into the distant sea like a fireball. Then suddenly as is the way in this land, it is night. The perimeter is guarded by a couple of scruffy, nonchalant guards - who don’t look old enough to have left their mothers, never mind be in possession of a firearm, but armed, they are indeed, with two elderly rifles. An outdoor meeting of new immigrants who call themselves ‘The Watchmen’, young men and women, in their early twenties - idealists and socialists, most of whom, have left their mothers - and fathers - and all their families behind in Poland or Russia. Among them, Rachel Yanait and lovers, Israel Shochat and Manya Wilbushevitz, he dressed in Bedouin clothes, she with a rifle on her shoulder.
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| Israel Shochat and Manya Wilbushevitz at Tel Adas |
Manya was a revolutionary idealist, a passionate socialist and a fiery and unstoppable woman. In her youth, she led a strike at her brother’s factory in Minsk and was arrested by the authorities. On her release, she founded the ‘Jewish Independent Labour Movement’, believing that Jews needed to be able to defend themselves. She joined the Social Revolutionaries and aged just twenty-five, was involved in a daring terrorist plan to assassinate no less than the Russian Minister of the Interior. She travelled to Berlin to raise money for the project, living with her brother Gedaliah. While there, she learned that the plot had been uncovered and that arrest and death awaited her comrades back in Russia. They were in fact executed. A depression seized her and worried Gedaliah contacted their brother Nahum, who had moved to Palestine, begging him to invite Manya to visit him there. Nahum pretended to be ill and this forced Manya to visit Palestine. Despite her love of Russia, here she remained and thus escaped the sentences meted out to her co conspirators. Her passion was transferred to her new country: ‘I became tied to the land with a deep love, an unusual love, which filled my entire soul, mind and emotions’. She now focused her attention on labour issues and Jewish self-defence and soon met some of the leading members of the Second Aliyah, one of whom was Israel Shochat. She and Shochat would marry but it would be a tempestuous marriage. He was increasingly unfaithful, causing Manya great pain and leading to one or more suicide attempts. Despite this, Manya continued her goals, buying and smuggling guns for HaShomer, transporting illegal immigrants, and in keeping with her radical ideas, advocating Arab equality. She founded an agricultural commune in Sejera, the Arab village al-Shajara, which inspired the first kibbutzim, combining Russian radicalism and home-grown Zionism. In defiance of Ottoman orders to disarm, Manya smuggled grenades into the country, hiding them in baskets of fruit and vegetables and created the first clandestine arms factory in the back of an agricultural repair shed. Together with other members of HaShomer, she and Israel went underground, hiding their arsenal of weapons. However, they were soon discovered, arrested and were banished to Bursa in Anatolia until the spring of 1919.
But that is still ahead. Under that purple sky the music gets louder. The small group are being addressed by rugged profiled, wild-haired Shochat, in the incongruous garb of a flowing kaftan and open sandals; a biblical caricature perhaps, of the great Moses. Charismatic Shochat, does indeed see himself as something of a prophet or messiah - and is already something of a scholar, but for the moment he is still a scruffy, young farmer cum ideologue, lover of Manya.
The crowd urges him on, among them, Watchmen Zvi Nadav, Shmulik Hefter and Israel Giladi.
“We are ‘chalutzim’, and must reclaim our own land by providing defence for all the communities in Palestine!” exclaims their leader.
In the flickering fire light we can just see one of the young guards with his rifle, stare nervously out of the perimeter fence into the darkness. A jackal howls making everyone jump, but it’s the wild man’s laughter; high-pitched ending in a take-no-prisoners guffaw. He’s the boss here and he wants everyone to know it.
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| Young People Dance |
The young people dance, drink and smoke. Musicians play fiddles, tin drums, a warbling, primitive flute. Some of these musicians were young concert pianists in Moscow and St Petersburg. One of them was assured a great future in Vienna as Professor at the Conservatoire, a position he turned down with some regret and later with much gratitude.
