Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [94]
The British, now ruling under an international mandate, were overtly sympathetic to the Arabs and permitted their gangs to prey on the Jewish community with impunity. The mufti of Jerusalem, a rabid Moslem clergyman, fomented hatred and riots erupted continually throughout the country.
The older Jewish settlers had transplanted much of the shtetl mentality to Palestine. They owned the large private farms, vineyards, and factories and were content to go on using cheap Arab labor.
A Jewish land agency was buying up acreage as fast as it could be acquired from absentee Arab landowners, but there was already a long waiting list of immigrants ready to start up new settlements.
To Nathan it seemed like the horrors of the shtetl all over again. What he had come to was a small, impoverished Jewish community unable to absorb the rush of new young idealists.
What Nathan Zadok saw was Jews walled in to defend themselves, roads impassable by night, and heat of unbearable intensity by day. Tel Aviv was a sorry town with little cultural life or entertainment. The hatred shown to Jews by the Pole, Cossack, Russian, and Ukrainian was amply replaced by that of the Arab. There was neither land to go to nor a living to be made.
“I’VE GOT A JOB as a guard,” Misha told Nathan a month after their arrival. “Bertha is coming along with me as a cook. There’s an opening for you as well.”
“What are you guarding?”
“ A Jewish-owned orange grove during the picking and crating season. We’re protecting against Arab theft in the fields and marauders from the outside.”
“So what do I know from guns? I’ll go with you if they’ll let me at least pick oranges.”
“The pickers are all Arab.”
“No Jewish pickers on a Jewish farm?”
“There were Jews last year, but the Labor Federation tried to organize them.”
Nathan shook his head. “For this we came to Palestine, to be exploited by Jews?”
“We’ve only been here a month, Nathan. Conditions are going to change. We knew it would be rough at first.”
“I don’t need from you a Zionist lecture,” Nathan answered. “Palestine is filled with Jewish exploiters, Arab exploiters, and British reactionaries. None of them give a damn for us. They’re sucking our blood to line their pockets.”
“So don’t you give me a Bolshevik lecture,” Misha shot back.
“And even if a union comes, does that mean we will automatically start having a love affair with the Arabs?”
“We can’t go back, Nathan. Poland, White Russia, and the Ukraine are covered with Jewish blood. The pogroms are worse than 1880, worse than 1905.”
“No, we can’t go back. You take the guard job, Misha.”
“And you?”
“I have relatives here somewhere. Ill shnorr them and see what happens.”
Nathan had the addresses of his first cousins, the Borokov brothers from Mariupol, who had made the Second Aliyah to Palestine before the war. Cousin Sidney was a teacher at the highly regarded Herzlia Gymnasium in Jaffa, where some of the more affluent Jews of the shtetl sent their children. Like everything in Palestine, the gymnasium was struggling for funds.
Sidney Borokov was a decent sort, with a houseful of kids, a low wage, and no authority. Nathan had no qualifications to work at such an institution, which was already overstaffed with underpaid scholars and intellectuals. After a week of listening to Nathan’s recounting of the tragic affair with Rosie Gittleman, Sidney took him to see his brother, Morris.
Morris Borokov was one of a small number of Jewish businessmen who had succeeded. He owned a villa in the upper-middle-class German colony on the edge of Tel Aviv. The coolness between Sidney and Morris and Morris and Nathan was mutual. Morris’s main operation was importing coal. Gevalt! Nathan thought. It was Mariupol all over again, only worse.
Being first cousins imposed certain obligations, so Morris housed Nathan, in the servants’ quarters with the Arabs, and complained constantly about how bad business was. He had all the unpleasant characteristics of his father, Boris, and was a notorious exploiter of his workers.