Mitla Pass (28 page)

After discussing the situation with his gang, Misha felt it would be impossible to make a snatch and run in Prater Park. He turned to studying the various stretches of road in and out of the city. Highway robbery was the answer.

Bureaucratic red tape and railroad inefficiency forced the pioneers to remain a fifth day. Things at the bathhouse had reached a low point when Misha and a half dozen of his merry folk, including Bertha and Nathan, pulled up in a cart with a hog large enough to feed a small army. The cart also contained a barrel of home-brewed schnapps.

When pressed by the other comrades, Misha confessed he had set up a careful ambush. The unfortunate farmer was caught on a lonely section of back road, bound up, gagged, taken to a nearby village church, hauled up to the steeple top, and left to dangle without his trousers some fifty feet over the ground.

Now came an ethical question of severe gravity. Namely; can a pig be made kosher? A sort of ad hoc rabbinical council was formed to debate the matter.

Nathan Zadok, dizzy from hunger and almost blotto from a glass of schnapps, played devil’s advocate brilliantly to convince the comrades that this was not the time to stand on ancient ceremonies.

“God often disguises His mysteries and works in riddles. When we captured this pig, it was a cow. Before our very eyes, it changed. Why is the Lord testing us? To see if we have the courage to get to Palestine, which might not happen if we don’t eat this cow. We cannot let God down after coming this far.”

As the comrades emptied the barrel of schnapps, it began to make a lot of sense, what Nathan was saying. The fact was, the animal was beginning to resemble a cow more by the minute.

A vote was taken and, indeed, it was overwhelmingly agreed that this animal was truly a cow in disguise. All the pioneers asked silent forgiveness of their parents and their rabbis. The animal was respectfully named Nicholas, after the late Czar, and in a ritual unique in the annals of Vienna became the only hog ever butchered and roasted in a municipal bathhouse.

Misha’s accordion went into action and those who were still able danced. Many of the pioneers, not used to the taste or notion of forbidden food, delicately repaired to the toilets and vomited.

As the party reached a peak, officials from Poale Zion arrived to let them know that a train for Trieste had been found and was waiting for them at the Bahnhof.

“Nathan, you were wonderful tonight,” Rosie Gittleman said boldly, laying her head on his shoulder. He summoned up the courage to put his arm about her, and after a time she slipped down so her head was on his lap and she fell asleep as he stroked her hair till far into the night.

Trieste

T
HE PIONEERS
broke into song the moment the train left Vienna. Their bellies were full and the scenery was grand. The train snaked through sweet-smelling high meadows and the overpowering visual opulence of the Alps, picking its way to Trieste, the port of embarkation.

During the twenty hours of the train ride, Nathan became increasingly worried about Rosie. She was fragile to begin with and now she was not bearing up well. She felt feverish and looked extremely pale.

“You shouldn’t worry, Nathan. It is probably this up-and-down business with the mountains. I remember when I first went up to Zakopane with the trouble with my lungs. The mountains made me dizzy. It will go away.”

By the time they passed through Ljubljana, Nathan was quite fearful. “I think you should maybe see a doctor in Trieste.”

Rosie was adamant. “No, and don’t you go babbling to the others. I’ve come this far. Nothing is going to keep me off our ship.”

“But, Rosie, you look like the color of paste.”

“If you mention so much as a single word to the others, I wouldn’t speak to you ever again.”

Nathan tried to bury his concern. Such a brave girl, he thought. For the first time in his life he allowed his mind to stray in a certain forbidden direction. With a woman like her at his side, Palestine would be far less forbidding. Maybe, miracle of miracles, she could possibly want and need him as well. Together, they could get through the hard times ahead. He chastised himself. It was total nonsense to think such grand ideas.

Trieste was a volatile piece of turf, an ancient prize, the rule of which periodically transferred from one winning empire to another. Since the war, Trieste had been ceded with a strip of land to the victorious Italians. But as a consequence, the port lost its natural hinterland of Slovenia. Trieste was the lifeblood of the province, but now operated at a sluggish pace.

