Exodus

“I promise … I’ll make them stay calm.”

“Well… go on.”

He set the automatic pilot again and went back to make sure they didn’t blow the plane up. Hanna made the announcement.

A fantastic scene of jubilation broke out. Crying, singing, laughing, praying. Whoops of joy-dancing-hugging.

“My God,” Foster marveled, “they didn’t make this much fuss when we beat Georgia Tech in the Cotton Bowl.”

A Yemenite woman took his hand and kissed it. He pulled away and returned to the controls. They continued cheering and singing all the way to Lydda. As the plane touched the end of the runway the din rose above the sound of the engines.

Foster watched them pour out of the plane, fall on their knees, and kiss the ground of Israel, weeping.

“Good-by, Tex,” Hanna said. “I am sorry you are leaving, but have a good time in Paris.”

Foster J. MacWilliams came slowly down from the plane. He looked at the scene of bustle. Ambulances and buses stood by. There were dozens of girls like Hanna mingling among the little Yemenites, calming them and joining in their joy. Foster froze at the bottom of the steps and a strange new feeling churned inside him. tt

He did not even see Stretch Thompson rush out for him.

“Good go, Foster babyl How’d the crate hold up?”

“Huh?”

“I said, how’d she fly?”

“Like an eagle.”

A half dozen officials from immigration pumped Foster’s hand and pounded his back.

“How’d they behave?”

“Was it a routine flight?”

Foster shrugged. “Routine,” he said, “just routine.”

Stretch led Foster away from the scene of jubilation. Foster

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stopped and looked back for a second and Hanna waved to him and he waved back.

“Well, Foster, you can go to Paris now. I’ve got my crews in and we dug up another plane.”

“If you’re in a jam, Stretch, I could take one more run. But it would be my last.” (

Stretch scratched his head. “I don’t know … Well, maybe I can sign you on for one run-to try out the new ship.” Hooked! Stretch said in glee to himself. I got the bastard hooked!

It was the beginning to Operation Magic Carpet.

Stretch Thompson, the erstwhile King Crab King, brought in rough-and-ready American flyers who had flown the Berlin airlift. Each new pilot and crew in turn became obsessed with the mission of bringing the Yemenites to their Promised Land.

Many times the planes were almost ready to come apart. Yet, no craft was ever lost, despite being overworked and underserviced. The pilots on Magic Carpet began to believe that the planes were being divinely sustained so long as they carried Yemenites.

Foster J. MacWilliams never did get to Paris. He flew the Aden run until all the Yemenites were evacuated and then he went on to Operation Ali Baba, the airlift of the Iraqi Jews from Bagdad. Foster worked longer and harder hours than any pilot in the history of aviation. As soon as his ship would land at Lydda with a load of immigrants, he would grab a few hours sleep right at the airport while his plane was being serviced. As soon as the plane was ready, he flew out again. In the next few years Foster flew four hundred missions covering millions of miles and bringing in nearly fifty thousand Jews to Israel.

He kept swearing that each trip was his last, right up to the time he married Hanna and took an apartment in Tel Aviv.

Magic Carpet was the beginning. They came from the hinterlands of Kurdistan and Iraq and Turkey.

A warlike lost tribe of Jews in Hadhramaut in the Eastern Protectorate fought their way to Aden.

They poured out of the displaced persons camps in Europe.

Jews came to Israel from France and Italy and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and Rumania and Bulgaria and Greece and Scandinavia.

Across the breadth of northern Africa they arose from the mellahs of Algeria and Morocco and Egypt and Tunisia.

In South Africa, the wealthy Jewish community and the most ardent Zionists in the world went to Israel. 570

They came from China and India where they had settled three thousand years before.

They came from Australia and Canada and England.

They came from the Argentine.

Some walked through burning deserts.

Some flew on the rickety craft of the airlift.

Some came in jam-packed holds of cattle freighters.

Some came in deluxe liners.

They came from seventy-four nations.

The dispersed, the exiles, the unwanted came to that one little corner of the earth where the word Jew was not a slander.

CHAPTER TWO: The trickle became a stream and then a deluge of humanity.

The exodus soon doubled, then began to triple, the population of Israel. The economy, raptured by war, buckled under the flood of immigrants. Many came with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Many were old and many were ill and many were illiterate, but no matter what the condition, no matter what the added burden, no Jew was turned away from the doors of Israel.

It was not a melting pot, it was a pressure cooker, for they came from every corner of the earth and had lived under every variety of circumstance.

Tent cities and ugly corrugated-tin-shack villages sprang up to blot the landscape from the Galilee to the Negev. Hundreds of thousands of people lived “under canvas,” in makeshift hovels, breaking down the medical, educational, and welfare facilities.

Yet there was an attitude of optimism all over the land. From the moment the downtrodden set foot on the soil of Israel they were granted a human dignity and freedom that most of them had never known, and this equality fired them with a drive and purpose without parallel in man’s history.

Every day new agricultural settlements sprang up. The immigrants went out to attack the wastes and the desert with the same fervor that the early pioneers had shown in rolling back the swamps.

Cities and towns seemed to spring up from the earth.

South Africans and South Americans and Canadians poured money into industry. Factories were built until the manufacturing potential reached one of the highest levels in Africa or Asia. General scientific, medical, and agricultural research reached an advanced stage.

Tel Aviv expanded into a bustling metropolis of a quarter of a million people, and Haifa grew into one of the most

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important ports on the Mediterranean. In both cities, heavy industry sprang up. New Jerusalem, the capital and educational center of the new nation, expanded into the hills.

Chemicals, drugs, medicines, mining, engineering, shoe and clothing manufacturing-the list grew into thousands of items. Cars were assembled and buses were built. Tires were made and airstrips laid down, and a network of highways spanned the nation.

Housing, housing, housing-people needed homes, and the concrete and steel skylines pushed farther into the suburbs almost by the hour. The sound of the hammer, the music of the drill, the concrete mixer, the welding torch never stopped in Israel!

The arts flourished. Bookstores lined Herzl Street and Allenby Road. In every kibbutz and in every home and in every moshav shelves were filled with books written in a dozen languages. Musicians, painters, writers put this dynamic new society into words and on canvas and into melody.

From Metulla to Elath, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv there was the electrifying feel and smell of one huge boom town.

Yet life was brutally hard. Israel was a poor and unfertile country and every single advance was made with sweat. Workers labored exhausting hours for little pay. Those out in the settlements fighting the soil toiled under nearly unbearable conditions. All the citizens were taxed to the breaking point to pay for the new immigrants pouring in. Clawing, bleeding, conquering with their bodies and minds, they made the tiny nation live and grow.

A national airline took to the skies.

A merchant marine flying the Star of David began to sail to the corners of the earth.

The people forged ahead with a determination that captured the heart of the civilized world. Young Israel stood out as a lighthouse for all mankind, proving what could be done with will power and love. No one in Israel worked for comfort in his own lifetime: it was all for tomorrow, for the children, for the new immigrants coming in. And in the wake of this drive, the tough you ng sabra generation emerged a generation never to know humiliation for being born a Jew.

Israel became an epic in the history of man.

