too small and the Jewish settlers so few as to threaten its existence. Mes’ha’s street retained an essentially Arab character, as in the period of the Second Aliyah. The number of Arabs living there was certainly no less—and sometimes even more—than the number of Jews. The cattle robbery of 1920 gave the Jews of Mes’ha a moment of alarm that their Arab neighbors, including the friends and kinsmen of their harats, would join forces with the thieves. In 1921, thirty-two Jews were reportedly hired as annual workers at Mes’ha, apparently on the same conditions as harats. They soon organized evening Hebrew classes, and outside lecturers included them on their circuit.76 All of a sudden Mes’ha was part of the Yishuv. Yet in less than a year, the number of Jewish workers dropped to nine, after having inspired a local counterculture: a Bnei Binyamin club, an organization of second-generation settlers, was founded in the colony, and most of Mes’ha’s young joined it. Culturally, it did not amount to much. But it accented—and exacerbated—the rivalry between farmers, who considered themselves middle class, and Jewish laborers, who leaned toward the Zionist Left.77
By 1921 it was clear that the dry farming of cereals could not support hired labor, whether Jewish or Arab, and that a radical solution was needed for the colonies’ woes—to reduce the size of the farm units and switch over to intensive farming.78 Of course, no one had the energy to tackle the farmers, the ICA, or the objective conditions. The lack of internal cooperation and the unwillingness of the farmers to establish a representative organization with financial and electoral clout prevented the Galilee’s settlers from constituting the political force that could have improved their lot.
In the eyes of the young Yigal, however, these were the best years. With the exception of his eldest brother, Moshe, who, after his release from British wartime imprisonment, left Mes’ha to work on the Haifa railway, the whole family was together. His mother, Chaya, showered the fair child of her “old age” with love and pampering, while Reuven, too, was not immune to his charms. On one heart-stopping occasion, Reuven, driving a mule-wagon laden with goods, spied Yigal alone in the fields. Unable to rein in the animals because of the weight of their load, he cried out from afar for the child to move out of the way, but to no avail. Yigal slid beneath the wheels. Only after he saw that the child had suffered minor cuts was Reuven able to breathe again. But the incident was apparently traumatic enough for him to recall it fifty years later.79 Yigal’s version of the same incident was different: Reuven, he said, commanded the doctor to save the child or he would have his head.80
Those happy years were dominated by the mother’s quiet presence. The adult Allon described his parents’ home—with its scents and dishes, with the serenity of a Sabbath eve descending on it, as the hub that it was for the colony’s guards and guests—as a short season of motherly grace. It was soon taken from him: after finishing her housework one Friday, Chaya sat down to rest, keeled over, and lost consciousness. The doctors summoned to her bedside did not hold out any hope, while neighbors rallied round to succor an abruptly motherless family. She was gone within the week. The young child could not but feel the change, although nothing prepared him for his last encounter with his mother: “Suddenly, my father came, picked me up in his arms, and carried me to the room where she lay. … I didn’t understand what was happening, but the silence of the family poised around her bed said it all. My father lowered me toward her and I kissed her forehead. If my memory does not betray me, she even turned her eyes on me, which suddenly lit up with the supreme effort of an impossible smile.”81 She was around forty-nine.
The loss was tremendous. Paicovich, only in his early fifties, refused to remarry, whether out of loyalty to her memory or the difficulty of adapting to someone new. The house began to empty out. Even before Chaya’s death, Mordekhai had joined the Bnei Binyamin organization of farmers’ sons to found the colony of Binyaminah. Deborah, fourteen, dropped out of school to assume responsibility for the home and to raise Yigal. Paicovich was never a social animal. After his wife’s death, there were no more visitors to the home and his public prestige waned. Gloom increasingly nestled between the four walls.
Allon wrote of his father as the dominant figure in his and the family’s life. He sketched a man strong and brave, honest and unimpeachable, a proud man standing up to ICA officials, unafraid to take on the authorities or to fight against wrong. In Allon’s hands, Reuven was either the Gary Cooper of the Galilee or a member of the enlightened landed gentry. Contemporaries, however, painted a far different portrait, as did Paicovich’s own memoirs. No one doubted his courage, toughness, or pride. But broad-mindedness or spunk against the “wicked” PICA? Yigal seems to have resorted to wishful thinking. (In the early 1920s, the ICA became the PICA—the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.)
The relations between Mes’ha and the PICA shed light on the character of the colony and its settlers. Mes’ha was founded with the intention that the farmers would stand on their own two feet after receiving an initial loan from the ICA. Reality, however, got in the way. The farmers were not shy about asking for additional assistance, while the officials, by nature, risked being snared into providing support and fostering dependency, despite all good intentions to the contrary.
Affairs came to a head in the 1920s. The PICA was hard put to balance the books, whereas the farmers had grown accustomed to requesting handouts for all and sundry. Their applications centered on important issues, such as water supply, as well as on minor items. When it came to public institutions—the school, the synagogue, the ritual bath or the community center—the residents of Mes’ha took it for granted that the PICA was to erect them. And when the harvest failed, they thought it only right that the PICA pay the government the land taxes due on their behalf. The PICA was fed up: the more it helped the farmers, the less they helped themselves.82
Paicovich was no different. He too enjoyed being on the receiving end of the PICA’s loans and benefits. Notwithstanding the image of a proud pauper that he liked to tout, he was neither all that poor nor all that proud.
His sense of the PICA’s wrongdoing went back to the very beginning, when the ICA’s Rosenheck had refused him the choice of a colony. But it only grew worse, and after the earthquake of 1927 and the ensuing argument over home repairs, his bitterness took firm root. As he told it, the PICA fixed the cracks in the houses of the other farmers, but not his; he ascribed it to the organization’s dislike of him, his pride, and his independence. He dashed off at least four letters to the PICA administration asking that his house be repaired or exchanged for another. In one letter, he noted: “Permit me to mention here that I have already been a farmer at Mes’ha for twenty years and I never come to the officials with a demand for help.”83 He was not eager to turn to the PICA, he said, but it was now a matter of necessity. The administration remained unimpressed: “We cannot, to our regret, meet your request since we have no budget for same.—Besides, it is time that the farmer understood that the maintenance [and] repair of his house comes under his care—not ours.”84 Paicovich did not let up. In December 1934 he again pressed the PICA for repairs and again was told that the “repair of the buildings falls on the farmer, not on our company,”85 as indeed the leasehold contract stated. It was a typical response from PICA officials weary of the endless demands made by Mes’ha’s farmers; it was not a sign of discrimination. Paicovich made no repairs. He left the house in splendid dilapidation as eternal evidence of his being wronged by the PICA.
The PICA-Paicovich cup of bitters grew fuller with another affair, that of the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School. Paicovich submitted Yigal’s application in 1931 and the boy passed the entrance exam. But Paicovich had no intention of paying school fees out of his own pocket. He hoped that they would come from the PICA: it provided six scholarships for which all of the children in its colonies could apply. There were thirty applicants; Yigal was not selected. A year later, Mes’ha’s only successful candidate quit the school, Paicovich reapplied, and Yigal redid the exam. This time Paicovich stressed the fact that Yigal was a motherless boy and noted the importance of an agricultural education for the future of both boy and farm. Again, Yigal was not among the six winners.86
Paicovich