Economic fright always brought on political bombastics. The pioneer train entered a city which was once again playing out a familiar turmoil. The long arm of the Bolshevik Revolution had reached the Balkans. Communist slogans defaced every wall, and leaflets covered the streets like newly fallen snow in the wake of perpetual demonstrations. Ships’ crews, generally supporting the Communists, staged debilitating strikes. All of this chaos was carried out with bravado.

Nonetheless, the Zionists were well organized and general conditions were better. The city had become the major port of departure for some forty thousand Russian and Polish Jews of the third “rising” to Palestine.

Misha and Bertha Polokov, as well as some of the other comrades, also spotted Rosie’s condition. She sloughed them off, and after a few days in Trieste and some decent food she seemed to be faring better.

At the end of a week an Italian freighter, the
Padua,
entered the port to take the pioneers to Palestine. They were put up on the open top deck. Their rations were an issue of dried food, with no provisions for cooked meals. Toilets were temporary shacks which accessed directly to the sea. Their beds, thin mats with blue sky above.

Captain Gionelli and his crew were friendly. Through Misha Polokov, the captain loaned them all the extra canvas aboard so they could put up a tent city to protect them from the elements.

She was far from being a luxury liner, but nothing could hold down the bursting enthusiasm of the pioneers as the
Padua
eased out of her berth and proceeded down the Adriatic. Although they never lost sight of land, they could not help but feel that the tie with the
shtetl
and all the Jew hating was cut forever.

The pioneers broke into small groups and studied and argued and sang and danced. Nathan was in his glory, going from audience to audience giving lectures on anything anyone would listen to.

On the third day out, seasonal meltemi winds from the north roughed up the
Padua
and climaxed in a nasty blow through the Strait of Otranto. Activities halted as the pioneers huddled together tightly and queasily. Finally a blessed calm befell and the skies put on a show of star showers as they sailed smoothly down the Greek coast.

The great debate between crew and passengers was the merits of communism over Zionism. The price for joining Lenin’s Communist International was to renounce all ethnic groups.

“It is not possible,” Nathan argued. “A Jew is a Jew and an Italian is an Italian. You cannot simply eliminate an entire ethnic people without destroying the culture itself. Lenin is crazy.”

And so it went, as the battle for the minds of the Europeans now raged between socialism and the new communism out of Russia. These discussions had little interest for the lovers who paired off. The gregarious Captain Gionelli granted them use of the lifeboats to sleep together.

“I have come to an important decision,” Rosie said to Nathan one night. “I have concluded that you can be just as true a Zionist if you choose not to go out and redeem the land. We must have cities and factories and hospitals as well as farms.”

“Yes, but everything we have been taught centers on the land,” Nathan answered.

“I must admit that it may be too difficult for me to live on a kibbutz,” she said. “I may apply for work in Jerusalem.”“I am in accord with your decision one hundred percent,” he answered. “I suppose for myself, I should be a farmer.”

“So what’s wrong with Jerusalem?”

“From what I understand, it is filled with Hasidim. It would be like moving to another
shtetl.
”

“Then what about Tel Aviv? There are already ten thousand Jews living there.”

Suddenly it occurred to Nathan that what Rosie might be suggesting was in line with his own secret thoughts. “Tel Aviv is an idea of merit. It should be given some thought,” he said.

“You’ll pardon my boldness, Nathan, but two people together in such a strange place might be better than one person alone.”

Nathan blushed and looked at her quizzically. She lowered her eyes modestly.

“No one says you can’t be a good Zionist in a city,” he declared at last.

“So, maybe we’ll talk about it a little more?”

She nodded and his heart almost leaped out of his throat. She reached over and pecked his cheek and he moved back slowly.

“It’s all right, Nathan. All the comrades know I hold you in high regard. You’ll pardon my shamelessness, but Captain Gionelli said we could have the last lifeboat.”

That night was the most wonderful of Nathan’s life. They snuggled up together, but with great respect, and held each other until daybreak.