The Negev Desert composed half the area of Israel. It was for the most part a wilderness, with some areas which resembled the surface of the moon. This was the wilderness of Paran and Zin where Moses wandered in search of the Promised Land. It was a broiling mass of denuded desolation where the heat burned down at a hundred and twenty-five degrees over the endless slate fields and deep gorges and 572

canyons. Mile after mile of the rock plateaus would not give life to so much as a single blade of grass. No living thing, not even a vulture, dared penetrate.

The Negev Desert became Israel’s challenge. The Israelis went down to the desert! They lived in the merciless heat and they built settlements on rock. They did as Moses had done: they brought water from the rocks, and they made life grow.

They searched for minerals. Potash was pulled from the Dead Sea. King Solomon’s copper mines, silent for eternities, were made to smelt the green ore again. Traces of oil were found. A mountain of iron was discovered. The northern entrance to the Negev, Beersheba, became a boom town with a skyline springing up on the desert overnight.

The greatest hope of the Negev was Elath, at the southern tip on the Gulf of Akaba. When Israeli troops arrived at the end of the War of Liberation it consisted of two mud huts. Israel had the dream of making a port here with a direct route to the Orient, someday when the Egyptians lifted the blockade of the Gulf of Akaba. They built in preparation for that day.

It was here in the Negev Desert that Colonel Ari Ben Canaan volunteered for duty after the War of Liberation. He was assigned the task of learning every inch of this vital place hemmed in by three sworn enemies, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Ari took troops over the killing slate fields and through the wadis in places where no human was meant to travel. He devised training so brutally hard that few armies of the world could duplicate it. All officer candidates were sent to Ari to receive some of the most severe physical testing human beings could stand.

Ari’s permanent troops became known as “the Beasts of the Negev.” They were a raw, spirited breed of desert rats who hated the Negev while they were in her and longed for her when they were away. Twenty parachute drops, hundred-kilometer forced marches, road-gang labor, hand-to-hand combat were all part of the experiences tbat made the Beasts of the Negev men among men. Only to toughest could qualify. The army of Israel gave no medals for bravery-one soldier was considered as brave as the next-but those who wore the shield of the Beasts of the Negev were held in special awe.

Ari’s base was Elath. He watched it grow into a town of a thousand hardy pioneers. Water was piped in and the copper mines went into full operation. Paths grew to roads as the Jews worked to strengthen their southern foothold.

There were whispers about the strangeness of Colonel Ben

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Canaan. He never seemed to laugh, rarely to change his hard expression. There seemed to be a sorrow and longing gnawing at him, forcing him to push himself and his troops too, almost beyond human endurance. He refused to come out of the desert for two long years.

Kitty Fremont had become known as “the Friend,” a title, hitherto conferred only upon P. P. Malcolm, the founder of the Night Raiders. After the War of Liberation, Kitty involved herself in immigration work and soon was the chief trouble shooter for the Zion Settlement Society.

In January of 1949 at the beginning of Magic Carpet, Kitty had been asked to leave Gan Dafna and go to Aden to organize the medical facilities in the children’s compound of the Hashed camp. Kitty proved a wizard at the chore. She brought order out of chaos. She was firm in her orders, yet tender in her treatment of the youngsters who had walked from Yemen. In a matter of months she had become a key official in the Zion Settlement Society.

From Aden she went directly to Magic Carpet at Bagdad, an airlift operation twice the size of the Yemenite airlift. Then with things under control in Iraq she rushed to Morocco, where tens of thousands of Jews poured out of the me/-lahs of Casablanca to go “up” to Israel.

She went from place to place as the aliyahs of the exodus formed. She made hasty flights to the European DP camps to break bottlenecks and she scoured Europe to find personnel and supplies. When the high point of the flood receded, Kitty was recalled to Jerusalem, where the Zion Settlement Society assigned her as an official in Youth Aliyah.

She had helped bring the youngsters in. Now she went at the job of getting them integrated into the complex society of Israel. Villages like Gan Dafna were the answers, but they were too few for the numbers arriving. The older ones received an education from the army of Israel, which became the greatest single integration instrument in the country, among other things teaching every new soldier to read and write Hebrew.

Kitty Fremont by now spoke a fluent Hebrew. She was at home flying in with Foster MacWilliams and a load of tubercular children, or visiting a border kibbutz. “Shalom, Giveret Kitty,” was a password in a hundred places which held her children.

And then something happened that Kitty found both heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. Kitty began to see the infants of the older youths she had known at Gan Dafna who had married and gone to the settlements. Some of them had been her babies in the camp in Cyprus and on the Exodus, 574

and now they had children of their own. Kitty had watched the machinery of Youth Aliyah grow until it could handle any emergency. She had helped set up the administration and train the people, from the first harrowing trials of inexperience to the point where they constituted a smooth-functioning organization. Now Kitty Fremont suddenly realized, with heavy heart, that her work was done. Neither Karen nor Israel would need her, and she decided she should leave forever.

CHAPTER THREE: Barak Ben Canaan reached his eighty-fifth year.

He retired from public life and was content to worry about running his farm at Yad El. It was what he had longed for for half a century. Even at his great age Barak remained a powerful man, mentally alert and physically able to put in a full day’s work in his fields. His enormous beard was almost fully white, but there were still traces of the old red flame in it and his hand still had a grip of steel. The years after the War of Liberation gave him great contentment. He had time, finally, to devote to himself and Sarah.

His happiness, however, was qualified by the unhappiness of Jordana and Ari. Jordana did not get over the death of David Ben Ami. She was wild and restless. She had traveled in France for a while and she plunged into a few unsatisfying affairs that ended in bitterness. At last she returned to Jerusalem, David’s city, and went back to the university, but there was an eternal emptiness about her.

Ari had banished himself to the Negev. Barak knew the reason for Ari’s exile, but he was unable to reach his son.

It was just, after his eighty-fifth birthday that Barak developed stomach pains. For many weeks he said nothing about them. As he thought of it, he was entitled to a few aches and pains. A nagging cough followed the pains, impossible to conceal from Sarah. She insisted he see a doctor but Barak made light of it. Whenever he did promise, he generally found reason to put off a visit to the doctor.

Barak received a call from Ben Gurion asking if he and Sarah would come to Haifa for the celebration of the third Independence Day and sit in the reviewing stand. It was a singular honor for the old man and he said he would come. Sarah used the occasion of the trip as a lever to make Barak promise to get a full examination. They left for Haifa five days before the celebration. Barak went into the hospital to undergo a complete physical check-up. He stayed in the hospital until the day of Independence eve.

“What did the doctors say?” Sarah asked.

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Barak laughed. “Indigestion and old age. They gave me some pills.”

Sarah tried to press the issue.

“Come on, old girl. We are here to celebrate. Independence Day.”

Crowds had been pouring into Haifa all day. They hitchhiked, drove, and came by plane and train. The city was bulging with humanity. All day long people stopped by Barak’s hotel room to pay their respects to him.

In the evening a torchlight parade of youth groups started the celebrations. They passed in review before the green at the City Hall on Har Ha-Carmel and after the usual speeches there was a fireworks display from Mount Carmel.

