Israel (36 page)

“Leah, listen, please. We're doing this together because we are partners, as Haim and I were partners at one time. The way I would like to be partners with him again. That's how you and I are partners, in addition to being husband and wife—”

“Woodrow Wilson,” Leah interrupted. If he could give the right answer, so could she.

They studied until it was time to open the store. Abe washed and shaved, using plenty of cold water to shock himself awake. While Leah made him coffee he dressed in his best suit, and then she napped and he tended to the morning's business.

He closed up at eleven-thirty. They had to be at the district courthouse at half past noon, and Abe wanted to get there in plenty of time to have a final go-round drilling Leah on Congress.

He heard her coming down the back stairs, turned and thrilled at the sight of her.

Leah's waist-length black hair was braided and tucked up beneath a high-crowned floppy-brimmed hat of maroon felt. Her turquoise dress was pretty enough with its flat white collar and its flounced skirt that ended above her ankles, which were covered by her high-heeled, high-buttoned shoes. Still, it was the hat that gladdened Abe.

She'd bought it well over a year ago in celebration of becoming pregnant, after an afternoon shopping on Division Street, nicknamed Millinery Lane. When she brought it home Abe thought it made her look both seductive and like a little girl. He said it made her look like Mary Pickford, who was one of Leah's favorites at the moving pictures.

It was a silly, totally useless hat, ready to cause
a nuisance by blowing off and cartwheeling down the street at the slightest puff of wind. It was the sort of hat a woman would wear purely for the joy of it, to make a man notice her.

And thank God she's wearing it again, Abe thought. “You look very pretty today,” he said.

Leah shrugged, making a face. “1 should be a frump on the day I become an American?” She stalked past him, stiff-legged and self-conscious.

Abe said nothing else as he locked up, afraid to break the spell. His heart was thumping like a newlywed's; as Leah brushed past him he noticed that she was wearing the gold earrings he'd given her for their anniversary.

That evening, in celebration of their new citizenship, they drank a bottle of wine with their dinner. Then, slightly drunk, emboldened by the wine and the events of the day, Abe led Leah to their bed. They undressed each other with trembling fingers; they felt extraordinarily naughty and nervous. It had not been so very long since sex, but an eternity since they'd made love.

They relearned each other, lingering over touch and taste. The cruel and raucous world retreated as they loved each other. Later, when they were resting, they felt renewed and reborn, dreamers ready to wipe the sleep from their eyes and face a bright morning after the passage of a long dark night.

“We must try again to have a child,” Leah whispered, her sweet lips brushing his ear as they shared a pillow.

“The doctor said no more children,” Abe objected.

“Doctor Glueck said no more children after this one we lost, but a loss shouldn't count,” Leah was continuing, her logic exquisite. “We will have another.”

“I love you so much, my Leah,” Abe said, and from her delighted laugh he knew that this time she'd heard. He rose up, twisting upon her. As she moaned, her nipples
rising to meet his hungry mouth, Abe felt himself grow strong again. The hope was relit inside his heart. There would be a son.

Any possibility that Haim might have written in response to Abe's appeal in the Palestine newspaper was swept away by Turkey's entry into the war. There had been only the slightest of chances in any event, assuming that the advertisement was ever run in the first place, and now that chance was shaved even slimmer. Abe doubted if correspondence could enter or leave Palestine until after the war.

The war fascinated Abe because he felt so remote from it. He bought armfuls of newspapers every day and spread them out on the counter to read during his free moments in the store. That America could ever get involved in the insanity overseas struck him as totally absurd. America was the New World. The war belonged to the old.

In April of 1915 Leah confided to Abe that she was once again pregnant. The visits to the doctor were resumed. Leah did not tell Abe that Dr. Glueck was very pessimistic.

Abe once again relegated his wife to the upstairs apartment. By day he minded the store, read his newspapers and argued current events with his customers. After the
Lusitania
was sunk, many of the people who came to his store argued with Abe that America would soon be at war.

