Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [100]
Ami Dan had made a serious mistake. On the fourth night there were some stirrings near Nathan’s position. His partner, a lad named Levi, went out to investigate. Alone and terrified, Nathan forgot the password and just about everything else and shot at Levi as he returned. Fortunately, Nathan’s aim was not a thing of beauty and Levi escaped unscathed.
“DO WE HAVE any new business?” Ami Dan asked.
Nathan popped up.
“I have a matter which I would like to present for serious consideration,” he said.
“You are out of order,” Ami Dan snapped and his sentiment was echoed about the room.
“I am certain, when the comrades hear what I have to propose, they will find me very much in order.”
“Very well, Comrade Zadok, but make it brief.”
“Today I again visited the library, as I often do, for I read several languages and have a background in literature. I find to my dismay that there are books in English, in Hebrew, in German, and in French, but not so much as a single volume in Yiddish. I cannot alone reverse the mentality in Palestine that says the tongue of Eretz Israel must be Hebrew—a language, as you all know, reserved exclusively for prayer. So, I accept what I cannot do nothing about. However, it is a disgraceful criminal matter that Yiddish has been abandoned. And I tell you that in the end, the Jewish community in Palestine will return to Yiddish, because Hebrew is not usable as a modern language.”
Ami Dan quickly quieted the members down. “You are way out of line, Zadok!” he retorted angrily. “We did not come to Palestine to transpose the shtetl but to build a new country. Spanish-born Jews do not speak Yiddish. American-born Jews do not speak Yiddish. African-born Jews do not speak Yiddish, nor do they speak it in any of the Moslem countries, where half the entire world’s Jewish population lives.
Yiddish is not the universal language of the Jews. It is the language of the shtetl and the ghetto!”
Nathan ignored the applause at the end of Ami Dan’s words.
“I propose the following,” Nathan continued. “Each of us should write home and have Yiddish books sent to our library. I, personally, will take the responsibility of teaching Yiddish to the children of the kibbutz, who should not forget they are Jews.”
“WHAT DO WE do with Nathan?” a frustrated Ami Dan asked Misha and Bertha.
“I know I made a terrible mistake by vouching for him,” Bertha said, “but I still don’t want to see him have to undergo the humiliation of being voted out of the kibbutz.”
Misha fingered his accordion. “He sits alone at night and reads. He never bothers to come and join us. I’ve never seen him sing or dance.”
“I didn’t tell you the story of when we met in Poland,” Ami Dan said. “I should have. This place is not for him. He’s driving everybody crazy.”
“I’d talk to him,” Misha said, “but he has no listening apparatus.”
“So what do we do?” Bertha said, repealing Ami Dan’s frustrated question.
“I have an idea,” Ami Dan said suddenly. “It’s a bit of dirty business, but it could work. The land fund has assigned us two thousand dunams of new land on the Huleh Lake.”
“But it’s all swamp,” Misha said.
“Exactly,” Ami Dan answered.
THE PLAN to develop Huleh Lake was a joint venture with Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi. An expert from the Far East had been sent to Palestine to study the feasibility of building ponds to seed, grow, and harvest fresh-water fish. It was the dicey business of rebalancing nature.
First a portion of the swamp had to be drained. No human physical labor matched it for filth, sweat, and danger. Six volunteers and Nathan were sent down as part of the team from Kibbutz Hermon.
All told, twenty men and four girls from the three settlements went at the swamp. They were short on machinery, but long on spirit. They hacked away with machetes at the papyrus reeds that hovered high over their heads, working in waist-high muck, and hand-dug a labyrinth