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Overview
When the Chaimovitch family fled the Russian pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century, they hoped their family could flourish in Eretz Yisroel, the land of their ancestors. Twenty years later, they are thriving in Palestine and sending their youngest son Mati off to attend an American college. But the difficulties of their old lives in Russia are harder to shake than they thought.
With the rumblings of World War II comes anti-Jewish violence reminiscent of the pogroms they once fled. And that violence claims the life of Mati’s younger brother. When Mati returns home to help his family deal with the sudden tragedy, he brings his new Jewish American bride Dena. Bridging the generations, the Chaimovitch family will confront unimaginable horrors as they work toward the triumphs and trials that created the Jewish state of Israel.
“The culmination of a prodigiously productive and important career.” —Norman Mailer
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625670847 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 672 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
ON THE old docks of Jaffa, exactly where the Chaimovitch family had arrived twenty years back — the extent of Mati's lifetime, since he was already felt in the womb during the drawn-out voyage from Odessa — they were all gathered at summer's end in 1927 to see the lad off to America.
Mati reached the dock early, crowded on the cart seat between his eldest sister, Leah the Giantess, and her life comrade, Natan the Red; although his departure would surely have warranted a special wagon trip, Mati himself had insisted on combining with the morning delivery of carrots, eggplant, and cucumbers from Leah's training farm for girls, at the far edge of Tel Aviv alongside the river Yarkon, to the Carmel market where they would already be almost in Jaffa. For he wanted to arrive early and have plenty of time in case of unforeseen British regulations and procedures, and also he wanted already to be there in case his brother Gidon arrived on the first train from Herzlia. Gidon had so much to do just now, building his house, and with his busy veterinary work in the new town, that Mati had insisted he ought not even come, so at least Gidon shouldn't be left wasting time waiting for them if he arrived early. Though Natan snorted not to worry for Gidon — even in the Jewish Legion, when they had waited months for the British to send them against the Turks, Gidon had never wasted his time — so now if he had arrived ahead of them at the port, Gidon would probably already have found a lame horse to take care of.
The cable from Mati's sponsor, the American scholar Horace Rappaport, at last verifying his tuition grant, had arrived from Chicago only a week ago, at home in Mishkan Yaacov, where Mati had worked all summer every summer during his years at the Herzl Gymnasia in Tel Aviv. With the cable Mati had hurried off to make arrangements for a passport, visas, passage, staying as during his high school days on his sofa at Leah's.
Last night he had said his farewell to his Zippie of the Long Braids, who refused to follow the hairbob rage from America, not out of conservatism but out of vanity, as she herself put it, with her usual mockery; they had gone strolling on the beach, stopping for kisses, strolling barefoot, in sudden serious talk always punctured by Zippie's humor — ach, after his years in Chicago Mati was certain to return in plus fours chewing a big cigar, married to a Chicago sausage heiress, whom he was bringing for a brief visit to his family, while she herself, having faithfully waited for him, Zippie preposterously proclaimed, would brokenheartedly bow to the will of her Orthodox parents and accept a matchmaker's match with a wealthy Polish land speculator; she would cut off all her hair not for the fashion but for a religious wig, a shaitl, at least a gorgeous high-style one such as you saw on Allenby Road, and she would resign herself to raising a flock of little sons with dangling ear curls! Laughing to tears at the image, Mati suddenly felt sure that Zippie with her humorous mouth was really the One and seized her in their longest, most passionate tongue kiss.
From the Carmel market, Natan turned onto the old road to Jaffa. Ah, where in America would Mati ever see a chain of camels still plodding among the droshkies, or even a droshky among the taxis? And at the bottom of the street Mati had his last look at the Herzl Gymnasia itself, still the most imposing structure of the town, with its castlelike portico where he and his friends had so often lingered, and indeed from which he and his troop of scouts in white Russian blouses had marched to Rothschild Boulevard to the wedding of the visiting American scholar Horace Rappaport, who had carried off their favorite English teacher, Celia, to Chicago, where indeed she and her family had come from in the heyday after the Balfour Declaration.
As they clopped toward Jaffa, Leah could not fail to remark how on her arrival in the land with Reuven, a year ahead of the rest of the family, all this had been empty sand. And as the minaret of Jaffa's Hassan Beq mosque came before them, the same thought lay unspoken among all three — of the sniping from up there during the evil May Day massacre of 1921, when Mati, a schoolboy from the Jordan Valley, had run with a cudgel, when Natan and Gidon had dug out their pistols kept from their years in the Brigade, when Leah had helped carry back the wounded and the dead from this in-between area, laying them out in rows on the assembly hall floor of the Gymnasia. But now all was quiet, the cart passed among the produce-laden donkeys, and Leah called out her cheerful Maasalam now and again to Arab standkeepers; everybody knew and grinned back at Big Leah. Indeed, ever since that raging May Day outburst against the "muscob" with their red-flag parade of Jewish workers, there had been quiet in the land. Partly because of this sense of peace, Mati did not feel so bad about going away to study.