The entire length of Herzl Street was packed with tens of thousands of people. Loudspeakers played music and every few yards hora rings formed. Herzl Street was a riot of whirling feet and music and color. Barak and Sarah joined the hora rings and danced to riotous applause.

Barak and Sarah were invited as guests of honor to the Technical Institute where the “Brotherhood of Fire,” the Palmach fighters during the riots, had gathered. They lit a huge bonfire and Yemenites danced and Druse Arabs danced and a lamb was roasted and Arab coffee was brewed and a chorus sang oriental and Biblical songs. All over the campus of the Technical Institute boys and girls from the settlements slept in each other’s arms. The “Brotherhood of Fire” danced and sang until daybreak.

Sarah and Barak returned to their hotel to freshen up, and even at daybreak the dancing was still going on in all the streets. Later in the day they drove in an open car along the parade route, to thunderous cheers, and went to the reviewing stand alongside the President.

Carrying banners like the ancient tribes, New Israel marched past Barak-the Yemenites, now proud and fierce soldiers and the tall strong sabra boys and girls and the flyers from South Africa and America and the fighters who had come from every corner of the world. The elite paratroops in their red berets and the border guards in green marched by. Tanks rumbled and planes roared overhead. And then Barak’s heart skipped a beat as the ovation rose in a new crescendo and the bearded, leathery Beasts of the Negev saluted the father of their commander.

After the parade there were more speeches and parties and celebrations. When Barak and Sarah left for Yad El two days later, dancers were still whirling in the streets.

No sooner had they reached their cottage at Yad El than Barak broke into a long, wracking spasm of coughing, as though he had been holding it in by main strength during the 576

celebrations. He sagged into his big chair, exhausted, as Sarah brought him some medicine.

“I told you it would be too much excitement,” she admonished. “You should start acting your age already.”

Barak’s mind was on the tanned, rough youngsters marching in the parade. “The army of Israel …” he mumbled.

“I’ll make some tea,” she said, fondly mussing his hair.

Barak took her wrist and pulled her down on his lap. She rested her head on his shoulder and then looked at him questioningly, and he turned his eyes away.

“Now that the celebrations are through,” Sarah said, “tell me what the doctors really told you.”

“I never have been able to lie to you very well,” he said.

“I won’t make a fuss, I promise.”

“Please understand that I am ready,” Barak said. “I think I have known it all along.”

Sarah uttered a short cry and bit her lip.

Barak nodded slowly. “You had better send for Ari and Jordana.”

“Cancer?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“A few months … a few wonderful months.”

It was hard to think of Barak as anything but a giant. Now, in the succeeding weeks, his age showed frightfully. The flesh had melted from his powerful frame and he was bent with age and his complexion had turned sallow. He was in great pain but he hid the fact and adamantly refused to be moved to a hospital.

His bed was arranged by a window so that he could spend his days looking out upon his fields and up the hills to the border of Lebanon. When Ari arrived he found Barak here, gazing with sadness toward the place where Abu Yesha no longer existed.

“Shalom, abba,” Ari said embracing Barak. “I came as quickly as I could.”

“Shalom, Ari. Let me look at you, son. It has been so long … over two years. I thought you might be at the celebrations with your troops.”

“The Egyptians have been acting up at Nitzana. We had to make a reprisal.”

Barak studied his son. Ari was bronzed from the Negev sun and looked as powerful as a lion.

“The Negev agrees with you,” he said.

“What is all this nonsense etna tells me?”

“Don’t feel obligated to cheer me up, Ari. I am ancient enough to die gracefully.”

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Ari poured some brandy and lit a cigarette while Barak continued to study him. Tears welled in the old man’s eyes.

“I have been happy these days, except for you and Jordana. If I could only go and know I am leaving you content.”

Ari sipped his brandy and turned his eyes away. Barak took his son’s hand.

“They tell me you could be chief of staff of the army of Israel someday, if you would choose to come out of the desert.”

“There is work to be done in the Negev, Father. Someone has to do it. The Egyptians are forming fedayeen gangs of murderers to cross the border and raid our settlements.”

“But you are not happy, Ari.”

“Happy? You know me, Father. I’m not given to making demonstrations of happiness like new immigrants.”

“Why have you shut yourself off from me and your mother for two years?”

“I am sorry about that.”

“You know, Ari, for the first time in my life, these past two years, I have had the luxury of being able just to sit and think. It is wonderful for a man to be able to meditate in peace. And in these last few weeks I have had even more time. I have thought of everything. I know that I have not been a good father. I have failed you and Jordana.”

“Come, Father … I won’t listen to such nonsense. Don’t get sentimental on me.”

“No, there’s truth in what I say. It seems now I see so clearly. You, and Jordana, and I … the little time I have been able to give you … and Sarah. Ari, for a family this is wrong.”

“Father … please. No son has had the love and the understanding that I have. Perhaps all fathers believe they could have done more.”

Barak shook his head. “When you were a small boy, you were a man. You stood beside me and worked these swamps when you were twelve. You have not needed me since I put a bull whip in your hands.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of this. We live in this country for what we can do for tomorrow. It is the way you had to live and the way I live now. I won’t let you torment yourself. We had to live this way because we have never had a choice.”

“That is what I try to tell myself, Ari. I say what else? A ghetto? A concentration camp? Extermination ovens? I say anything is worth this. Yet, this freedom of ours … the price is so high. We cherish it so fiercely that we have created a race of Jewish Tarzans to defend it. We have been 578 *

able to give you nothing but a life of bloodshed and a heritage of living with your back to the sea.”

“No price is too great for Israel,” Ari said.

“It is-when I see sadness in my son’s eyes.”

“You didn’t take David Ben Ami from Jordana. It is the price of being born a Jew. Is it not better to die for your country than to die the way your father died, at the hands of a mob in a ghetto?”

“But the sadness of my son is my fault, Ari.” Barak licked his lips and swallowed. “Jordana has become a great friend of Kitty Fremont.”

Ari started at the mention of her name.

“She has become a saint. She visits us when she is in the Huleh. It is too bad you haven’t seen her.”

“Father … I …”

“Don’t you think I see the hunger in that woman’s eyes for you? Is this the way a man gives love, by hiding in the desert? Yes, Ari! Let’s have it all out now. You’ve rut and hidden’ from her. Say it. Say it to me and say it to yourself.”

Ari got off the edge of the bed and walked away.

“What is this terrible thing in your heart that keeps you from going to this woman and telling her your heart breaks for her?”

Ari felt bis father’s burning gaze at his back. He turned slowly with his eyes lowered. “She told me once I would have to need her so badly that I would have to crawl.”

“Then crawl!”

“I cannot crawl! I don’t know how! Can’t you see, Father … I can never be the man she wants.”

Barak sighed sadly. “And that is where I have failed you, Ari. You see, I would have crawled to your mother a million times. I would.crawl to her because I need her in order to live. She is my strength. God help me, Ari, I have been a party to the creation of a breed of men and women so hard they refuse to know the meaning of tears and humility.”

“She once said that to me,” Ari whispered.

“You have mistaken tenderness for weakness. You have mistaken tears for dishonor. You have made yourself believe that to depend on another person is to retreat. You are so blind that you cannot give love.”

