Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [97]
The crowd suddenly opened an aisle as they felt a presence. The kibbutz leader, Ami Dan, came toward them. He was not all that large a man, but his unkempt beard gave him a look of power and he had the unmistakable manner of a leader.
Ami Dan embraced Misha. “Welcome to Hermon, comrade.” He turned to Nathan who stared at him for ever so long and then came remembrance.
“Yossi Dubnow?” Nathan asked.
“That is right. I was once Yossi Dubnow. The last time I saw you was in Poland, at an abandoned brick factory outside Siedlce. We’ll talk about it later.”
Ami Dan turned to the others. “All right, comrades, your questions will have to wait. We will have a meeting after dinner and get caught up on the news of the outside.”
As they were shown around this roughhewn stockade, Nathan suddenly realized there were no electricity, phone, or telegraph wires entering the kibbutz, and he did not share Misha’s elation.
THE KIBBUTZ OFFICE was a spartan room attached to the end of the men’s barracks. As Nathan entered, Ami Dan was seated at a crystal radio set writing down dots and dashes of an incoming message. When the transmission ended, he doffed his earphones and waved to Nathan to take a chair.
“When Bertha Polokov submitted your name, I was really taken by surprise,” Ami Dan said. “I could have sworn I’d never see you in Palestine.”
Nathan Zadok had, over the years, developed a near total capacity to forget any past incident in which he had been at fault, or tuck away into a far corner in his mind an unpleasantness. Ami Dan’s opening remark passed over him without striking a chord.
“Bertha assures me that you have changed and you’ll be an asset to the kibbutz. I understand you’ve paid your dues here in Palestine. Well, I’m willing to forget what happened between us.”
Nathan was unresponsive. “You’ll be so kind to tell me,” he said, “what’s by this Ami Dan?”
“My Hebrew name,” Ami Dan answered. “Yossi Dubnow was left in the shtetl. Most of us here have chosen to take new names.”
“I am aware of this business of changing names,” Nathan said.
“You might want to take a Hebrew name as well.”
“Never,” Nathan shot back. “My father would never understand such a thing. Something is wrong with Zadok? Zadok was one of our most revered Jewish dynasties.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Nathan Zadok,” Ami Dan said.
“It’s a Jewish name, a true Jewish name.”
Ami Dan smiled and changed the subject. “Misha and Bertha told me that the three of you have had a difficult time.”
“An understatement.”
“I promise you that it is not going to be easy here either, but turning a spade in our own soil is a lot different from breaking rocks for a British road. We have made a tremendous start for the future. In five years this place will be like Degania.”
Ami Dan painted an upbeat picture. The Syrians in the villages in the foothills had been unable to dislodge them. Marauding, a way of life among the Bedouin, had almost been curbed. Jewish settlers would soon be returning to Tel Hai and Kfar Giladi, so they would again have close neighbors.
Kibbutz life? It was simple and hard but no one left the table hungry. The hours were long, but never a night ended without singing and dancing and debates and storytelling. Most of all, their efforts had been blessed by the six infants in the nursery, and another three were on the way.
Nathan’s mind flashed back to his Uncle Bernie’s cinema in Minsk. He remembered what a great favorite the American cowboy films had been. The covered wagons, the Indian attacks, the privation. At the time he couldn’t possibly have equated Americans crossing the prairie with Zionism, but now there seemed to be amazing similarities between Kansas and the northern Galilee, except that the earth of Kansas showed more promise. The rest of it—the constant peril, the isolation, and the enemies—was the same. Only here there would be no U.S. Cavalry to save them.
“I should like a job,” Nathan said, “to do clerical work