especially during harvest, they continued working past dark. After the day’s work, the boys would hitch a wagon and ride to the spring to fill barrels of water for drinking and household needs. The houses in Mes’ha had no running water until the 1930s and trips to the spring were a daily ritual. Alighting at the source, the boys would lower a can into the water, fill the barrels, and carefully cover them with sacks to protect the water from road dust. At home, again with great care, they would empty the barrels into vats kept in the farmyard. The route to the spring cut through fields with bumps and potholes, and on occasion the barrels arrived home half-empty. The spring could not supply the colony’s demand and in drought years—which were frequent—it would be dry by summer’s end. Its waters were turbid; as soon as several farmers had drawn their fill nothing remained for the rest. The water level was on everyone’s lips as farmers passed one another to and from the spring.
Water was a source of friction with the Arab neighbors too: in periods of drastic shortage, Mes’ha’s young would get into fights trying to pilfer water from guarded Arab wells. Water wars were an annual occurrence. Two Mes’ha boys were once caught red-handed yet continued to draw water rather than flee. Finding themselves surrounded, one of the boys shot into the air, mustering the entire colony to their rescue. Before matters could escalate, a soft-spoken teacher by the name of Entebi stepped in and rebuked the Arabs; he shamed them for their un-neighborly behavior, depriving the thirsty colony of drinking water.43
In these conditions bathing and laundry were obviously a luxury, particularly in summer. For decades, this was the situation at all settlements in the Lower Galilee. It is little wonder that one girl from Yavne’el carried a lifelong memory of an immaculate first-grade teacher with not a fly on her, while clusters of insects hovered over the children’s faces.44
Life at Mes’ha followed the agricultural cycle and seasons: in the autumn, everyone looked out for the first rains. When they came, the land was prepared for sowing. Oxen were used for plowing until they were replaced by mules in the transition from the light Arab plow to the European kind.
In winter, the village was totally cut off and enveloped in heavy mud, inside and out; no one arrived, no one left. Roads were unpaved and a journey to Tiberias or Nazareth could not be made without a donkey. Later, under the British Mandate, the outside world was opened up by train service from Afulah. The rainy season was a time for repairs. Housewives used the long winter nights to sew clothes for the family or to sell and earn a little extra money. Families sat around tables lit by oil lamps. The oil was imported in tins and sold by the measure, and the filling and the lighting of the lamp was an art in and of itself: if a lamp died out, the children were generally charged with relighting it, taking care not to get burned by the hot glass.45 On nights such as these, Reuven Paicovich would read to his children from Hebrew literature: Abraham Mapu, Peretz Smolenskin, Mikha Joseph Berdyczewski, I. L. Peretz.46 Winter was also the season for studying since in the spring and the summer children twelve and older would accompany their fathers to the fields, making up school assignments in the evenings after a hard day’s work.
Spring was heralded by the return of Mes’ha’s cattle to the village. Spare in flesh and produce, the herd consisted of Arab cows unflatteringly known as “tails.” In winter, when a thin mantle of green covered the hills, Arab cowhands would lead them to pasture north of the colony—“on vacation” according to the local jesters. Two months later, the cows came home, filling the air with mooing and lowing as each found its way to its master’s yard and every farmer spotted his beast.47
Summer’s sign was the threshing floor: the entire family with the exception of the farmwife would scramble to bring in the grain out of harm’s way, be it from natural or human elements. To guard the harvest from thieves, everyone slept in the granary. Girls and young women brought along food and drink, someone would reach for a harmonica, and the sound of song would soon be heard. Couples seeking privacy clambered to the top of the piled-up sheaves, away from prying eyes.
Mes’ha may have been lean, but it did not suffer from hunger. Most of the food was home grown. The seeds from the harvest were ground at the Kafr Kama flourmill, which worked like a charm, unlike Mes’ha’s contraption. For the children, the walk to Kafr Kama, a Circassian village, was like a holiday: in addition to the half day off from work, there was the anticipation of waiting in line for their turn at the mill, of buying sweets for a penny, of roaming through the narrow village lanes—all of it was a lingering adventure.48
For cooking and baking, the Arab outdoor tabun was used. The first settlers to arrive in the Lower Galilee had erected the usual barred range, but the lack of wood for fuel soon posed a problem, while rising smoke made housework grueling. Into the breach stepped the wife of the harat, the Arab laborer: kneading together grass and earth, straw and water, she marked off a tabun in the ground to present the women with a superior technical upgrade. It was fueled three times a week with the help of slow-burning, kneaded animal droppings, but since matches were not always handy, great care was taken to keep the embers alive. The tabun became hearth and home.49
The food was simple and natural: bread, milk, cheese, and butter. Eggs from the chicken coop were plenty and were often sold to a wholesaler in exchange for such luxuries as herring or halva. Cooked food was based on cereals and legumes: bulgur, cholent, and so forth. Meat was less common, although for the Sabbath and holidays a hen would be slaughtered. Fruit and vegetables were bought from Arabs hailing from the water-rich Bet-Netofah Valley who made the rounds of the villages. Mes’ha’s vegetable patches yielded only herbs, onions, and sometimes a potato.50
In times of trouble, the hardships of living in an out-of-the-way village were all too palpable: if illness struck, the bumpy wagon ride to a hospital in Tiberias or Nazareth could well hasten a patient’s end. In winter, the trip was out of the question altogether and the sick simply had to cope on their own. For childbirth, the bobbeh or midwife was called in—she was a Mes’ha institution in herself.
The village was too small to support good services. It had no store worthy of the name, medical treatment was poor, and the school left much to be desired. Rosh Pinnah, in contrast, was already a small town boasting various service providers from artisans to ICA officials, as well as farmers. The service providers were able to maintain a store and their presence lent the colony a sense of relative ease.51 Mes’ha had none of these.
Predictably, Mesh’ha’s relations with its Arab neighbors were complex from the first. Although the interaction was rather simple and unsophisticated, at the same time, it had many aspects: hostility was tempered by affection, dependency by self-sufficiency, aggression by friendship, and distance by closeness. Mes’ha’s attitude stemmed neither from ideology nor politics; largely, it was an extension of the attitude shtetl Jews had toward the Russian or Ukranian muzhiks who brought Jews the produce of their fields and gardens, sold them their butter and eggs, and at their stores bought the provisions they required for their farms—rope, nails, tools. The shtetl Jews’ singular attitude to the country goyim reflected both Jewish uniqueness and the Jewish anomaly: on the one hand, Jews were contemptuous of the goyishe dunderheads, who were the butt of their ridicule and deception; on the other hand, Jews had a gnawing fear of the goyim’s violent outbursts: come pogroms, all of Jacob’s wisdom would prove useless against Esau’s brawn. In Mes’ha on the whole, however, calm reigned as business dealings and interdependence spilled over onto the personal plane, sparking friendships and loyalties across national and religious divides. To a great extent, the relations between Mes’ha’s residents and their Arab neighbors were patterned along these lines.
Built on the ruins of an Arab village abandoned in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Mes’ha did not face the sort of strife that had poisoned Metullah’s early years (when the Druze claimed dispossession). It did come under attack from a-Zbekh Bedouin—though not more so than other villages, whether Arab or Jewish. Marauding was the Bedouin way of life