“Never,” Abe declared to them all, echoing what Stefano had told him the last time Abe delivered his building's rent receipts. “Next year comes up a Presidential election. No politician worth his salt considers a war during his campaign.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Abe's customers would cluck.

“Take it from a United States citizen,” Abe would brag. “You might as well worry about a pogrom on Cherry Street.”

In June Leah had another miscarriage. This time it was not nearly as debilitating as the first, but Dr. Glueck insisted that she spend a couple of days in the hospital to be certain there were no complications.

Abe visited her both evenings. He sat by her bed and held her hand. They both said little, having known there was a strong chance this would happen. This time they could face their sorrow together.

On the second evening in the hospital, Leah squeezed Abe's hand. “We will try again.”

“Of course we will.”

“We will die trying.” Leah mustered a look of weary determination.

“I certainly intend to.” Abe leered until Leah had to beg him to stop, for it still hurt too much to laugh.

As the war progressed, the Yiddish newspapers devoted great coverage to events on the Palestine front and the exploits of Joseph Trumpeldor and Vladimir Jabotinsky. Abe read that both these men were Jews who had fought their way to respectability in Russia despite strong prejudice. Trumpeldor had done it through valor in battle, Jabotinsky through his prowess as a philosopher-writer. Neither man had allowed his own relatively comfortable circumstances blind him to the plight of his people. Both became staunch Zionists.

Their paths crossed when Jabotinsky, employed as a correspondent for a Moscow daily, went to Alexandria. His assignment was to report on the refugee camps the British set up to shelter Palestinian Zionists, but the Russian journalist had a far different personal motive. Jabotinsky's dream, according to the accounts in the Yiddish newspapers, was similar to the one the departed Trumpeldor had recently espoused but went far beyond.

Most Yiddish newspapers carried a certain photograph of Jabotinsky. The grainy black-and-white likeness revealed a slightly built clean-shaven man of indeterminate age with rather large ears and intense-looking eyes behind thick spectacles. From his picture he didn't look much like a fighter, but he must be one from what the various articles went on to say.

Jabotinsky believed that the war was the Jews' golden opportunity to forge an army of their own and earn the Allies' goodwill by helping to defeat the Central Powers. In return the Allies would endorse the postwar creation of a Jewish national home. This same army would then guarantee the security of the Jewish people. Jabotinsky dubbed his army a Jewish legion.

The newspaper articles recounted how Trumpeldor and a majority of the Palestine Refugees' Committee—the governing body—endorsed Jabotinsky's idea. Training of five hundred volunteers began immediately, with the understanding that they would fight beneath a special Zionist ensign as a British detachment in the liberation of Palestine.

Things stalled, Abe read, when General Maxwell, the British commander in Egypt, announced that an assault on Palestine was unlikely and that there was a question as to the legality of foreign nationals entering His Majesty's army.

“The best we can do,” the newspapers quoted Maxwell, “is allow the Palestinians to serve in some support capacity on some other Turkish front.”

Jabotinsky and others immediately rejected Maxwell's offer. Trumpeldor, however, agreed to help train the sort of unit Maxwell had in mind. Trumpeldor believed it to be better than nothing and not so different from his own far more modest concept of a symbolic Jewish presence in the war.

Under the auspices of the British Trumpeldor formed and led the six-hundred-fifty-strong Zion Mule Corps, which
provided supply and artillery transport during the Gallipoli campaign.

That Trumpeldor and his volunteers worked behind the lines instead of grappling hand to hand with the Turks made little difference to Abe and his Jewish neighbors. The very idea of Jews like themselves wearing uniforms and standing side by side with soldiers from the foremost nations of Europe captured their imaginations.

The Yiddish dailies knew what sold newspapers. Until the ill-fated Gallipoli venture came to an end in the first quarter of 1916, there were articles on the subject in each issue.