With the ship cost from America, the scholar might not be back for four whole years, not even during summers, so to say farewell to the youngest, the yingel, born a whole generation after Reuven, mother Feigel got her one richly married daughter Shula to poke chubby Nahum awake at dawn so as to drive from Tiberias with the huge American automobile that he had bought for carrying guests from his fancy new hotel to the city's celebrated Hot Springs. The season of the Hot Springs had not yet begun, and besides, Nahum often used his hotel taxi as a Private; he could very well drive the family even all the way to Jaffa today, to see Mati off to America.
Though Nahum with his heavy-lidded round eyes was quick enough once awake, early rising he had long ago given up, along with the practice of accompanying his pious father for the dawn prayer; now that Nahum had the new hotel, his own, he took his time rising. But of all Shula's family it was to young Mati that he sparked; this one was no ox like the next-up brother, Schmulik, who worked their meshek in constant bickering with their aging father, Yankel. Nor would Mati be likely to settle in a kvutsa like their dreamy, idealistic Reuven. This Mati had a different head on him; besides, in the back of his own head Nahum had certain ideas regarding a vast coastal orange grove development to be sold in parcels to American Jewry, and it might prove quite useful to have a family contact, a college student in Chicago; Nahum didn't at all mind rising this day at dawn to drive the lot of them to Jaffa, where he had some Arab landowners to talk to as well.
Indeed, it was Nahum who had to poke Shula and hurry her through her decisions on what to wear for Tel Aviv and how to do her hair, reminding her that it was, after all, not to greet the High Commissioner that they were setting forth and that they still had to stop to pick up Reuven and Elisheva in their kibbutz on the way to Mishkan Yaacov.
At least those two were waiting at their kibbutz gate. Then at the farmstead Mama Feigel had to load in her hampers and her gift parcels to her sister in America — twenty-three years since they had laid eyes on each other, Feigel kept repeating. Schmulik had already departed for Jaffa on his own, for that one on any pretext would zoom off on his motorcycle; his Nussya was staying behind with her babies — true, there was hardly room for her even in the big Buick because on the way through the Vale of Esdraelon Nahum still had to halt at Gilboa to pick up the middle sister, Dvora. Her husband, Menahem, they'd meet in Tel Aviv, for Menahem was again delegated there on some pretext of agricultural planning, as though every British CID man didn't know Menahem sat high up in the Haganah. Dvora herself, Nahum respected. In her steadfast, single-minded way she had built up the largest and most modern poultry run in the entire Yishuv, even providing other settlements with her special breed of incubated chicks; indeed, if it was ever imaginable that such a one would leave her kvutsa, Nahum could see himself adding a poultry-raising enterprise to his planned citrus-grove enterprise for investors in the Diaspora.
Dvora was ready, wearing her embroidered Sabbath blouse. Squeezing in between Feigel and Elisheva, she exchanged news about everybody's children — all thriving, Feigel said, thank the Above.
With Natan staying by the cart on the lookout for Gidon, Leah and Mati threaded their way to the harbor edge, where the fishing boats bobbed and the catch was being sorted; from here they saw what was surely Mati's ship, fat and whitish, arriving from her stop in Haifa. Lighters were already being rowed to meet her, but as the steamer dropped anchor, few passengers could be made out descending; these days, because of two years of hard times and unemployment, hardly any immigrants arrived. Still, perhaps some had debarked at Haifa, Leah said hopefully. Gazing at Mati, she joked a bit about last night with his Zippie, trying to get him to tell more. And then Leah sighed about how half of her girls at the training farm had been in love with him; Mati knew what a disappointment it was to Leah that with all the maidens she had put in his way in these years nothing had happened, and he broke into laughter now, and she too, while she admonished, "Aye, Mati! You're just at the age! Be careful there in America; at this age a mistake can ruin whole years of a life!" She was still grinning, but a bit woefully, and Mati knew it was her admission about her ten years lost over her Handsome Moshe, a subject Leah still never touched on and that no one touched on in her presence. This warning was the most intimate she could give him in their parting, and Leah suddenly engulfed him in all her flesh, her baby! Mati flushed as though hearing again her unabashed description of how their mama, Feigel, had given birth to him right into her hands. And they threaded their way back to Natan. Still no sight of Gidon. The train had arrived, as droshkies were now bringing more passengers with their baggage; some were tourists, the last of the season, but also Mati noticed a few families plainly from the Yishuv, a pair with two babies and endless bundles and roped-up valises, all their possessions it seemed, and Leah even believed she recognized them, from Chedera. Leaving the land. In the last year this had become a common sight; more were leaving, it was whispered, than were entering the Yishuv. Going down from Zion. "Yordim."