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| Toba Gelberg |
Toba Gelberg, oval faced, dark-eyed with brown hair in a middle parting, in her mid twenties, with a pack of cards spread out before her, sitting cross-legged on the clay threshing-floor which serves as dance floor and platform for the address. She had once been the girlfriend of Alex, but he abandoned her after a night in the hay, and the little dalliance came to an end and Toba swapped allegiances and joined HaShomer.
Toba is considered something of a seer, a fortune-teller, to whom many, particularly the women of the settlements, are drawn. Her method of divination, age old, the reading of the cards, by which she has told the future of a number of inquiring individuals. She does not resort to the supernatural - her advice is more that of the lay psychologist. She reads her character’s aspirations and fears, connecting those to the cards - Spades for misfortune, indecision, heartbreak; Hearts, as we know, for love and for infidelity, too; Clubs for fortune and success; Diamonds for money, of which there is a distinct shortage.
Sara dismounts from her horse and sits next to her friend at the fireside, a little breathless. Toba leans over and they kiss each other on both cheeks.
“Sarinka! I’ve missed you. Where have you been?!”
Toba’s voice is deep and smoky like her eyes.
Sara smiles ruefully: “Busy. Housekeeping - Mama is not well.”
“I’m sorry my darling. And Aron? We never see him?” asks her sympathetic, inquisitive friend.
“Busy too with his work. I never see him either!”
Toba looks quizzical but she swallows her curiosity. There is always something mysterious about Aron and anyway she has something she wants desperately to share with Sara.
“Guess who's here?” she aks in a confidential tone. “Avshalom Feinberg!”
Sara shrugs, having seen him many times at the Station and from childhood visits to Hadera.
That handsome, dark, young man with a cigarette hanging from his unshaven upper lip, is surrounded by a group of girls.
Toba’s eyes twinkle, her husky voice goes down an octave: “Everyone’s in love with him! But no one’s managed to catch him yet!”
She looks questioningly at her friend: “What about you?”
Sara smiles and Avshalom, catches her eye. A mocking summation - or is it admiration - as if he is seeing into her very soul. Or is he just flirting?
At that precise moment, Aron enters and clocks the look between Sara and the Poet. Sara drops her eyes and Avshalom turns back to his cigarette.
Sara smiles as Aron comes over to her, but her expression quickly changes to one of shocked concern:
“You’re hurt!?”
A long bloody scratch dissects Aron’s left cheek.
Aron puts his hand to his cheek, as if he’s only just realised.
“It’s nothing. A stone came through the window.”
Sara’s anxious face as she wipes the cut with a handkerchief.
“A stone? Or a bullet?” Toba’s voice is louder than it should be.
“A bullet actually. A number of them.”
“Oh my God, an ambush! Who?” Toba’s deep voice booms into the darkness.
Aron shakes his head: “Bandits. Bedouin bandits. We’re not short of enemies.
He looks pointedly at Shochat.
“Pick-up’s a mess! No point reporting it. They’ll do nothing as usual.”
Sara takes his arm: “Never mind as long as you're safe.”
She is anxious, wants to get home now that she’s found Aron. And the Mother will be waiting.
A circle of concerned young people have gathered around them including Manya and Rachel.
Shochat glares at Aron. A dog spoiling for a fight. Clearly, there is no love lost between the two men.
Shochat marches up to Manya and takes her arm: “It’s what comes from enslaving others!” he says pointedly.
Aron shrugs: “I take it you are referring to our use of local labour?” he says.
“That and other things.”
“It would be better if we were friends, ‘Comrade’ Shochat!”
Aron’s voice is deadly calm.
In answer, Shochat spits in the dust: “Never!” he says. “You’re nothing but a bunch of greedy capitalists exploiting Arab labour instead of working the land yourselves!”
Aron’s face expresses contained rage and pent up frustration. This particular argument for the state of the fledgling nation’s soul has been going on for some time and there will be lifelong enmity between the two men.