“So, I cannot do what I cannot do,” Ari cried,

“And I am sorry for you, Ari. I am sorry for you and I am sorry for myself.”

The next day Ari carried his father in his arms to his car and drove him to Tel Hai, to the very spot at which he and his brother Akiva had crossed to Palestine more than half a century before.

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The graves of the Guardsmen were there at Tel Hai, the first Jews to bear arms at the turn of the century in a roving defense of Jewish settlements against Bedouins. It was as a Guardsman, Barak was remembering, that he had met Sarah at Rosh Pinna.

The stones of the dead formed two lines, and i there were a dozen plots waiting for those Guardsmen still alive. Akiva’s remains had been removed from Elijah’s Point to this place of honor. The plot next to Akiva was reserved for Barak.

Ari carried his father beyond the graves to where the huge stone statue of a lion stood looking down upon the valley, the symbol of a king protecting the land. On the base of the statue they read the words: “IT IS GOOD TO DIE FOR ONE’S COUNTRY.”

Barak looked down at the valley. Settlements were everywhere. A town was springing up below them with thousands of new settlers. The father and the son lingered at Tel Hai until darkness fell and they watched the lights go on, ringing the valley with a fortress of determination. Yad El-the Hand of God-stood in their center. A settlement of tough new youngsters had just broken ground at Gonen far below; they lived in tents just a few yards from the Syrian border. The lights of Gonen went on too.

“It is good to have a country to die for,” Barak said.

Ari carried his father down from the hill.

Two days later Barak Ben Canaan died in his sleep and he was taken back to Tel Hai and buried next to Akiva.

CHAPTER FOUR: In the last stages of the War of Liberation, Dov Landau joined the army of Israel and took part in Operation Ten Plagues against the Egyptians. His bravery in the storming of Suweidan won him a field commission. For several months he stayed in the desert as one of Colonel Ben Canaan’s Beasts of the Negev. Ari recognized the boy’s obvious talents and sent him north for tests. The army then asked Dov to go to the Technical Institute at Haifa and study specialized courses for the ambitious water projects being planned for the redemption of the Negev. Dov proved to be a brilliant scholar.

He had. completely burst out of his former darkness. Now he was warm and filled with humor and showed uncommon understanding for those people who suffered. Still rather slight in stature, with sensitive features, Dov had become a handsome young man. He and Karen were deeply in love.

The young romance was plagued with constant separations, uncertainty and of course the eternal tension. The land was in a turmoil and so were they; each had his separate serious 580

duties. It was an old story in Israel, it was the story of An and Dafna and the story of David and Jordana. Each time they saw each other the desire and the frustration grew. Dov, who worshiped Karen, became the stronger of the two.

When he reached his twenty-first birthday he was a captain in the corps of engineers and was considered one of the most promising officers in his field. His time was spent studying at the Technical Institute and at the Weizmann Research Institute at Rehovot.

Karen left Gan Dafna after the War of Liberation and also went into the Army. There she continued nurses’ training. She had gained valuable experience in working with Kitty and was able to finish her basic training quickly. Nursing suited Karen. She wanted someday to follow in Kitty’s footsteps and specialize in caring for children. She was stationed in a hos-pitai in the Sharon. It was convenient, for she was able to hitch a ride to Jerusalem to Kitty when Kitty was there and to get to Haifa frequently to see Dov.

Karen Hansen Clement grew from a beautiful girl into a magnificent woman. She was striking perfection, with the tenderness and kindness which had characterized her youth following her into maturity.

In the depths of Kitty’s mind the thought sometimes rose that Karen might come with her to America, but it was pure wishful thinking. In more realistic moments she knew that Karen did not need her. She had done her job for the girl just as she had done it for Israel. Karen was a part of Israel now, too deeply rooted to be torn away. And Kitty knew that she did not need Karen now. Once she believed she would never be able to part from the girl. But that void, the emotional starvation in Kitty, had been filled by years of unselfish devotion to “her children.”

Kitty not only knew she could leave Karen, but she dared hope that normalcy and true happiness awaited her somewhere, sometime, again.

No, for Karen and herself, Kitty had no fears about leaving Israel. But there was one fear-a fear for Israel itself.

The Arabs sat at Israel’s borders, licking their wounds and waiting for that day they would pounce on the little nation and destroy her in their much-advertised “second round.”

The Arab leaders handed their masses guns instead of plowshares. Those few who saw the light of Israel and wanted to make peace were murdered. The old harangues poured from the Arab press, from its radio, its leaders, and from the Moslem pulpits.

The Arab people, already bled dry by willful men, were

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most magnificent garden on earth, for he saw Karen running toward him from her hospital tent.

“Dov! Dov!” she cried, and raced over the bare brown knoll and flung herself into his waiting arms and they held each other tightly, their hearts pounding in excitement and joy with the feel of each other.

They held hands as Karen took Dov to the water tank; he washed his sweaty face and took a long drink. Then Karen led him away from the settlement to a path which led beyond the knoll where some Nabataean ruins stood. It was the forward outpost, right on the border marker, and the favorite meeting place of the single boys and girls.

Karen gave a signal to the guard that she would take the watch and the guard left knowingly. They picked their way through, the ruins until they came to the enclosure of an ancient temple and there they waited until the guard was out of sight. Karen peered out at the field through the barbed wire. Everything was quiet.

They both leaned the rifles they carried against the wall and embraced and kissed.

“Oh, Dov! At last!”

“I’ve almost died from missing you,” he said.

They kissed again and again ignoring the burning midday desert sun, ignoring everything but each other. Dov led her to a corner and they sat on the earthen floor, Karen lying in his arms, and he kissed her and caressed her and she closed her eyes and purred with happiness.

And then his hands became still and he just gazed lovingly.

“I have some wonderful news,” he said.

She looked up. “What could be more wonderful than this minute?”

“Sit up,” he commanded teasingly.

“What is it, Dov?”

“You know about me being transferred to the Huleh Project?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, I was called in yesterday. They want me to stay up there until the end of the summer only … then they want me to go to.America for advanced studies! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology!”

Karen blinked her eyes.

“America? To study?”

“Yes … for two years. I could hardly wait to get here and tell you.”

She forced herself to smile-quickly. “How wonderful, Dov. I am so proud. Then you will be going in about six or seven months.” 584

“I didn’t give them an answer,” he said. “I wanted to talk it over with you.”

“Two years isn’t forever,” Karen said. “Why, by the time you get back the kibbutz will all be built up. We’ll have two thousand dunams under cultivation and a library and a children’s house full of babies.”

“Wait a minute …” Dov said. “I’m not going to America or anywhere else without you. We will get married right now. Of course, it will be difficult in America. They can’t give me much of an allowance. I’ll have to work after classes but you can study nursing and work too … we’ll make it.”

Karen was very quiet. She looked out and saw the rise of Gaza in the distance and the guard towers and the trenches.

“I can’t leave Nahal Midbar,” she whispered. “We have only started here. The boys are working twenty hours a day.”

“Karen … you’ve got to take leave.”

“No, I can’t, Dov. If I go it makes it that much harder on everyone else.”

