Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [95]
AS THE TRAIN WENDED through the great ravines and vales of the Judean hills, Nathan’s spirits lifted as the sense of Jerusalem and its mystical powers began to overtake him.
Jerusalem! Jerusalem of gold! Why had it taken him so long to come to it? He wondered. A lot of Yiddish was spoken in the city and there was certain to be work.
But Nathan’s euphoria was short-lived. Jerusalem was a line of barren hills swept by ominous winds, a city of glaring stones and dust. It had not recovered from losing a third of its population to hunger and disease during the war. It was the poorest of cities, lonely and remote, a place reserved for only those with the most powerful faith.
Jerusalem of gold was tarnished from too many sackings over too many centuries and its resurrection was a long way off, if ever. Nathan found a cot at a hostel in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. This square mile within Ottoman walls contained the wildest potpourri of religious ferment on earth. It was a short walk to the Walling Wall, but the route was safe because it was traveled by sufficient numbers.
Within the walled city lived the poorest of the poor, existing from hand to mouth. Streams of Hasidim and ultra-Orthodox men pounded the stone pavements to and from the Wall in their severe long black coats, bobbing in prayerful motions as they went, their earlocks flopping beneath black broad-brimmed beaver hats. Supported largely by world Jewish charities, they spent their lives in study and prayer.
It was a tight, suspicious place, where one trod cautiously on the filthy streets, always aware of the dark, hostile eyes probing the back of one’s neck.
Beyond the wall were cliques: scores of Jews from different lands, Bukharians, Yemenites, Moroccans, Syrians, Poles, each in their own fortress neighborhood.
Nathan found no comfort in his wanderings. It was a place where one could exist if one wanted to drown in false religious promises, Nathan thought. At best, it was a place to come to die.
Obviously, there was no work for him. The religious groups were impenetrable, their schools staffed with their own, their living conditions dismal.
He beat a retreat from Jerusalem after a fortnight of disenchantment.
In the next months he worked as a common laborer on rail and road gangs, carrying sand to mix with mortar for public buildings, whitewashing houses, laying water pipe, and splitting rocks with a sledgehammer. Workers were underfed and underpaid and labor trouble was always brewing.
Seven months after their aliyah to Eretz Israel, Misha found Nathan digging ditches near Hadera.
Misha related that his sister, Bertha, had fallen in love with a Kibbutznik and joined his settlement. Miracle of miracles, a place for both Misha and Nathan had been found at the kibbutz.
“You didn’t bring this news a minute too soon. Where are we off to?”
“The northern Galilee. A kibbutz called Hermon.”
“Hermon!” Nathan cried. “My God, Misha, that’s only a few kilometers from the Tel Hai massacre,” he continued in reference to a recent battle between Jew and Arab. “I think we’d better wait until some new land opens. Hermon is in the jaws of the tiger.”
“Maybe we’d better wait for the messiah,” Misha retorted. “I’m tired of all this shit here. At least at Hermon we can begin to be Zionists and do what we came here to do.”
Outside Nathan’s tent was an endless ditch to be dug. “Include me in,” he said at last. “I will go with you to Hermon.”
THE ZIONIST SETTLEMENT Department provided Nathan and Misha each with a bedroll and a rucksack of rations and essentials. The way north was from kibbutz to kibbutz. What Nathan and Misha saw, for the most part, was a group of new settlements popping up in the Jezreel Valley. Pioneers were battling centuries of swampland resulting from Arab neglect. The settlers existed on thin man’s diets in primitive conditions. A few of the older kibbutzim