Exodus - Leon Uris [123]
Although both boys concealed their feelings, Rosh Pinna was a terrible disappointment. Instead of flourishing farms they found a rundown village. There were but a few dozen Jews living midst conditions not much better than those of the Arabs of Abu Yesha.
“Sometimes I think it would have been better to have stayed in Russia,” one of the Bilus opined. “At least in the ghetto we were among Jews. We had books to read, music to hear, and people to speak to ... there were women. Here, there is nothing.”
“But all those things we heard at the Lovers of Zion meetings——” Jossi said.
“Oh yes, we were filled with ideals when we arrived. One soon loses them in this country. Look at it ... so ruined that nothing can grow. What little we do have is stolen by the Bedouins, and the Turks take what the Bedouins leave. If I were you boys I’d keep on going to Jaffa and get on the next boat to America.”
An outlandish idea, Jossi thought.
“If it were not for the charity of Rothschild, De Hirsch, and De Schumann we would all have starved long ago.”
They left Rosh Pinna the next morning and set out to cross the hills to Safed. Safed was one of the four holy cities of the Jews. It sat on a beautiful cone-shaped hill at the entrance to the Huleh area of the Galilee. Here, Jossi thought, their dejection would soon fade because here there were second-, third-, and fourth-generation Jews who lived and studied the Cabala, the book of mystics. The shock of Rosh Pinna was repeated in Safed. They found a few hundred aged Jews who lived in study and from the alms of co-religionists around the world. They cared nothing about the rebirth of the House of Jacob—but wanted only to live quietly, studiously, and in poverty.
The Rabinsky brothers set out again from Safed the next morning, and crossed to nearby Mount Canaan, and stopped to get their bearings. From Mount Canaan the vista was magnificent. From here they could look back at Safed on its cone-shaped hill and beyond it to the Sea of Galilee. To the north they could see the rolling hills of the Huleh from whence they had come. Jossi loved this view—for before him was the land he had first trod. Yes, he vowed again that someday—someday it would be his.
Yakov’s bitterness began to show. “All our lives, all our prayers ... and look at it, Jossi.”
Jossi put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Look how beautiful it appears from here,” he said. “I tell you, Yakov, someday we will make it look just as beautiful from the bottom of the hill as it does from the top.”
“I don’t know what to believe any more,” Yakov whispered. “All through those winters as we walked through the mountains blue with cold ... all through those blistering summers.”
Jossi said, “Now cheer up. Tomorrow we begin our journey to Jerusalem.”
Jerusalem! The magic word caused Yakov’s flagging spirits to soar.
The next morning they came down from Mount Canaan and moved south along the Sea of Galilee into the Genossar Valley, past Arbel and the Horns of Hattin on the plains where Saladin the Kurd had once crushed the Crusaders in mortal combat.
But as they trudged on, even Jossi became dismayed. Their Promised Land was not a land flowing with milk and honey but a land of festering stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth caused by a thousand years of Arab and Turkish neglect. It was a land denuded of its richness. It was a land that lay bleeding and fallow.
After a while they came to Mount Tabor in the center of the Galilee, and climbed up this hill which had played such a great part in the history of their people. It was here that the Jewish Joan of Arc, Deborah, and her General Barak hid with their armies and swooped down to crush the invading host. Atop Tabor they could see for miles in every direction. Around them stood Crusader ruins and a tiny monastery; it was here that Jesus was transfigured and held communion with Moses and Elijah.
From Tabor they could see the entire