Abe read them all. He convinced himself that Haim had joined the Mule Corps and was obsessed with the younger man's safety. When in February one of the dailies published a list of the corps' six casualties, Abe fully expected to see Haim's name on it and thanked God that it was not.

Throughout the rest of that year Abe kept abreast of developments in the war by reading both the Yiddish and English-language newspapers. The Yiddish papers focused a great deal of attention on Jabotinsky's lobbying efforts on behalf of a Jewish legion in the various European capitals of the Allies. Along with other Jews and Christian immigrants who realized in one form or another the horrors of a pogrom, Abe was appalled at reports of the Turkish slaughter of a million and a half Armenians, a helpless minority within the Ottoman Empire. As Germany's use of U-boats increased, more and more Americans, including Abe, began to suspect that America would be forced to step in despite President Wilson's campaign pledge to keep America out of the war.

Stefano told Abe that no President would declare a war while running. True, but what might happen after Wilson was safely returned to office was another thing entirely.

America, Abe read, had a huge economic investment in the Allies. The politicians and businessmen put forth that the nation would maintain its neutrality by selling to the Germans if they could break through the Allied naval blockade, but it was becoming clear from the slant and tone of the newspapers that this country was siding with the Allies. Suddenly Abe's Old World seemed not so far away.

In December, the election behind him, Wilson attempted a peace initiative, but the new year 1917 was an increase in German U-boat activity leading to the sinking of the British liner
Laconia
and the loss of three American lives. In February an irate United States learned of a month-old telegram from German Foreign Secretary Zimmerman to the German minister in Mexico City. This “Zimmerman Telegram,” as the newspapers dubbed it, proposed a Mexican-Japanese-German alliance against the United States should she enter the war. By the end of March word of the “pro-democratic” revolution in Russia convinced many Americans that entry into the war was essential if the newborn Russian people's government was to survive. War appeared inevitable as the Germans sank three American ships.

Despite it all the newspapers were full of Wilson's efforts to keep the country neutral. Abe prayed that the President would succeed in his goals. It had been a decade since Abe entered the Russian army, but the talk of a military draft vividly brought back those dreary memories.

It does not matter what you want, Abe firmly told himself. You became a citizen, you voted, and now you must pay for that privilege if asked.

But what would become of the store, of Leah? In March she had come to him, tense, hopeful, with the news that she was two months pregnant.

Early in the year the interior agricultural settlements were overwhelmed with refugees. Many were people Haim and Rosie knew from Tel Aviv. The Turks expelled nearly all the Jews from the coastal cities. Dizengoff himself, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, was deported to Damascus.

About Rosie's family there was at first no word. Then as the anxious weeks passed, rumors began to abound. Every new arrival at Degania had a different story to tell about the fate of the Glaser household, and every bearer of bad news swore that his version was the truth.

The Glasers had been deported to Egypt, to Damascus, to the interior. They had been arrested as British spies, had bought their freedom by turning in a Jewish resistance group to the Turks. They had been killed.

Rosie calmly listened to every story and did her best to believe only the more optimistic accounts. Meanwhile, there was plenty of work to keep her mind off her own troubles. The valley was Filled with people who knew nothing about survival in Galilee. Degania's shelters were overcrowded and its sanitary facilities were overtaxed.
Fever began to spread. At night the settlement was filled with the moans of the sick.

Rosie worked hard in the nursery. There were many more children, and their health did not permit them to run barefoot or play outside with the thoughtless energy of Degania's own offspring.

The mural remained uncompleted, a symbol of life disrupted by war. As she endeavored to be both a teacher and a nurse to the frightened, miserable children, many of them orphans, she found herself struck several times throughout the day by the realization that her own family was lost to her. For the first time she comprehended a little of what her husband had suffered his entire life. Now both of them might be orphans.

They are not dead, and you know your mama and papa are not spies, so they could not be imprisoned, she sternly lectured herself. At the very worst they have been expelled to the camps in Alexandria or Damascus. Perhaps they are just a few miles from here at one of the other settlements.