As the
Padua
plowed along through the Sea of Crete, the meltemi blow faded altogether and the sea dished up another fright from its endless bag of tricks. Zephyrs from the inland deserts of Arabia called “khamsin” drifted out to the sea, flattening it mirror-smooth. The air turned into a furnace. The canvas afforded no relief as temperatures flared over a hundred and ten degrees. The crew hosed down the pioneers regularly with salt water, but after a few minutes it was little better than nothing.

Their songs melted into drones of agony. The steel deck became too hot to walk on. It took two harrowing days to reach Cyprus. The weakest among the pioneers were breaking down fast. A doctor came aboard to examine them and urged that two of the girls and one of the boys be taken to a hospital for sunstroke. During the examinations, Rosie had hidden.

At Famagusta, while the
Padua
took on a cargo of winter potatoes, the pioneers were able to renew themselves ashore with fresh water, a shower, a day in the shade, and a decent meal. They returned to the
Padua
in high spirits, knowing that Jaffa was less than a two-day sail.

Once under way, the ferocious heat of the khamsin returned. By nightfall Rosie had passed out from heat prostration and Nathan could no longer cover for her. He went to Misha weeping. Captain Gionelli fixed her a berth next to his own cabin, and as a half dozen more fell ill, radioed ahead to Jaffa for emergency medical help to be on standby.

Nathan continually bathed her face and sweat-soaked body to try to cool her down, but she broke into a raging fever followed by chills and spent the rest of the journey in a state of delirium.

The battered members of the Third Aliyah lined the rail of the
Padua,
most of them crying openly as specks on the horizon enlarged into a flat coastline. A wave of white buildings could be made out along a ridge, and now a minaret poked through. As they eased toward Jaffa, the joy of seeing Zion was tempered by concern over seven fallen comrades. Rosie in particular was on everyone’s mind.

There was also an unmistakable feeling of hostility in the stillness of the air that one could sense from out at sea. The heat and dreariness and flatness and lethargy did not conform with their lifelong visions of Palestine. When it came into view, what they saw was a weary old place baking and rotting under a cruel sun.

A stunned silence was broken by the sound of the anchor chain rattling down and smashing into the water. The port, such as it was, consisted of little more than a breakwater pier and a few warehouses.

First out to greet them was the harbor master’s launch, with a medical team and a proper British Government authority. After a quick examination of the sunstroke victims, landing formalities were waived to get them ashore quickly.

Captain Gionelli and Misha took the British major aside and appealed to him to allow Nathan to go ashore with Rosie. The Englishman huffed and puffed for a moment, then nodded approval.

They were removed to Neve Shalom, a sector of Jaffa that had been purchased by the Zionist Settlement Department from the Arabs. The hospital was actually a large old Arab house, recently bought by an organization of American Jewish women called Hadassah, which had undertaken to provide medical care for the Jews in Palestine. The hospital held ten beds and was staffed by a pair of American doctors and five nurses.

One by one, the other pioneers came around, but Rosie Gittleman remained in critical condition. She rallied on the second night long enough to recognize Nathan.

“We made it, Rosie,” Nathan said. “We’re here, in Eretz Israel.”

Rosie managed a small smile and then she died.

TO PALESTINE

1920-1921

I
T WAS NO LAND
of milk and honey. In truth, Palestine was a weary and neglected place, eroded by sun and infested by swamp. Feudal Arab overlords fought any progress the newly arriving Jews might bring, preferring to continue to suck dry their own lethargic and defeated people.

The British, now ruling under an international mandate, were overtly sympathetic to the Arabs and permitted their gangs to prey on the Jewish community with impunity. The mufti of Jerusalem, a rabid Moslem clergyman, fomented hatred and riots erupted continually throughout the country.

The older Jewish settlers had transplanted much of the
shtetl
mentality to Palestine. They owned the large private farms, vineyards, and factories and were content to go on using cheap Arab labor.

A Jewish land agency was buying up acreage as fast as it could be acquired from absentee Arab landowners, but there was already a long waiting list of immigrants ready to start up new settlements.

To Nathan it seemed like the horrors of the
shtetl
all over again. What he had come to was a small, impoverished Jewish community unable to absorb the rush of new young idealists.