“You’ve got to. I’m not going without you. Don’t you understand what this means? I’ll come back here in two years and I’ll know everything there is to know about water tables and drilling and pipes. It will be perfect. We’ll live in Nahal Midbar together and I’ll be working around close by in the desert. The kibbutz will have my salary. Karen … I’ll be worth fifty times the value I am now to Israel.”

She stood up and turned her back to him. “It’s right for you. It’s important for you to go to America. I’m more important here, now.”

Dov turned pale and his shoulders sagged. “I thought I would make you happy …”

She faced him. “You know you have to go and you know I have to stay.”

“No, dammit! I can’t be away from you for two years! I can’t even take it for two days any more.” He stood and seized her in his arms and covered her mouth with kisses and she returned kiss for kiss and both of them cried, “I love you” over and over and their cheeks were wet with perspiration and tears and their hands felt for each other’s bodies and they slipped to the floor.

“Yes! Now!” she cried.

Dov sprang to his feet and stood trembling. He clenched his fists tightly. “We’ve got to stop this.”

It was still except for Karen’s soft sobbing. Dov knelt behind her. “Please don’t cry, Karen.”

“Oh, Dov, what are we going to do? It is just as though I’m not living when you are away. And now, every time we see each other it ends up the same way. When you leave me I am sick with wanting you for days.” 38 585

“It’s just as hard on me,” he said. “It’s my fault. We’ll be! more careful. Nothing is going to happen until we marry.” He helped her to her feet.

“Don’t look at me that way, Karen. I don’t want to ever hurt you.”

“I love you, Dov. I’m not ashamed or afraid of wanting you.” i

“I’m not going to do what’s wrong for you,” he said.

They stood still, eyes shining with love and bodies taut with insistence.

“We had better go back to the kibbutz,” Karea said at last, with desolation in her voice.

Kitty had traveled over most of Israel and she had seen the most rugged of the settlements. She knew when she traveled to Nahal Midbar that it was the brink of hell. Yet in spite of preparing herself for the worst her heart sank at the sight of Nahal Midbar, a bake furnace planted in the path of angry Arab hordes.

Karen showed Kitty around with obvious pride over what had been accomplished in three months. There were a few new wooden shacks, a few more dunams of land plowed, but it was a heartbreaking sight. It represented boys and girls working agonizing hours during the day and standing guard during the night.

“In a few years,” Karen said, “there will be trees and flowers everywhere, if we can only get enough water.”

They walked out of the sun into Karen’s hospital tent and each had a drink of water. Kitty looked through the tent flap. Barbed wire and trenches. Out in the fields, boys and girls worked in the sun while others walked behind them with rifles, guarding them. One hand on the sword and one on the plow. That was the way they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. Kitty looked at Karen. The girl was so young and so lovely. In a few years in this place she would age before her time.

“So you are really planning to go home. I can hardly believe it,” Karen said.

“I told them I want to take a year’s leave. I have been terribly homesick lately. And now, with you gone … well, I just want to take things easy for a little while. I may come back to Israel, I am not sure.”

“When will you leave?”

“After Passover.”

“So soon? It will be dreadful with you gone, Kitty.”

“You are a grown woman now, Karen. You have a life of your own.”

“I can’t think of it with you away.”

“Oh, we’ll write. We will always be close. Who knows, 586

after living in this volcano for four years, I may find the rest of the world too dull for me.”

“You must come back, Kitty.”

Kitty smiled. “Time will tell. How is Dov these days? I hear he has finished school.”

Karen avoided telling Kitty that Dov had been asked to go to America, for she knew Kitty would take Dov’s side.

“They sent him to the Huleh Lake. They are planning a project to dig channels and lower the whole lake into the Sea of Galilee and reclaim it for farmland.”

“Dov has become a very important young man. I hear tremendous things about him. Will he be able to get here for Passover?”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

Kitty snapped her fingers. “Say! I have a splendid idea. Jordana has asked me to come to Yad El for Passover and I promised I would. Dov is working close by. Why don’t you come up to Yad El?”

“I really should stay at my kibbutz for Passover.”

“You’ll be here for many Passovers. It will be a farewell present to me.”

Karen smiled. “I’ll come.”

“Good. Now, how is that young man of yours?”

“Fine … I guess,” Karen muttered glumly.

“Did you have an argument?”

“No. He won’t argue with me. Oh, Kitty, he is so damned noble sometimes I could scream.”

“I see,” Kitty said raising her eyebrows. “You are quite the grown-up woman of eighteen.”

“I just don’t know what to do. Kitty … I … I go crazy thinking about him and then every time we see each other he gets noble. They … may send him away. It may be two years before we can get married. I think I’m going to break open.”

“You love him very much, don’t you?”

“I could die for wanting him. Is it terrible for me to talk this way?”

“No, dear. To love someone that way is the most wonderful thing in the world.”

“Kitty … I want so much to love him. Is that wrong?”

Was it wrong? Kitty remembered standing over a bed and implying to Ari that Jordana was a tramp for the moments she had stolen with David Ben Ami. Was that wrong? How many times she had regretted her words. David had been dead for three years and Jordana still grieved deeply. Even with that tough shell of sabra aggressiveness she would take a broken heart to her grave. Was it wrong? How many tomorrows would Dov and Karen have? That angry host of

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people beyond the barbed wire-would they let them live?

Karen … her precious baby …

“Love him, Karen,” Kitty said. “Love him with all the love that is in you.”

“Oh … Kitty!”

“Yes, dear. Love him.”

“He is so afraid.” ’

“Then help him not to be afraid. You are his woman and that is the way it should be.”

Kitty felt empty inside her. She had given her Karen away forever. She felt Karen’s hand on her shoulder.

“Can’t you help Ari?”

Kitty’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of his name. “It is not love when one person loves and the other doesn’t.”

They were both silent for a long time. Kitty went to the tent flap and looked outside. The flies swarmed around her. She spun around quickly and faced Karen. “I can’t go without telling you I am sick about your coming to this place.”

“The borders must be defended. It is easy enough to say let the other fellow do it.”

“Nahal Midbar is three months old. Already you have a boy and a girl in your graveyard, murdered by fedayeen.”

“We don’t think of it that way, Kitty. Two are lost but fifty more have joined Nahal Midbar and another fifty have come to build a settlement five kilometers away-because we came here. In a year we will have a children’s house and a thousand dunams of land under cultivation.”

“And in a year you will begin to grow old. You will work eighteen hours a day and spend your nights in the trenches. All that you and Dov will ever have out of this is a single room eight by ten feet. Even the clothes on your back won’t belong to you.”

“You are wrong, Kitty. Dov and I will have everything.” “Including a quarter of a million kill-crazy Arabs at your throats.”

“We cannot be angry at those poor people,” Karen said. “They sit there day after day, month after month, locked up like animals, watching our fields grow green.”

Kitty sagged down in a cot and buried her face in her hands.

“Kitty … listen …”

“I can’t.”