A fleck of worry even now came to Mati that he might be mistaken for one such, ready, bag and baggage, to desert. And Leah must have sensed this discomfort in him, for she led the way to a café behind the dock area.
Now, with the ship already sitting out there — though there was still nearly two hours to boarding time — Mati became fidgety; of course, the family could not yet have got here all the way from Tiberias, but where was Gidon? It was Gidon who could give Mati the greatest certainty that he was doing the right thing, to go.
Though Mati had said his farewells a few days before when he had departed from the meshek to get his passport, a father still had to make the journey to see off his yingel, and besides, Yankel knew, Feigel would have inundated him with reproaches or, even worse, taken to her bitter silences had he perhaps suggested staying away from that cursed port of Jaffa, where he had not set foot since their arrival in the land, when the bandit Arab boatmen had stopped their rowing and demanded extra baksheesh, tearing his last coins from his hand, threatening to hurl him and his whole family into the sea, like Jonah before him, only there would be no whale to spit them up! Where indeed had those Moslem bandits learned of Jonah!
Perhaps for four long years he would not see his youngest again, or who even knew when young people went to America whether they would ever return at all to Eretz! Such thoughts, Feigel cried, let them burn like raw vinegar in his entrails! — Giving him one of her looks as for a cockroach. So Yankel had defiantly persisted. And what? In the colleges there in America did not Jewish boys meet shiksehs and marry them? And finish! And an end! Wasn't that how it had been with Yehuda Schneirson's son from Kfar Tabor, who had not needed even to go as far as America, but only to Paris, never to return?
"What do they believe in, your godless children? What would it matter to them, a shikseh or not?" Yankel continued to complain in his usual way. "Unbelievers! Heathens! Apikoirasim!" But inwardly he had long ago lost his bitterness toward their yingel. Despite Yankel's seizure of violence when the youngest had first been taken off to study in Tel Aviv, kidnapped by the older brothers and sisters, Leah and Gidon, the ringleaders of the plot, these years had not proved out Yankel's misgivings. Each summer, just as in these last months, Mati had returned and labored in the meshek like a good settler's son; together with Schmulik, he had extended the groves; a pleasant sight it had been to Yankel, though he would never speak of this to them, to watch them as he wound on his tefillin, while they yoked up the two teams of mules and made off to the fields, leaving him only the smaller tasks around the cattle barn. And in the wheat harvest he and his offspring together, even Gidon coming home to lend a hand, following Reuven sitting high on the huge machine he had brought from his kibbutz for a modest share of the crop. And much as Yankel had protested, this did turn out advantageously in the end. No, nor had his first visceral resistance to the yingel's removal to the city remained in Yankel: his fear of the citified Diaspora luftmensh disease infecting his sons, from the speculators and swindlers permeating that unproductive nothingness built on sand, arriving in the new wave of immigrants from Poland and Rumania. Rumanians especially Yankel had always distrusted, though the group in Mishkan Yaacov had turned out not so bad if you kept your distance from them, even if Schmulik had married among them. Perhaps also Mati had been protected from all such because he lived in Leah's meshek, outside the city itself, though soon enough that pullulating Tel Aviv would smother it, the speculators were already sniffing around, he had heard. Yet a wonder — now Yankel smiled to himself in his beard — a wonder his young Mati hadn't got himself attached to one of Leah's girls there; as Leah said, all the young chalutzoth were crazy for the boy. Oh, his yingel, he would have his time with the girls! Of all the sons, Yankel had always secretly felt, though only grunting when his Feigel declared the same, Mati was the most favored. And only deep within himself Yankel admitted there would be now a long-stretching loneliness as there had been every winter without the boy; the house was empty now, only himself and his old woman, even if Schmulik and Nussya lived close by.
A whole swarm of porters and beggars and vendors had to be dispersed as Nahum's glossy Private, still shining through the dust of the traversed land, came to a halt at the port entrance.
Amid the greeting clamors of the assembling family all of Feigel's parcels and hampers were handed out, even a specially oilcloth-wrapped huge round raisin kugel, Mati's favorite delicacy, while he laughed. "Ima, it's heavy enough to sink the whole ship!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Harvest"
by .
Copyright © 1978 Meyer Levin, Eli Levin, Gabriel Levin, Dominique Quignon-Fleuret and Mikael Levin.
Excerpted by permission of Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc..
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