Exodus - Leon Uris [184]
“Dov! Everything is so beautiful!” Karen cried.
Dov’s grumble Karen interpreted as meaning that he didn’t see so much to make a fuss about.
They drove deep into the Huleh to Yad El, the home of Ari Ben Canaan. Here a road branched from the main road and ran up into the hills toward the Lebanese border. The children saw the road sign pointing to Gan Dafna; they nearly exploded with anticipation, with the lone exception of the morose Dov Landau. The buses worked up the winding road and soon the Huleh expanded into full vista, carpeted with green fields of the kibbutzim and moshavim. The rectangular fishponds made a dozen small lakes around the larger swamplands of Huleh Lake.
They slowed as they entered the Arab village of Abu Yesha halfway up the mountains. There was none of the coldness or hostility at Abu Yesha the children had noted in the other Arab villages. They were greeted with friendly waving.
Past Abu Yesha they climbed beyond the two-thousand-foot elevation marker and then on to the Youth Aliyah village of Gan Dafnathe, Garden of Dafna. They stopped before green lawn measuring fifty by a hundred yards in the center of the village. The whole place sat on a large plateau. The center green was surrounded by administration buildings and was the hub of the village, which ran off in all four directions. Flowers and trees and green were everywhere. As the Exodus children debarked the village orchestra greeted them with a rousing march.
In the center of the green stood a life-sized statue of Dafna, the girl after whom the village was named. The figure was cast in bronze with a rifle in her hands, looking down on the Huleh, much the same as that day at Ha Mishmar when the Arabs had killed her.
The village founder, a tiny man with a slight humpback named Dr. Lieberman, stood by the statue of Dafna, smoking a large-bowled pipe as he welcomed the new youngsters. He briefly told them that he had left Germany in 1934 and founded Gan Dafna in 1940 on this land which had been generously given to Youth Aliyah by Kammal, the late muktar of Abu Yesha. Dr. Lieberman went to each youngster to speak a few personal words of welcome in a half dozen languages. As Karen watched him she had a feeling that she had seen him before. He looked and acted like the professors at Cologne when she was a baby ... but it was so long ago she could not really remember.
Each new child was attended by a member of the village.
“Are you Karen Clement?”
“Yes.”
“I am Yona, your new roommate,” said an Egyptian Jewess a bit older than Karen. The two girls shook hands. “Come, I will show you to our room. You will like it here.”
Karen called to Dov that she would see him later and she walked beside Yona past the administration buildings and the schoolrooms to an area of cottages set in a shrubbed pathway. “We are lucky,” Yona said. “We get the cottages because we are seniors.”
Karen stopped a moment before the cottage and looked at it with disbelief, then entered. It was very simple but Karen thought it the most wonderful room that she had ever seen. A bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a chair—her own, her very own.
It was evening before Karen had a free moment. After dinner the children were to be given a welcoming show at the outdoor theater.
Karen met Dov on the green near the statue of Dafna. For the first time in weeks and weeks she felt like dancing. The air was so crisp and wonderful and the village was heaven! Karen trembled with happiness. She stood by Dov and pointed to the white clustered houses of Abu Yesha below them in a saddle of the hill. Above them was the Taggart fort, Fort Esther, on the Lebanese border, and down at the floor of the valley were the fields belonging to the village, adjoining the fields of the moshav of Yad El. Along the hilltops at the far end of the Huleh was Tel Hai, where Trumpledor fell, and across the valley was Mount Hermon and