“Please … please listen. You know that even when I was a little girl in Denmark I asked myself why I was born a Jew. I know the answer now. God didn’t pick us because we were weak or would run from danger. We’ve taken murder and sorrow and humiliation for six thousand years and we have 588

kept faith. We have outlived everyone who has tried to destroy us. Can’t you see it, Kitty? … this little land was chosen for us because it is the crossroads of the world, on the edge of man’s wilderness. This is where God wants His people to be … on the frontiers, to stand and guard His laws which are the cornerstones of man’s moral existence. Where else is there for us to be?”

“Israel stands with its back to the wall,” Kitty cried. “It has always stood that way and it always will… with savages trying to destroy you.”

“Oh no, Kitty, no! Israel is the bridge between darkness and light.”

And suddenly Kitty saw it all, so clearly … so beautifully clear. This then was the answer. Israel, the bridge between darkness and light.

CHAPTER FIVE: One night above all other nights is the most important for a Jew and that is the religious holiday of Passover. The Passover is celebrated in memory of the deliverance from bondage in Egypt. The Egyptians, the original oppressors, had become the symbol of all the oppressors of all the Jews throughout all the ages.

The high point occurs on the eve of Passover when the Seder-the Feast of Liberation-is held to give thanks for freedom and to offer hope for those who do not have it. For the exiles and the dispersed, before the rebirth of Israel the Seder always ended with the words: “… next year in Jerusalem.”

The Haggadah, a special book of prayers, stories, and songs for Passover, parts of which were written three thousand years ago, is read. The story of the Exodus from Egypt is recited by the head of the house.

The Seder was the high moment of the year. The woman of the house had to prepare for it for a month. All dirt had to be chased. Special Passover foods and decorations had to be prepared. All over Israel half-frantic preparations for the Seder took place. In the communal settlements the Seder table would hold hundreds. Other homes had small and simple Seders. As the eve of Passover drew near, the air of anticipation of the great feast grew and grew to a bursting point.

The Seder this year at the Ben Canaan cottage at Yad El was to be a relatively small affair. None the less, Sarah had to carry out the prescribed traditions and rituals to the letter. It was a labor of love and she would not be robbed of it. The cottage, inside and out, was made spotless. On the day of the feast the rooms were filled with enormous Galilee

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roses. The Menorah-the ritual candlesticks-had been polished to a dazzling gleam. Tens of dozens of special Passover cookies and candies had been made. All the special foods had been prepared and Sarah herself was dressed in her finest.

On the day of Passover Eve, Kitty and Sutherland drove from his villa to Yad El. >

“The idea of your leaving Israel is wretched,” Sutherland grumbled. “Can’t make myself get on to it.”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought, Bruce. It is best. In America we always say, ‘leave them laughing.’ ”

“Do you really feel that immigration has passed its peak?” “Well, let’s say the first flood is over. There are many small communities of Jews, like the Poles, locked in Europe who want to get out. We suspect the roof may fall in on the Jews in Egypt at any time. But the main thing is that we have personnel and facilities for any emergencies.”

“You mean for little emergencies,” Sutherland said. “What about the giants?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The United States has six million Jews and the Russians have four. What of them?”

Kitty thought deeply. “Most of those few Jews who have come from the United States are either one of two things; they are either idealists of the old pioneer days or neurotics seeking a false haven. I do not believe that the day will ever come that American Jews must come to Israel because of fear or persecution. If the day does come, I do not want to be alive to see it. As for the Russians, there is a strange and haunting story that not many people know.”

“You have me curious,” Sutherland said.

“Well, you know that they have tried to integrate the Jews by swallowing them up in theories and in evolution. They have tried to make them lose their identity by letting the old ones die out and indoctrinating the young ones from birth. Of course you know that anti-Semitism still rages in Russia.”

“I’ve heard.”

“It was on the last high holy days that this fantastic thing happened. It proved that the Soviets have failed miserably. The ambassador from Israel went to the only synagogue they permit in Moscow. After thirty years of silence, thirty thousand Jews appeared on the streets just to see and touch the ambassador! Yes, there will be a great aliyah from Russia someday.”

The story struck Sutherland deeply and he was silent. It was the same old story, the concept that arose so often in Ms mind: … the Jew never loses his identity. And … 590

there comes that day of truth when he must stand and declare himself. He thought of his own beloved mother …

They turned from the main road into the Yad El moshav. Sarah Ben Canaan rushed from the cottage to meet them. There were hugs and holiday greetings.

“Are we the first here?”

“Dov has arrived. Come in already, come in … come in.”

Dov met them at the door. He shook Sutherland’s hand and embraced Kitty warmly. She held him off at arm’s length. “Major Dov Landaul You get better-looking every time I see you.”

Dov blushed.

Sutherland was examining Sarah’s roses in the living room with a trace of envy.

“Where is everybody?” Kitty asked.

“Jordana went to Haifa last night. She said she would be back early,” Sarah said.

“Karen wrote me that she would leave Nahal Midbar the day before,” Dov said. “That would be yesterday. She’s allowing plenty of time to get here. She may have stayed over at Haifa last night. Anyhow, she may have to hitch a ride beyond Safed.”

“Don’t fret,” Sutherland said. “She’ll be here in time for

the Seder.”

Kitty was disappointed that Karen had not arrived but made no point of it before the others. Transportation was terrible, especially on a holiday. “Is there anything I can help you with?” she asked Sarah.

“You can sit down and take life easy. Already there have been a dozen calls for you from the moshav office. Your children all over the Huleh know you are coming. They said they would be .dropping in during the day before the Seder.” Sarah rushed off to her kitchen.

Kitty turned to Dov. “I hear some very good reports about you, Dov.”

The boy^shrugged.

“Don’t be modest. I understand you’re planning a Jordan

water project.”

“If the Syrians let us, which they won’t. Funny, Syria and Jordan stand to benefit from it ten times more than we do. But so long as it puts an extra ounce of water into Israel, they are against it.”

“What is the problem?” Sutherland asked.

“We have to change the course of the Jordan a few kilometers. The Arabs say we are doing it for defensive reasons, even though we welcome their observers. Oh well, we will

work it out.”

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Dov took a deep breath. He was obviously preoccupied and Sutherland sensed that Dov wanted to talk privately to Kitty, so he drifted to the far end of the room and absorbed himself in the shelves of books.

“Kitty,” Dov said. “I wanted to talk to you about Karen before she gets here.”

“Yes, Dov, of course.” ’

“She is very stubborn.”

“I know. I was at Nahal Midbar a few weeks ago. We had a long talk.”

“Did she tell you that I have a chance to study in America?”

“She didn’t tell me but I knew, anyhow. You see, I’ve been in Israel so long I’ve developed my own spy system.”

“I don’t know what to do. She is loyal to her kibbutz. I am afraid she will refuse to leave. I … I just can’t leave her for two years.” ,

“I’ll work on her,” Kitty smiled. “She is weakening by the moment. You’ll see, Dov. Everything is going to work out fine.”

The front door was flung open and Jordana, her red hair flowing, held open her arms.

“Shalom, everybody,” she called.

Kitty embraced her.

“Ema" Jordana called. “Come here. I have a surprise for you!”

Sarah rushed in from the kitchen just as Ari walked through the door.

“Ari!”

