Only Yesterday (58 page)

I

Our comrade Rabinovitch didn’t exaggerate and didn’t overstate. When you go out to that desert that Ahuzat Bayit bought, you see

some sort of buildings glittering from the sands. Not yet real houses there, but there will be houses. And there are already people in Jaffa who call that place by the new name of Tel Aviv. And so that Jewish quarter they call Tel Aviv is being built, and every day new workers come, tamp down the sand and make houses. And that place which was desolate and without inhabitants is humming like a settled land.

There are some Children of Israel who prophesy that those houses built by the hands of Jewish workers won’t possibly stand, just as a farmer can’t possibly exist with Jewish workers. And sometimes, chance supports them, a wall fell or a beam collapsed. And behold this miracle, from the place of the defeat comes relief and salvation, for every wall that fell and every beam that collapsed teaches the workers what to do and what not to do, and they become expert in their work to their own enjoyment and to the enjoyment of their boss. And now our comrades in Jaffa have bread to eat and money to pay rent, to relax their bones and draw strength for their work, until folks are amazed and say, How they have changed. And as folks are amazed, so is Heaven amazed. And when the sun blazes in the firmament and the whole world is seething, it comes there to cool it-self a bit among the wood scaffolding. And at night, couples come there and stroll among the new buildings, for all the places on the beach are taken by the new immigrants who are coming with every ship. Waves and ripples rise from the sea and hug one another, and the moon now floats on the sea and now goes to see the new houses rising from the sands, like a strong city in a dry land.

Many times Isaac saw Sonya, sometimes at Rabinovitch’s and sometimes on the beach or among the houses of Ahuzat Bayit which is called Tel Aviv. Sometimes he found her strolling with Yarkoni and sometimes with somebody else, for Yarkoni was busy at work arranging his affairs and wasn’t available to Sonya all the time. Once Isaac found Sonya strolling with a tall, skinny fellow, with an artist’s beret on his head and a roll of canvas in his arm. If we’re not mistaken, this is the one who scolded Isaac when Isaac asked him about his fellow painters. A lot of pictures he “picted” in Jerusalem, and now Jaffa is ripe for him to “pict” pictures of it. Isaac doesn’t hold a grudge against him and isn’t jealous to see him with Sonya, and

doesn’t care to know what they are talking about, whether it’s Apollo or Venus or Beatrice, or other creatures who are already dead.

In fact, they aren’t talking about anything, but are walking along with one another, and each one is thinking his own thoughts in his heart and doesn’t raise his thoughts to his lips. Sonya is thinking about Yael Hayyot who is two-faced, her face is the face of the Madonna, but her heart is full of deceit. She walks around with Shammai but doesn’t let go of Hemdat. From Yael Hayyot, Sonya’s mind wanders to Tamara Levi. That little girl who still has ink on her fingers from school is already preparing to go to university Outside the Land. From Tamara Levi, Sonya returned to thinking about Yarkoni, he doesn’t seem to have anyone in the world but her, yet she and the whole world seem superfluous to him.

While Sonya was thinking about the whole world, that artist was walking next to her and thinking to himself, You are walking around with a girl and nothing happens. Good God Almighty, how can you paint pictures if you have never in your life seen the bare calf of a woman’s leg. Paint whatever you may paint, the blind and the lame, the sidelocks of the Yemenites and the beggars scrabbling in the dung, but not a living soul whose smell you inhale. This land is a strange land, a land without women. The Arab women are veiled, and as for the girls of the Old Yishuv, Heaven separates you from them. What do you have left outside of those old virgins whose purses are full of quinine pills and a thermometer and bicarbonate of soda. And if you went down to Jaffa and are strolling with this erect girl, you have to fulfill your affection, in thought only. That man takes on the manner of an artist, stretches out his arm to the sea, and says, How beautiful is that sea. Sonya nods in agreement, and her head nods at Isaac Kumer who passed by and asked how she was. Isaac often encountered her. Sometimes he spoke with her and sometimes he got off with a simple hello, like people who know one another but aren’t close to one another.

One day, Isaac went into his hut. He found the owner of the hut sleeping on his bed. How did he get in if Isaac has the key? He waited for him one hour, two hours, but he didn’t wake up. Sweet

Foot returned from wherever he returned from, where he made a pulley for a room that stands on top of a room, and if the Turkish officials come to spy on the place, you turn a kind of spring and that lower room rises so they don’t notice anything. Sweet Foot noticed Isaac but didn’t want to engage him, because he was tired and wanted to sleep. Isaac got up and went to a hotel. He said, Tonight I shall sleep in a hotel and tomorrow I shall return to Jerusalem.

