and even in the farmers of the colonies by appealing to voluntarism and the general good were met with bitter derision: how easy it was for him, who could be sure of his meal, to preach idealism and making do to people who worked themselves to the bone and went hungry for bread.32 The high-brow Vitkin found no common language with the farm workers whose children were his educational charges. He felt that he failed to leave a mark on the children: “The environment is stronger … and all that we sow within the school walls in the long term and with great emotional effort is uprooted in the short term.”33
Mes’ha was synonymous with dereliction. When the teacher Asher Ehrlich and his wife, Dvora, arrived at Mes’ha in 1905 to replace the exhausted Vitkin, they found twenty-two abandoned houses, the tenants having returned their homesteads to the ICA. Some of the houses—recently built—were already cracked and dilapidated. In the entire village, there was not a spot of green—no grass, no flowers, no fruit trees. These were luxuries ruled out by the lack of water. But, in any case, the population did not have a feel for ornamentation or a need to introduce beauty into their lives. In this respect, Mes’ha resembled the Eastern European shtetl where Jews did not hanker after aesthetics, especially in public areas; aesthetics were a trivial goyish pursuit of non-Jews.34
Vitkin, in one of his letters, bemoaned the hills of Mes’ha that closed in on it and robbed it of a horizon, of open space. But Mes’ha’s residents were quite comfortable with the narrow vistas handed them by fate. In time, those who stayed on despite the privations very likely explained their endurance in Zionist terms. The romanticism of their twilight years lent an aura of idealism to the ordeals of youth and maturity. If truth be told, however, their aliyah to Eretz Israel had been a combination of love of Zion—the fruit of midrash, aggadah, and liturgy—and the hope of a better living in Palestine. The tidings that Baron de Rothschild was settling Jews on the land and that other agencies too were involved in the endeavor attracted Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Yet they were a mere trickle. The great current flowed toward American shores. There is no way to quantify or appraise the ratio between emotional nationalism and personal expediency in the hearts of those who turned to Zion. Often, those guided by expediency lost their hearts to the country and never were to be dislodged from it, not even by a dozen oxen, while those who came in search of King Saul’s Hills of Gilboa or Gideon’s Ein Harod broke on the rock of reality, abandoning the country of their dreams in disillusionment. Of Mes’ha’s residents it may be said that their Zionism came after the fact and despite everything; they certainly paid a high price for their Eretz Israel.
To the extent that they ever had dreamed of the country and their lives in it, the dream had been as narrow as their village horizon: to dwell each under his vine and fig tree in the Promised Land. They had no problem with the traditional lifestyle of the shtetl. Religion played a central part, molding individual and public spheres. Kashrut was self-evident, and everyone attended synagogue on the Days of Awe. Only the doctor was allowed to absent himself since, as everyone knew, he was well-versed in external wisdom and therefore exempt from the rules governing ordinary Jewish mortals.35 In principle, Mes’ha’s inhabitants did not suffer from overeducation. As was typical of a Jewish shtetl, those with schooling consisted of the teacher, the doctor, and the pharmacist, although not in all cases.
Mes’ha was a mirror of the faults and virtues of a shtetl: arguments and intrigue were regular fare, and the infighting in some years caused the council to change its composition more than once. Yet, there was also a sense of mutual concern: when disaster struck—a householder’s death, lengthy illness, and so forth—the council would strive to extend assistance while the women lent a hand with housework and everyday needs. Men, too, could rise to gestures of magnificence, plowing or sowing a neighbor’s fields. In normal times, though, every farmer jealously guarded his own acreage and kept to himself.
The move of Mes’ha’s residents from the shtetlach or villages of their births to Kefar Tavor did not entail modernization, a new self-image, or a new worldview. But when an Eastern European Jewish village is planted in the Wild West of the Palestine frontier something’s got to give. The Lower Galilee sprouted a frontier culture complete with romance, symbols, and heroes, with its own lifestyle and code of conduct. The Paicoviches fit right in.
In November 1908, Reuven signed a contract with the ICA and became a tenant farmer on the lands of Um-J’abal—“the mother of mountains” in Arabic.36 The best fields had already been taken. Newcomers were given remote plots, several kilometers to the north of the village, on the lower slopes of Mount Tabor (at the site of today’s Kibbutz Bet Keshet). The virgin soil was so stony in parts that the earth could not be seen. It bordered the lands of a-Zbekh, the strongest, most dangerous Bedouin tribe in the area. The Zbekhs claimed ownership of some of Um-J’abal, while the ICA had plans to extend its holdings into a-Zbekh’s territory. Thus, tension over land was already in place, even before anyone took a hoe to the ground.37
Paicovich’s field neighbors too were recent arrivals. One was a Yemenite Jew named Zefira; the other, Mattveyov, was one of the Russian converts to Judaism who settled in the Galilee. Come the rainy season, the three planned to plow their fields together. But the route to their fields passed through a-Zbekh territory and the tribesmen blocked their way. The farmers thought they might outwit them: they tried their luck at dawn, they tried in the middle of the night, but it made no difference. Whenever they showed up, the Bedouin were out en masse to greet them, until one day Reuven’s patience snapped. Booming with rage, he demanded the right of passage. Seeing that this made no impression, he drew his rifle and fired into the air. He had every intention of continuing to shoot when he noticed that one of the elders wished to approach. Reuven was too angry even to listen at first, though in the end he heard the Bedouin out—from a distance. The tribesman informed him that from now on the a-Zbekhs would accept them as neighbors and allow them through. Paicovich’s reputation was sealed. From then on in a-Zbekh eyes, he was brave and indomitable. Sipping cups of coffee, they wondered who he was. A Jew? Certainly not: Jews were walad el-mitta (mortals), that is, cowards who did not defend themselves. A Muslim or a Christian? Evidently, no. Ultimately, they concluded that he was an Insari, a member of the north Syrian tribe of Ashuri known for their courage. Paicovich’s sons adopted the appellation. At family affairs, he became “al-Insari” to them.38
Paicovich threw himself into farming with all the love and energy of a man who had at last realized his life’s dream. With infinite toil, rudimentary tools, and no mechanization whatsoever he cleared his fields stone by stone and used the stones to mark off his land. He actually enlarged his holding to 350 dunams (87.5 acres; 35 ha), a takeover that won recognition from the ICA.39
His love for the soil was almost sensual. As if born to farming, he would pick up a clod of earth and relish its taste. Every stalk of grain fallen from the wagon he retrieved with a loving hand. He had his children or a laborer trail behind the wagon to collect whatever fell off—a practice that his neighbors variously interpreted as either mingy or thrifty.40 Meticulous and orderly, he took great care of his tools and his harvests. The rows he sowed were painstakingly straight. The olive grove he cultivated had no match, and his vineyard earned high praise from visiting ICA officials who marveled at the talents of the novice farmer. He raised potatoes in his vegetable garden and, by his own account, every potato that he managed to grow was treated with the reverence Jews reserved for a perfect citron.41
Paicovich was known in Mes’ha as a smart farmer adeptly managing his holding. Industrious, persevering, and surrounded by a bevy of sons learned in the lore of the land from the cradle, he had the advantage over his neighbors. What’s more, he was tall and strong, and took easily to physical work. A hard and stubborn man, he could hold his own in negotiations. As a result, the family was not counted among the colony’s poor. Poverty and wealth, however, are relative concepts.42
Life revolved around work. Chaya rose in the wee hours to do her chores and to prepare food for the field hands. She would rouse the family and, at first light,