She reached for her handkerchief and simultaneously burst into happy tears and embraced him. “Ari! Oh, Jordana, you are a devil with red hair! Why didn’t you tell me Ari was coming!”

“Well, I figured that you might have made enough for an extra mouth at the table,” he said, hugging his mother.

“You devils!” Sarah said, shaking her finger at them, and dabbing at her eyes. “Let me look at you, son. Ari, you look tired. You are working too hard.”

They embraced again and laughed.

Then Ari saw Kitty Fremont.

The room turned awkwardly quiet as both of them stared long and hard. Jordana, who had carefully arranged the meeting, looked from one to the other.

Kitty stood up slowly and nodded her head. “Shalom, Ari,” she said softly.

“Shalom,” he whispered.

“Make yourselves at home,” Jordana said, grabbing her 592

mother’s arm quickly and leading her back to the kitchen. Dov shook Ari’s hand. “Shalom, Brigadier Ben Canaan,” he said. Kitty watched Dov. The young man’s eyes brimmed with admiration, seeing Ari as the almost legendary leader of “the Beasts.”

“Shalom, Dov. You are looking fine. I hear you are going to bring water down to us in the desert.” “We will try very hard, Brigadier.” Sutherland and Ari shook hands. *

“I received your letter, Sutherland, and I will be delighted to have you visit us at Elath any time.”

“I am terribly keen to see the Negev first hand. Perhaps we can arrange a time.”

“Fine. And how does your garden grow?” “Well, I must say, your mother’s roses are the first I’ve found to envy. I say, old boy, I’m not letting you get back to Elath without spending an afternoon at my villa.” “I shall try.”

Again an awkward silence fell as Bruce Sutherland looked from Ari to Kitty. She had not taken her eyes from Ari. Sutherland walked over to Dov quickly and led him from the room. “Now, Major Landau, you’ve got to tell me just how you chaps plan to drop the Huleh Lake into the Sea of Galilee. That’s a bit of doing …” Ari and Kitty were alone. “You look well,” Kitty said at last. “And you.”

And there was silence between them once more. “I … uh … how is little Karen? Is she coming?” “Yes, she will be here. We are expecting her at any time.” “Would you … would you like to take a walk? It is quite fresh outside.”

“Yes, why don’t we?” Kitty said.

They walked wordlessly past the fence and along the edge of the fields and past the olive orchard, until they came to the Jordan River. The rebirth of springtime was in the smell and the sight of everything. Ari lit two cigarettes and handed

Kitty one.

She was even more beautiful than the memory he held of

her.

Kitty became aware of Ari’s fixed gaze.

“I … am really quite ashamed of myself. I have never been to Elath. The commander at Beersheba has offered to fly me down a half dozen times. I should see it, I suppose.”

“The water and the mountains are quite beautiful.”

“Is the town growing?”

“It would be the fastest-growing town in the world if we

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could break the blockade and open her as a port to the Orient.”

“Ari,” Kitty said seriously, “what is the situation down there?”

“What it has always been … as it will always be.”

“The fedayeen gangs are getting worse, aren’t they?”

“Those poor devils aren’t our real worry. They’re massing to overrun the entire Middle East from Sinai. We’re going to have to hit them first if we expect to survive.” Ari smiled. “My boys tell me we should cross the border and find Mount Sinai and give the Ten Commandments back to God … it’s all caused us enough trouble.”

Kitty stared at the bubbling stream for a long time. She sighed unevenly. “I am sick with worry over Karen. She is on the Gaza Strip … Nahal Midbar.”

“Nasty place,” Ari muttered. “But they are tough youngsters. They’ll make out.”

Yes, that is the way that Ari would answer, Kitty thought.

“I hear you are returning to America.”

Kitty nodded.

“You’ve become a woman of renown.”

“More of a curiosity,” Kitty said.

“You’re modest.”

“I’m sure Israel will survive without me.”

“Why are you leaving?”

“You saw Dov … Major Dov Landau now. He’s a fine young man. Karen is being left in good hands. I don’t know … maybe I just don’t want to wear out my welcome. Maybe I still don’t fully belong here. Maybe I’m homesick. There are lots of -reasons and no reasons. Anyhow, I just want a year to take off and spend the time thinking-just thinking.”

“Perhaps you are doing a wise thing. It is good for a person to think without the pressures imposed by daily living. It Was a luxury my father was denied until his last two years.”

Suddenly they seemed to run out of words to say.

“We had better start back for the house,” Kitty said. “I want to be there when Karen arrives. Besides, I am expecting visits from some of my children.”

“Kitty … a moment, please.”

“Yes?”

“Let me say that I am grateful for the friendship you have given lordana. You have been good for her. I have been worried about this restlessness of hers.”

“She is a very unhappy girl. No one can ever really know how much she loved that boy.”

“When will it end?”

“I don’t know, Ari. But I have lived here so long that I 594

have become a cockeyed optimist. There will be happiness again for Jordana, someday.”

The unspoken question-the unasked words-hung between them. Would there be happiness for her … and for him, someday, too?

“We had better go back,” Kitty said.

All through the morning and afternoon Kitty’s children came from Gan Dafna and from a dozen Huleh settlements to see her. The people of Yad El came to see Ari. There was a constant flow of traffic through the Ben Canaan house. They all remembered the first time they had seen Kitty, aloof and, awkward. Now she spoke to them in theix language and they all looked up to her in admiration.

Many of her children had traveled a long distance to spend a few minutes with her. Some showed off new husbands or wives. Almost all of them were in the uniform of the army of Israel.

As the afternoon passed, Kitty became concerned at the failure of Karen to appear. Several times Dov went out to the main road to look for a sign of her.

By late afternoon all the visitors had left to get ready for

their own Seders.

“Where the devil is that girl?” Kitty snapped, expressing

her worry in annoyance.

“She’s probably just a little way off,” Dov said.

“The least she could have done was to phone and let us know she was delayed. It isn’t like Karen to be thoughtless,”

Kitty said.

“Come now, Kitty,” Sutherland said, “you know it would take an act of Parliament to put a phone call through today.” Ari saw Kitty’s discomfort. “Look … I’ll run down to the moshav office and put in a priority call to her kibbutz. Perhaps they know where she planned to stay en route and we can track her down.”

“I would appreciate that very much,” Kitty said. Not long after Ari had left Sarah came in and announced that the Seder table was ready for everyone’s inspection. This was her moment of triumph after a month of labor. She opened the door to the dining room and the guests selfconsciously tiptoed in with a chorus of “ohs” and “ahs.” It was a table indeed fit for a Feast of Liberation.

All the silver and dishes glistened. They were used only once a year, on this holiday. The silver candlesticks • shone in the center of the table. Next to the candlesticks sat a huge ornate sterling-silver goblet which was called “Elijah’s cup.” It was set there and filled with wine to welcome the prophet. When he came to drink from the cup he came as the forerunner of the Messiah.

595.

Special wine and silver goblets were at each place, to be filled four times during the Seder for the four promises of God: to bring forth, deliver, redeem, and take the Children of Israel. The wine symbolizing joy would also be sipped during the recounting of the Ten Plagues against Pharaoh, and when the Song of Miriam, of the closing of the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s army, was sung. ’

At the head seat there was a pillow, so that the teller of the story of the Exodus might relax. In ancient times only free men relaxed, while slaves were made to sit rigid.

