A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [111]
But most of all they dreaded the mobs. They were terrified of what might happen in the gap between governments, for instance if the Poles were thrown out and the Communists came in, they were afraid that in the interval gangs of Ukrainians or Belarussians or the inflamed Polish masses or, farther north, the Lithuanians, would raise their heads once more. It was a volcano that kept dribbling lava all the time and smelling of smoke. "They're sharpening their knives for us in the dark," people said, and they never said who, because it could be any of them. The mobs. Even here in Israel, it turns out, Jewish mobs can be a bit of a monster.
The only people we were not too afraid of were the Germans. I can remember in 1934 or 1935—I'd stayed behind in Rovno to finish my nursing training when the rest of the family had left—there were quite a few Jews who said if only Hitler would come, at least in Germany there's law and order and everyone knows his place, it doesn't matter so much what Hitler says, what matters is that over there in Germany he imposes German order and the mob is terrified of him. What matters is that in Hitler's Germany there is no rioting in the streets and they don't have anarchy—we still thought then that anarchy was the worst state. Our nightmare was that one day the priests would start preaching that the blood of Jesus was flowing again, because of the Jews, and they would start to ring those scary bells of theirs and the peasants would hear and fill their bellies with schnapps and pick up their axes and pitchforks, that's the way it always began.
Nobody imagined what was really in store, but already in the 1920s almost everyone knew deep down that there was no future for the Jews either with Stalin or in Poland or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and so the pull of Palestine became stronger and stronger. Not with everyone, naturally. The religious Jews were very much against it, and so were the Bundists, the Yiddishists, the Communists, and the assimilated Jews who thought they were already more Polish than Paderewski or Wojciechowski. But many ordinary Jews in Rovno in the 1920s were keen that their children should learn Hebrew and go to Tarbuth. Those who had enough money sent their children to study in Haifa, at the Technion, or at the Tel Aviv gymnasium, or the agricultural colleges in Palestine, and the echoes that came back to us from the Land were simply wonderful—the young people were just waiting, when would your turn come? Meanwhile everyone read newspapers in Hebrew, argued, sang songs from the Land of Israel, recited Bialik and Tchernikhowsky, split up into rival factions and parties, ran up uniforms and banners, there was a kind of tremendous excitement about everything national. It was very similar to what you see here today with the Palestinians, only without their penchant for bloodshed. Among us Jews you hardly see such nationalism nowadays.
Naturally we knew how hard it was in the Land: we knew it was very hot, a wilderness, and we knew there was unemployment, and we knew there were poor Arabs in the villages, but we could see on the big wall map in our classroom that there weren't many Arabs, there may have been half a million altogether then, certainly less than one million, and there was total certainty that there would be enough room for another few million Jews, and that maybe the Arabs were just being stirred up to hate us, like the simple people in Poland, but surely we'd be able to explain to them and persuade them that our return to the Land represented only a blessing for them, economically, medically, culturally, in every way. We thought that soon, in a few years, the Jews would be the majority here, and as soon as that happened, we'd show the