abundant. Their eyes lit up at the thought of promoting the national good while treading a common path. In January 1937, thirteen members of the first two graduating classes organized and applied to the Government of Palestine for a piece of land.42 The signatories included Arnan Azaryahu (Sini), Joel Prozhinin, and Yigal Paicovich.
The application was denied. The government replied that it did not intend graduates of Kadoorie to found a settlement of their own; rather, they were to fan out across the country and use their knowledge to boost agriculture as a whole. Furthermore, any assistance given to Jewish Kadoorie graduates would have to be matched for Arab Kadoorie graduates, entailing an expenditure beyond its means. In general, there were little available land, and the government preferred to place what there was at the disposal of the JA to use as its discretion.43
Amos Brandsteter did not sign the application. He knew very well that he would be returning to his father’s farm in Yavne’el. Not so Allon. His memoirs say that he entered into the plan half-heartedly.44 Nevertheless, his signature was the first step in his break with Kefar Tavor.
Kefar Tavor may have been home, but certain aspects of it caused him distinct discomfort. He never invited any of his friends to his house. Not even Ada ever crossed the threshold. If a friend happened to accompany him on his way home, he made sure that he did not come inside but waited for him outdoors. He seems to have been ashamed of the poverty, which is strange since poverty was not looked down upon, especially not in his circles. Ada was puzzled by his behavior: true, her own family occupied a fine home at the time, and her father earned the enormous salary of Palestine £500 a year, but this was one period in a long life that had known hardship and struggle. For Ada, poverty carried no social stigma. This was not so for Allon: he regarded it as a blot, as something to be hidden.45
Perhaps, it was the shabbiness, not just the poverty, that accounted for his attitude. The house was run down, having gone without a woman’s touch for years. Rickety walls stood unrepaired, no ornaments or luxuries of any kind graced the premises. Within these bare walls, there lived an old man and a boy. Allon’s home was not like any of those of his friends, not even the poorest among them.
Since Kadoorie, he saw Mes’ha with different eyes. Compared with Ada, its plain, simple girls held no charm for him. Compared with the modern agriculture he learned at Kadoorie, Mes’ha’s farming methods, including his father’s, appeared terribly backward. Even the local school, which he remembered fondly and had built up before his new friends, had lost its luster.
Allon, in Bet Avi, attributes his leaving Mes’ha primarily to the ideological changes in him during his second year at Kadoorie: “The ideological consideration began to vie within me with natural sentiment,”46 “the social-moral uniqueness of kibbutz life; the qualitative standard of living; equality and mutual responsibility” were values that drew him with magic strings to the concept of the kibbutz, he said. “From day to day, I became increasingly convinced of the justice of the kibbutz way for the Yishuv, the nation and human society, and from day to day my desire to belong to it grew.”47 Was this really the case? Ideology was not discussed at Kadoorie. Among themselves, the boys would prattle on about soccer, girls, security actions. The question of a kibbutz composed of Kadoorie graduates came up only in their last few months. But it was not an intellectual conviction, merely the way of life favored by the country’s top youth. Few of Kadoorie’s graduates had been exposed to the enriching food for the soul served up by youth movements. They lacked the values education absorbed by members of youth movements. In this sense, there was very little difference between the youth of Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir and the youth of Ha-Noar Ha-Oved at Kadoorie. The latter’s onsite activities amounted to twice yearly visits by a movement coordinator. The socialist-Zionist bricks that built the ideological foundation and motivation for kibbutz life were not inherent in Kadoorie’s cultural world.
Allon grappled with the decision in talks with Ada and even more so in his letters to her. He seemed to find it easier to express his reservations in writing. Unfortunately, the letters have been lost, but their substance was clear enough and confirmed by the accounts of his friends. Ideology played a marginal role. The decisive factor was his feeling that Mes’ha was a dead end; a curtain on the new horizons he had glimpsed since coming to Kadoorie. A return to Mes’ha was a life sentence of retrogression, of poverty without compensation or challenge, in a backwater marginal to the great drama unfurling in the country. Apart from his sense of guilt at abandoning his father—and shattering the old man’s hopes that the child of his old age would carry on the family farm—Mes’ha did not beckon him.
The kibbutz, in contrast, symbolized the new world: the company of young people, a hazardous location, a tractor instead of a plow, creating something from scratch. More than an explicit worldview, it was a proclamation of belonging to a dynamic current, to the Yishuv’s creative forces at the time.
There was also the question of his future relations with Ada. Ada had finished the Re’ali School and was also considering her next move, whether to go to a university and study literature or join Allon on a kibbutz. Two things were clear: she would not go to Mes’ha and he would not pursue further studies. But going to a kibbutz together was an option. In the end, Ada chose to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was the termination of their four-year relationship.48
The decision to leave Mes’ha and the Paicovich farm was very difficult for Allon—comparable, perhaps, to the decision of Diaspora youngsters to quit home and country and make aliyah to the land of Israel. It spelled rupture with a wealth of loyalties: childhood landscapes, the land and the farm, the father who nursed hopes and had expectations of him. Like pioneering aliyah, it was a new start and complete break, clean, clear-cut, life defining. It molded his life, but also his father’s—for there was no one left to shoulder the burden of the farm now, and Paicovich was seventy. The choice was between Allon’s life and his father’s. At that moment of hard—even cruel—truth, the nineteen-year-old Allon found the strength to opt for the future.
The meeting at which he announced his decision to his father must have been one of his greatest trials. According to Allon, Paicovich told him that he had the right to do as he saw fit—even if he had not consulted his elder. But by saying that he, Paicovich, would go on living at Mes’ha, the lonely old man saddled Allon with a heavy sense of responsibility for his father’s fate.49 Emotional blackmail comes in many forms and is not necessarily direct. Paicovich may have hoped that Allon’s decision was not final, that he would think better of it and return to Kefar Tavor.
A chain of events now conspired to turn Allon’s intent into fact. Paicovich took sick and Allon had to hospitalize him in Haifa, near the home of his daughter, Deborah, and her family. Allon meanwhile stayed on at Mes’ha, having promised his father that he would not go to a kibbutz until the summer farm work was done. After the reaping, threshing, and storing of grain, he was faced with a dilemma: his father was in a hospital in Haifa, where the family wanted him to stay, with or near his daughter or one of his sons. Allon was all alone on the farm and the farm was a yoke around his neck: a homestead with livestock and poultry could not be left for a single day. It was one thing to talk about leaving, another to actually do so when there was no one else to take over. That summer, lonely and in a ramshackle house, he was more conscious than ever of the noose his father had placed on him. He was suffocating. In this mood, he decided that if he wished to live, he had no choice but to dismantle the farm and sell off the inventory. Only a draconian measure could free him of his native village. Only thus could he be the master of his fate.
It was a daunting decision, likely fueled by desperation and the typical egoism of the young. His mind made up, he acted quickly, feverishly. Livestock, poultry, wheat—everything was sold off. Every cow he let go added to his sense of freedom. In the end he was left with a pair of mules, a year’s feed of barley for them, and a wagon. He harnessed the mules to the wagon, loaded the feed, and set out, a man alone on the perilous roads of Eretz Israel in the summer of 1937.
He