And in the center near the candlesticks sat the gold Seder dish holding the symbolic foods. There was matzos, the unleavened bread to remind them that the Children of Israel had to leave Egypt so quickly their bread was unleavened. There was an egg to symbolize the freewill offering, and water cress for the coming of spring, and the shank of lamb bone to recall the offerings to God in the Great Temple. There was a mixture of nuts and diced apples and maror, bitter herbs. The first symbolized the mortar the Egyptians forced-them to mix for brick building, and the herbs recalled the bitterness of bondage.

Sarah shooed them all out and they returned to the living room. As they entered, it was Jordana who saw Ari first. He leaned in the doorframe, pale and with a dazed expression in his eyes. Now they all stared at him. He tried to speak but couldn’t, and as a moment passed they all knew at once.

“Karen! Where is she!” Kitty demanded.

Ari’s jaw trembled and he lowered his head.

“Where is she!”

“Karen is dead. She was murdered last night by a gang of fedayeen from Gaza.”

Kitty let out an anguished shriek and slumped to the floor.

Kitty blinked her eyes open. Bruce and Jordana knelt near her. The remembrance hit her and her eyes bulged and she turned and sobbed, “My baby … my baby …”

She sat up slowly. Jordana and Sutherland were in a-stupor of shock. They looked haggard and numb with grief.

“Karen is dead … Karen is dead …”

“If I could only have died for her,” Jordana cried.

Kitty struggled to her feet.

“Lie down, dear … please, lie down,” Sutherland said.

“No,” Kitty said, “no …” She fought clear of Sutherland. “I must see Dov. I must go to him.”

She staggered out and found Dov sitting in the corner of another room, hollow-eyed and his face contorted with pain. She rushed to him and took him in her arms.

“Dov … my poor Dov,” Kitty cried. 596

Dov buried his head in her bosom and sobbed heart-brokenly. Kitty rocked him and they cried together, untii darkness fell upon the Ben Canaan cottage and no one had any tears left.

“I’ll stay with you, Dov … I’ll take care of you,” Kitty said. “We will get through this, Dov.”

The young man stood up shakily. “I will be all right, Kitty,” he said. “I’m going on. I’ll make her proud of me.”

“I beg you, Dov. Don’t go back to the way you were because of this.”

“No,” he said. “I thought about it. I cannot hate them, because Karen could not hate them. She could not hate a living thing. We … she said we can never win by hating them…”

Sarah Ben Canaan stood at the door. “I know we are all broken,” she said pitifully, “but we should go on with the Seder.”

Kitty looked to Dov and the boy nodded.

They walked in tragic procession toward the dining room. Jordana stopped Kitty outside the door.

“Ari sits alone in the barn,” Jordana said. “Will you go to

him?”

Kitty walked from the cottage. She saw the lights of the other houses of the moshav. The Seder had begun in them. At this very moment, fathers were telling their families the age-old story of the Exodus as it had always been told by fathers and would be told for eternities to come. It began to drizzle and Kitty walked faster, toward the flickering lantern light from the barn. She entered and looked around. Ari sat with his back to her on a bale of hay. She walked up behind him and touched his shoulder. “Ari, the Seder is about to begin.”

He turned’ and looked up at her and she stepped back as though from a physical blow. She was shocked by Ari’s face, distraught with a suffering that she had never seen in a human being. Ari Ben Canaan’s eyes were filled with anguish. He looked at her but he did not seem to see her. He turned and hid his face in his hands and his shoulders sagged with defeat. “Ari … we must have the Seder …” “AH my life … all my life . . I have watched them kill everyone I love … they are all gone now … all of them.” The words came from profound depths of an unbearable despair. She was awed and half frightened by the almost tangible emotion that tortured the now-strange figure before her. “I have died with them. I have died a thousand times. I am empty inside … I have nothing left.” “Ari… Ari…”

“Why must we send children to live in these places? This

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precious girl … this angel … why … why did they have to kill her too … ?”

Ari staggered to his feet. All the strength and power and control that made him Ari Ben Canaan was gone. This was a tired and beaten hulk. “Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?”

The years of tension, the years of struggle, the years of heartbreak welled up in one mighty surge. Ari lifted his pain-filled face to heaven and raised his fists over his head. “God! God! Why don’t they let us alone! Why don’t they let us live"

And his powerful shoulders drooped and his head hung to his chest and he stood and trembled.

“Oh, Ari … Ari!” Kitty cried. “What have I done to you! Why didn’t I understand? Ari, my darling … what you must have suffered. Can I ever be forgiven “for hurting you?”

Ari was exhausted, drained. He walked along the edge of a stall. “I am not myself,” he mumbled. “Please do not let the others know about this.”

“We had better go in. They are waiting for us,” Kitty said.

“Kitty!”

He walked toward her very slowly until he stood before her looking down into her eyes. Slowly he sank to his knees and put his arms around her waist and laid his head against her.

Ari Ben Canaan wept.

It was a strange and terrible sound to hear. In this moment his soul poured out in his tears and he wept for all the times in his life he had dared not weep. He wept with a grief that was bottomless.

Kitty pressed his head tightly against her body and stroked his hair and whispered words of comfort.

“Don’t leave me,” Ari cried.

Ah, how she had wanted to hear those words! Yes, she thought, I will stay, this night and for a few tomorrows, for you need me now, Ari. But even as you show tears and humility for the first time in your life, you are ashamed of them. You need me now but tomorrow … tomorrow you will be Ari Ben Canaan again. You will be all the strong, defiant Ari Ben Canaans who inure themselves to tragedy. And then … you will no longer need me.

She helped him to his feet and dried his tears. He was weak. Kitty put his arm over her shoulder and held him tightly. “It is all right, Ari. You can lean on me.”

They walked from the barn slowly. Through the window they could see Sarah lighting the candles and reciting a benediction. 598

He stoppecj^md released her and straightened himself up, standing tall and strong again.

Already, so soon, he was Ari Ben Canaan again.

“Before we go in, Kitty, I must tell you something. I must tell you I never loved Dafna as I love you. You know what kind of a life you must share with me.”

“I know, Ari.”

“I am not like other men … it may be years … it may be ! forever before I can ever again say that my need for you comes first, before all other things … before the needs of this country. Will you be able to understand that?”

“I will understand, always.”

Everyone entered the dining room. The men put on skull caps.

Dov and Jordana and Ari and Kitty and Sutherland and Sarah. Their hearts were bursting with sorrow. As Ari walked toward the head of the table to take Barak’s place, Sutherland touched his arm.

“If you would not be offended,” Sutherland said, “I am the oldest male Jew present. May I tell the Seder?”

“We would be honored,” Ari said.

Sutherland walked to the head of the table, to the place of the head of the family. Everyone sat down and opened his copy of the Haggadah. Sutherland nodded to Dov Landau to begin.

Dov cleared his throat and read. “Why is this night different from all other nights of the year?

“This night is different because we celebrate the most important moment in the history of our people. On this night we celebrate their going forth in triumph from slavery into freedom.”