All the rooms of the hotel were taken, for this was the season for bathing and some came from Jerusalem and some from the settlements to bathe in the sea. The landlady of the hotel set up a bed for him in a small room where Teplitsky the overseer lived, who supervised the estate of his uncle Spokoyny. Amazing, said Isaac to himself. When I left here I found Victor, and when I came back here I found Teplitsky. As if all those who wouldn’t let me work the Land are passing before me. Teplitsky didn’t recognize Isaac, for never in his life did Teplitsky raise his eyes to a person. But he was glad to see him, for if he has a roommate, they lower the rent.

That day, a great calamity befell Teplitsky. An orphan girl had grown up in the house of his uncle Spokoyny, who had been appointed her guardian by the girl’s father. Teplitsky set his sights on her to marry her because he knew that that citrus grove he supervised belonged not to his uncle, but to that orphan girl, and he was already secretly congratulating himself, for if he married her, the citrus grove would fall into his hands. What did his uncle do? He went and married her off to an idler, a medical student in Beirut who agreed to marry her as she was, without a dowry.

Isaac lay on his bed and recited the Bedtime Shema as he sometimes did. Drowsiness fell on his eyelids, and he wasn’t frightened by bad dreams, or by dreams that seem good but aren’t. But close to morning, he heard the sound of studying the Talmud. And since that Teplitsky who shared his room was not a scholar, Isaac understood that it was Reb Yudel his ancestor who was studying. And since his ancestor was no longer in this world, he imagined that this was no one but himself. A matchmaker entered and proposed a match to him. He put his handkerchief on the Talmud to hear what

the matchmaker said. The entire room was filled with men wearing prayer shawls and wrapped in Tefillin, and the Tefillin of some touch the Tefillin of others.

After Isaac ate breakfast, he went to the hut, packed his things, and went out to find a porter to take them to the railroad sta-tion. The porters saw him and started wrangling with each other to serve him. Isaac saw one man standing alone with his hands folded behind his back, he called him. That porter was a porter of the Bur-ial Society whose work was to serve the dead, but since he had called him, he didn’t refuse the profit that fell into his hands. He untied his ropes and followed Isaac.

B O O K F

U R
Epilogue

Leaves Isaac and Returns to Balak

1. I
   

   Whenever Balak appeared in the neighborhoods of the Jews, they hurled stones at him, when he moved away from them, they cast false charges at him. There was not one mouth that did not throw mud at him and not one newspaper that did not blacken his name. The newspapers were filled with nothing but the misfor-tunes of Balak.
   Havatselet
   called him a heathen and heretic, who behaves insolently and goes bareheaded with the letters of the Holy Tongue on his skin. And
   Ha-Or
   , which was lavish in his praise at first for the same reason, because he went bareheaded, changed its opinion about him for the worse, and suspected him of a touch of hypocrisy, because he moved away from the neighborhoods of the Jews for he feared
   Havatselet
   . Harsher than both of them was
   Ha-Herut
   , which reprinted the words of both
   Havatselet
   and
   Ha-Or
   , but added, Why do
   Havatselet
   and
   Ha-Or
   turn their eyes away from that event? Because they get hush-money.
   

   When the Jerusalem newspapers reached Jaffa, Jaffa thought that dog was a parable, like Mendele’s horse and other stories of livestock and animals and birds which a person reads for pleasure, and if he’s intelligent, he applies his intelligence to the moral. The peo-ple of Jaffa, who are all intelligent, applied their intelligence to that, but they didn’t know who they were against. This one says, There’s something to this; and that one says, We have to derive the implicit from the explicit. But what is explicit here no one explained. Meanwhile, opinions were divided, and there were as many opinions as there were inhabitants of the city.
   

   I
   485
   

   Suddenly a rumor spread in the city that the whole episode of Balak referred to the administrators of education in Jerusalem. One person told his comrade and that comrade told his comrade, Why should we rack our brains and express another opinion every time, obviously this concerns so-and-so and so-and-so, who run like dogs after their masters the ministers of the nations and the foreign consuls, some because they are servile and others to win a medal, and impose all kinds of foreign tongues in the Land. But the newspapers of Jerusalem, who are afraid of them because they depend on them for money, talk in allusions.
   