Shochat sees his moment, an audience electrified by the conflict, stands mouths agape, ready to be whipped into a fervour of righteous indignation by their leader.
He climbs onto a chair: “It’s no use escaping bondage only to enslave others!”
“Hear, hear!“ yell the crowd.
Sara realises that in all the commotion, Avshalom can’t take his eyes off her. His gaze pins her down like a butterfly on a pin-board. She struggles to look away.
Avshalom grins and stubs out his cigarette.
Shochat is getting into his stride. The slogans of his ideology flow like a well-studied Marxist manifesto from his impassioned lips. The Workers must Unite, the Bosses are Fools, the Means of Production must be seized, etc. Everyone cheers - except Aron who has heard it all before and is annoyed and Sara who is her usual composed and unfathomable self.
Toba motions for silence: “As chairwoman I ask for quiet! Quiet! First, we must vote on the motion - ” she says. “The committee is of the opinion - ”
“Of what opinion?” Aron says in an undertone. “Nothing but a bunch of sheep with their bloody committee business! They act like nothing happened here, until they arrived!”
But Sara keeps her countenance, torn between her friend and her brother and between the rival ideologies being propounded by the fervent young people who dream of a better world.
Despite his crazy garb and his scruffy appearance, Shochat is no fool. But before she can say another word, Aron turns on his heel, pulling her with him.
“Let’s go” he says.
When he gets to the pick-up Sara is shocked at the state of the truck. Aron gestures for her to get in, but Sara shakes her head and mounts her horse, galloping off into the night. Her brother follows her all the way home, tailing her closely, the truck’s lights barely making an impact on the thick darkness.
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| Manya Shochat & Rachel Yanait |
It might have seemed impossible that Rachel Yanait would ever consider working with Aron - the two sides locked as they were, into that fierce dispute, a riven country, then as now. In her circles, she had always been told Aron was a ‘boycotter of Jewish labourers’ and an exploiter of Arab ones. There were those who said, very unjustly: ‘Is it possible that a member of the the party’s central committee would go and work for the hater of the Jewish labourer?’.
Rachel responded to her critics: ‘If the experimentation station were in a remote monastery, I would go there anyway to study the nature of the soil and of the crops we cultivate.’ Ignoring the objections of her own party, she remained absolutely certain that she would contribute her research to the struggle. She was determined to meet that ‘hater of Jewish labour’, on her own terms. Aron was less keen. He was busy. The locusts were back. He’d never had a woman working for him.
Rachel persisted. At the time of their meeting, Aron was in Jerusalem on ‘locust business’. He always stayed in a nice hotel and she arranged to see him in his rooms where he was at his desk, writing a letter to Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman Governor in charge of eradicating the swarms of locusts, a perpetual struggle every year or two, that direly threatened the food supply. The victory of the locusts would bring famine and a country preparing for a probable war could not afford a plague of such biblical proportions.
Aron handed her the letter and when she read it, she saw that Aron was as determined as she was to do the best for the country and its agriculture. She told him she would like to work with him. That she had studied in France and had the qualifications. But Aron said no.
Rachel was not a woman who understood the word ‘no’. It only acted as a spur to her decisiveness. The next week she arrived in Zikhron and asked Aron if she could work as an unpaid trainee in the laboratory and library and for one day a week in the nursery at the Station in Atlit.
At first Aron responded in the negative. His brushes with HaShomer and its leader, too recent and too abrasive. Then he softened: “Not many people come to me, not to the laboratory or the library. As far as I’m concerned, you can come to Atlit as well.”
He showed her round the library and her excitement was infectious. He could see that she was as crazy about his subject matter as he was.
