around for the chickens and they came running over to me, croaking and pecking. I tried to touch them, but the colored rooster drove me away. The excrement stuck between my toes. At last Grandma washed my feet, fed me a soft-boiled egg, and lay me down again, this time on the sofa in the second room.
There was still light in the window, and I couldn’t fall asleep. Grandfather came in, dug in the glassed-in bookshelf above me, found what he was looking for, and put a notebook before me.
“Read it,” he pleaded. His face was different this time, soft and supplicatory. When he left, I opened the notebook and found handwritten script, in blue ink. At my age handwriting was still not easy to read, and only the many strange names attracted me. Kusseima, Suez, they sounded like magic words as I muttered them. Most of all I was fascinated by a name that sounded as if out of the Arabian
When I woke, mosquitoes sang. Yellow, vibrating electric light and jets of cigarette smoke entered through the slit of the door, mixed with the jingling of glasses and the screeching of chairs. Spoons rang on saucers. There were guests in the entrance room. They argued about something, my mother’s voice rising above all of them with a strident tone. From time to time there were long periods of silence and then I heard the old man grunt, and the sounds of sipping of tea. Sometimes Grandma Bracha squeaked, her voice cajoling. I understood that she was trying to find a compromise among the hard people of her life.
Suddenly the radio near me began the tones indicating a news broadcast. The chairs in the next room scraped the floor. The door opened carefully, and they all came in on tiptoe. My mother sat on the couch, near me. The narrator spoke in a low, deliberate voice. She spoke words I knew already: Allies. Nazis. Jews. Russia.
That evening, when everybody had gone and my mother arranged to sleep near me, I learned that I was a Jew too. I listened with a lot of interest to the Nazi plan to kill all the Jews. Before I fell asleep I thought about it a long time, a little surprised and proud of the fact that the Nazis—creatures I knew nothing about—knew about me and were interested in me. When my mother pulled up the blanket and turned over, before dozing took me over, I asked her silently what “Darb El Hajj” was. The Road of the Celebrators, she told me, and suddenly asked, “What, he already stuck you with his notebook? Oh, that bookkeeper, what does he hope to accomplish with that?”
NATHANIEL TATAR, A BITTER, hard person, left behind him thirteen pages written with a scratchy pen in blue ink, in basic, sometimes archaic Hebrew. In this notebook I found buried a vanished world.
My mother’s parents began their journey to the land of Israel (there was no country then, just the land) in the township of Rezina, near Kishinev, in Moldova. Nathaniel was a veteran of the tsar of Russia’s army. His odd name, Tatar, had an alien sound, and he was formally registered as a Christian. One can assume that he came from one of the Mongol-Tatarian communities of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, his twenty-three-year-old bride, Bracha (blessing), had a good Jewish name. They married through a matchmaker and settled down in Rezina. Nathaniel managed an agricultural farm for its owners.
One evening, when he was thirty-two years old, he went to the movies.
“The film was called
He tried to get the passport that was necessary to allow him to leave Russia. “But because I had been a soldier, and there were rumors of war, it was difficult. So I tried something else. Since I had a daughter sick with bronchitis, the doctors advised taking her to a tropical country. This way I received permission from the government to go to the land of Israel for three months. I was delayed, for my wife gave birth. She bore another daughter, Shoshana. This was in February 1914,” he wrote.
Three weeks after his wife left the hospital, the family took a ship in Odessa and sailed to Israel.
“After a week at sea we arrived at Jaffa and stayed in a hotel. When we left the ship I managed not to give anyone my name, so they couldn’t find me later.” That didn’t help poor Tatar much.
That was Passover 1914. Within five months World War I would break out.
To this country, Palestine in 1914, Tatar came without a cent. Soon he found that manual labor was his only hope. Even that was not easy to find. His young family first lived in Jaffa, then moved ten kilometers east to a cheaper place, the Jewish settlement of Petach Tikva, established in 1878. There they lived on Tatar’s work in the orchards “for a tiny salary, the same as the Arabs,” tells Nathaniel, the former farm manager. “Even this kind of work was given me reluctantly, for the orchards’ owners contended that the work was too hard for us new immigrants and the salary too low for us to live on. There was only one kind of work where I could make some money, and it was mowing hay with a scythe. I had done this work.”
With visible pride he went on to tell how he became a subcontractor and employed others as workers, including men who became important later, such as Shkolnik (Levy Eshkol, fifty years later Israel’s prime minister), and Harzfeld (a future important political figure). He even employed the manager of the local labor exchange!
On August 14, 1914, World War I broke out.
The Turks, who governed the country, began checking the citizenship of every one of the inhabitants of Palestine, and either drafting them into the army or expelling them from the country. Tatar was captured.
“I took seven pairs of horses for deep plowing in Mikveh Israel (an agricultural school a few kilometers southeast of what was then the village of Tel Aviv). We had just gotten organized and begun working when some Turkish cops showed up. They ordered me to untie the horses from the plow and tie them to the carts. We were taken to Jaffa and put in front of the Sakkai (a Turkish military building). There we stayed till the evening. We sent a message to the horses’ owners in Petach Tikva and informed them what had happened.”
Tatar was always very careful with any property loaned to him, and his descendants inherited this from him. “But the owners were too afraid to come and defend their property, and told me to do my best. In the evening I entered the Sakkai and asked one of the officers why we were being kept there. He answered that come morning we would haul a load of cement to Beer- Sheva.”
The Moldovan estate manager turned teamster in Palestine was going to learn about the Ottoman Empire.
“We watched what happened in the Sakkai. In one of the rooms a commander sat, twenty large candles lit around him. From time to time he called in someone who had resisted confiscation of his property. The commander ordered punishment: fifty falaki (blows on the soles of the feet). This was the way it went all night—verdicts, the punishments executed on the spot, and the people around watching.” After this demonstration, there was no more resistance. The next day Tatar’s journey began.
“We loaded the cement barrels, and a week’s food for the horses, a barrel of water on each cart, and off we went without knowing where we were going, as all I knew about Beer- Sheva came from the Bible. We asked Arab passersby. One said ‘go north,’ the other pointed south. We decided to go to Rehovot, and see what to do from there.”
Rehovot was an agricultural settlement some thirty kilometers south of Jaffa. There, civilization ended and gave way to the wild, wild South.
“From Rehovot there was no road fit for carts going south, only camel trails. Thanks to the light loads on the carts we made it somehow, and after a day and a night we came to Kastina, a Jewish settlement.”
So they stopped at Beer-Tuvia, a small settlement among some Arab villages.
“We found there a warehouse, rested for four hours, and continued on our way. From there, there was really no more road, only a narrow trail crossing the wadis (dry streambeds). The barrels were rolling around in the carts and the cement spilled out of the cracks. Another day and night and we reached Kibbutz Ruchama.”
The name Ruchama came from the Bible. “Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi (my people), And to your sisters Ruchama,” said the prophet Hosea. “Ruchama” means mercy. “I will have mercy upon her that has not obtained mercy.” But Tatar didn’t know all that, and found no reason to stop there. The place was just a few acres with some shacks. There were fifteen workers planting almond and eucalyptus trees. They couldn’t help him with anything—they had brought their own bread from Beer-Tuvia with difficulty, and sometimes personal danger; the Bedouins would sometimes rob them on the way.
So he went on, “There in Ruchama, we found a big wadi with a narrow trail. One of our carts rolled over, and fell to the wadi together with the horses. We worked for half a day until we got it out.”
They were crossing the wadi system of Ruchama—a magnificent area, nowadays a national park with many