   By the end of the day, Jaffa had left its business and come to a protest meeting. The courtyard of the Gates of Zion Library was filled with a big crowd, and all the slopes leading to it were crowded with people. Some above others and others even higher, and everyone who preceded his comrade felt as if he had achieved a temporary success. And still they came. The leaders of the meeting saw that there was no room for all the people who were coming and they declared that the meeting would be outside in the open. All the people who had crowded in started going out. The ones on top suddenly found themselves on the bottom and the ones on the bottom who stood below were on top, for the temporary successes turned away from their possessors. They brought a bench and somebody climbed up on it and delivered a speech. And he was followed by his comrade, who was followed by his comrade. Thirty-six speeches were delivered that night and every speaker said something new. (A phenomenon that may not have happened since the day Jaffa became a metropolis for speakers.) Since the principals of the schools of Jerusalem were administrators of education, every single person had a different opinion, and just as his opinion was different so his language was different. The Alliance Israelite spoke French. The Gehilfsverein spoke German. At Evelyn Rothschild’s they spoke English. And thus they impose all kinds of languages on their students and bring a turmoil upon the Land. And if they don’t have the Children of Israel as teachers, they hire Gentile teachers and even complete anti-Semites, famous Jew-haters whose hatred bubbles up like venom. And any student who doesn’t want to hear slander about the Jews is disgraced. And there was the tale of one
   

   student who left the classroom of a wicked teacher and went out to answer the call of nature, and the principal followed him and locked him in the outhouse and took away the key.
   

   What the activists of Jaffa did orally, the workers of the Land of Israel did in writing. They wrote stinging articles in
   The Young Laborer
   against the Alliance Israélite Universelle and against Miss Lan-dau and against the Gehilfsverein and against the other schools, because every one of them confounds another language, until the Land of Israel is confounded in seventy languages like the Tower of Babel. And when they attacked those schools for adapting the tongues of the Gentiles to Jewish mouths, they didn’t refrain from assaulting the Yeshivas and the Heders that forbid their students to speak Hebrew and cut our tongue from our mouth.
   

   The enlightened of Jerusalem were teachers in those schools themselves, or their sons or their sons-in-law were, and they could not make open war against their breadgivers, but they couldn’t remain silent either; they assaulted the missionary schools that hunted the schoolchildren of Israel deceitfully and introduced into their hearts hatred of their own nation and converted them to their own faith and forced them to deny the holiness of the nation until they departed from the community of Israel. The missionaries took vengeance on them and raised the price of the Bible severalfold. The teachers lost heart and withdrew from the quarrel. Things settled down and the world went back to business as usual.
   

2. I
   

   Since the war for Hebrew was aroused again, the Rabbis of Jerusalem started a war for Torah, until all the walls were filled with excommunications against atheists who breached the fence that was fenced and bounded by our ancestors who were like angels, those aged Rab-bis and ancient geniuses, the mighty ones of the Land of Israel, to im-pose a strict and total ban on all schools in all the cities of the Holy Land that adopted as the essence of their religion the Hebrew language and the Holy Tongue and they profane everything holy. Because of that quarrel, Jerusalem took its mind off Balak. And Balak thought the world had returned to a good state.
   

   When the newspapers of Jerusalem arrived outside the Land, the Jews of Diaspora understood that they said dog only as a euphemism. The newspapers which are wont to criticize the Distribution of Charity and its managers, made the tale of the dog the prime feature of their editorials about the distribution of charity and its corruption. The newspapers that have no interest in the Distribution of Charity, but are interested in political issues found that everything in the Jerusalem newspapers hinted at the Turks. They immediately launched a war against Turkey and its tactics. And they wrote again and again that anyone who thought Asiatic brutality had passed out of the world should read the Jerusalem newspapers and see how far it goes. When practical people saw all their newspapers writing, they gathered together and sent letters to their emperors and their kings to order their plenipotentiaries and consuls to keep an eye on the deeds of the Sultan to remind him that this world hasn’t gone to the dogs.
   