She wrote of this experience: ‘I look and read from the covers, and I catch my breath at the sight of this rare treasure - books about nature and agriculture in the Land of Israel, in foreign languages and in Hebrew. A devoted and experienced hand selected and collected every book dedicated to knowledge of the natural environment of our land - the living and the inanimate, archeological and historical studies, from everything written about our land, whether written impressions from the field or research papers. Among the books are ancient folios, in illustrated leather-bound volumes that bring to mind my grandfather’s Gemara books and inspire awe and respect. From the adjacent wing comes the gentle scent of the rich herbarium. Here is the rare collection that the agronomist Aronson collected from the wild herbs of the land as well as the collection of wild plants from lands of similar climate to our own…’ The same night, Rachel wrote to her friends in HaShomer confirming her decision: ‘In Zikhron, I’ve found study materials to my heart’s content. I will stay here as long as I can, and I will not be removed except for urgent matters of HaShomer. All I want is to learn and teach nature and agriculture, and this is the place to do it.’
Their shared love of nature and the flora of the Land of Israel brought them closer and Rachel sometimes accompanied Aron on field excursions and he taught her to work with the plants that surrounded them. Soon he opened his library and home to her and even introduced her to his family. Rachel told her friends that she was going to stay there as long as possible, not only to learn but also because tending to the plants gave her peace of mind. The longer they worked together, the closer they got despite their arguments. Aron let her read an article he wrote about forestation in Israel, and she shared with him her dream of seeing forestation of the land’s mountainous regions. She showed him a paper she wrote during her agricultural studies, and Aron told her, “If you seek knowledge, put down the books, walk the length and breadth of the land, observe nature…” He even confided in her how upset he was that hardly anyone from the local Jewish community acknowledged his achievements. “Out there in the world, I am recognised and only here, in my own land am I insulted and ignored.”
Their arguments on the labour issue continued, but as colleagues they also grew closer. Aron made it obvious that he appreciated her work and that their political differences were unimportant. Rachel enjoyed her time in Atlit. ‘Ever since I began my agricultural studies, I never had an agricultural experience like I had in Atlit’, she wrote. And more tellingly: ‘What a great blessing it could have been for all of us, had we known how to forge direct ties with him, and what harm this feud between his people and ours has caused us all.’ At the same time, she was torn over the idea of sitting in an ivory tower and enjoying her time in the experimentation Station while her friends in HaShomer faced every sort of hardship. And yet, she kept coming back to the Station and started research of her own. Wild orchids being one of her specialities. She even became friends with Sara after Aron thought the two young women had much in common, and introduced them. That in itself was evidence of his esteem for Rachel and often she was invited on their research trips around the Carmel region.
Rachel offered an amusing description of their search for a particular specimen during one of these trips: ‘A few days passed, and Sara came to the laboratory. She found me bent over the microscope and asked if I wanted to come with her on a tour of the mountain range on horseback…’
Rachel rented a horse and joined them. ‘Suddenly, Aron commented that among the rocks he noticed a rare and special plant. He suggested I try - if I was indeed so passionate about plants - to find it without his help… I wandered about, pointing at various specimens, and Aron merely shook his head, disappointed that I couldn’t find what he had so easily spotted. I was offended but continued searching until there it was. The queen of the wild plants right before my eyes - the rare wild orchid in all its glory! I forgot the affront and exhaustion and took it in both hands as if I was holding a great deal of treasure, and Aron threw back his head and laughed.’
When Sara returned from her failed marriage in Constantinople, she shared with Rachel the story of that terrible journey home. She also confided in Rachel about her beloved friend Avshalom. And Sara was not in the habit of such outpourings, especially to another woman. Rachel learned that Avshalom was the life and soul of star of every field trip and fireside gathering, and that there wasn’t a place in the whole of Palestine with which he was unfamiliar.
“And his eyes,” Sara added, “shine brighter than every precious stone - that’s Avshalom!”
Rachel saw Sara in the same way. ‘Full of passion to do something even if there was nothing in return, no glory, and no boasting! And above all - Sarah is a girl of the Land, a daughter of Zikhron Ya’akov, this is her home and her birthplace, she will never be taken away from this place ever again.’
Of Avshalom, however, they would have deep and lasting disagreement.
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| Aron's Geological Map of Palestine |
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