   When the newspapers of Diaspora arrived in the Land of Is-rael, the Land of Israel understood that the kingdom of Turkey had imposed a harsh persecution on the Children of Israel, but that the leaders of the Children of Israel in all lands stood in the breach and abolished it. The whole Land of Israel gathered together and lauded the Children of Israel in Diaspora, whose eyes were wide open every day upon those who dwell before the Lord on the holy mountain in Jerusalem. And all poets wrote poems made cleverly in the shape of our destroyed Temple and in gold letters, curled and curlicued, to honor our champions, the defenders of the Land, the leaders of the Children of Israel who stand in the breach, who hold king and no-bles in their hand, and their eyes and their heart are on the precious sons of Zion to urge them to put off every persecution without delay from the nation of the Lord that dwells in Jerusalem.
   

   And Jerusalem went back to its disputes and its rivalries and to the Big Quarrel, for all the national groups were divided about the episode of Balak. The Ashkenazi Geniuses and Rabbis said he was the reincarnation of that heretic who denied the entire Torah and accepted the Holy Tongue. The Sephardi Sages and Rabbis said he was the well-known fox who emerged from the Holy of Holies, but the
   

   sages of the congregations were divided about the profound issue. Some said he came for good, and some said that wasn’t the case, but that harsh persecutions that were about to come down—may they strike the foes of Israel and not Israel. Babylonians say don’t rejoice, Aleppans say rejoice. Iraqis say don’t rejoice, Yemenites say rejoice. Moroccans say don’t rejoice, Georgians say rejoice. Bukharans and Persians didn’t stand apart. The Persians separated from the Bukharans, Persians say don’t rejoice, Bukharans say rejoice. But they all agreed that penance had to be done.
   

3. I
   

   The tale of the dog was not confined solely to the borders of the Land of Israel, but began influencing science and life and art both within the Land and Outside the Land. And even Hasidism was enriched by its rejection of Balak. We shall not exaggerate if we say that the story of Balak was more significant than most deeds of a lot of people.
   

   How did it influence science? Aside from those who reside here permanently, there are Gentile sages who come to the Holy Land now and then to study its climate, its flora, or the manners of livestock, animals, and birds there, or the inhabitants of the Land and their customs, or other kinds of research whose name hasn’t yet been researched by research. They sit in a hotel and record in their note-books what they hear from the innkeepers and the carters and the guides, and when they return to their own country, they write books and pamphlets. One sage came by here. He saw the dog and his skin. He sat down and wrote, It is a simple custom in Jerusalem, and no doubt throughout Palestine that the Jews write on the skin of dogs in the Hebrew language and in block letters: Crazy Dog. This seems to be done as a form of a “placatory act,” that is, someone who has a crazy person in his house goes and catches a white dog and writes on his skin, as those Jews do on the eve of their Day of Atonement with chickens, which they twirl over their head and say, This is my atone-ment this is my exchange. And it is still open to investigation why they chose a dog of all animals, and not a cow or some other animal. Further study is required to elucidate if this is because in Islamic countries the dog is abandoned, or because of some other reason. At
   

   any rate, the Jews of Palestine are to be condemned, for after they do that, they throw big stones at the dog and chase him furiously. This, however, is not within the realm of science, and it is not the task of the genuine scholar whose sights are set solely on science, to be concerned with mores. But this should be called to the attention of the Humane Society, if there is such a society in the Oriental lands, so that they may pay heed to this brutal custom which brings more brutality in its wake. And if they can, they should stop the Jews from doing whatever their heart desires.
   

   How did it influence life? When the scholar’s words were published, another scholar came along and added, From his words we learned that the Jews hate animals, and when they see a cow or an animal or a bird that isn’t fit to eat, they kill them with stones. And when he condemned the Children of Israel, he fabricated slanders that caused us many troubles, Heaven Forfend.
   

   If we were amiss in one place, we benefited in another place. How? There was a group of artists in Jerusalem and that group came up with an idea to paint the dog everybody was talking about. They were afraid to use a real dog as a model, so they went on to paint a likeness of a likeness of him. And if I didn’t fear a trace of apostasy, I would say that the deeds of artists are greater than the deeds of our God, for the Creator May-He-Be-Blessed sometimes produces re-pulsive and ugly and defective creatures, while the artist makes everything beautiful. And we can say without fear or doubt that if not for Balak, we would lack several things in art. Moreover, a few years later, a few streets in Tel Aviv were added because of him. For when the artists became famous, a few streets were named after them. Moreover, we gained other streets which were named after writers who wrote books about the painters.
   

4. I