The Nation State and the Promised Land: An American Yiddish Writer in Israel, 1949, by Solomon Simon. English translation, 2024, by David R. Forman. All rights reserved.
Page numbers from Medines Yisroel un Erets Yisroel, 1950, Farlag Matones (NY), are included for those who wish to follow along with the original Yiddish, below.
To begin with the Introduction, click here.
I was only in Tel-Aviv for four days. On Shabbes[1], I went back to my brother. In the meantime, I thought I would visit the Immigrant Transit Camp, the camp for those who had just been brought over, which was near Ra’anana.
About a quarter of a million immigrants have been brought to Israel over the last year. In the abstract, anyone can understand the enormity of the accomplishment. Every thinking person will admit that setting up camps for so many people would be no easy feat, even for a rich and well-developed country. When a poor country like Israel takes in so many new immigrants —amounting to a third of its population — you can imagine the difficulties. Then, too, the immigration has not been selective. Everyone has been taken: Healthy and unhealthy, young and old, psychologically normal and abnormal people, those suited to their new circumstances and shattered human beings who will never be able to adapt to a normal healthy life. So a visitor to a camp ought to understand that it is not a very pleasant place to witness. This should not be a shock.
But theory is one thing and reality is something else. When the average person visits a camp, he in fact walks away a shattered person, in a state of shock. No one can blame him. But birth is not…
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…a very pleasant phenomenon. A person who does not have strong nerves should not visit a birthing room.
I do not know how large the immigrant camp near Ra’anana is in area. It seemed to me as though there were many more people there than in Ra’anana itself. I entered the fenced-off camp (the gate is always open and no one is guarding it), and as far as the eye could see I saw tsrifim, barracks or, really, huts with holes for windows, clapped together from boards, and ohelim, tents.
I went with my daughter Miriam, a thirteen-year-old girl. We stood dumbstruck next to the tsrifim and ohelim and looked. Long rows of one-room tsrifim, with beds set up right next to one another, twelve people per tserif. The tents were dark inside, furnished with beds and crates. The tents held six people.
It was hard for me to start talking to people. Here I come, my belly full, a free man from outside, sticking my nose into other people’s problems.
The immigrants in that camp were our Jews, who had come from the German and Austrian camps. A small portion of them from Shanghai. A large percentage of them were over forty years old. Here and there were an old man and an old woman. More than a few of them had numbers tattooed on their arms. But they talked readily. Before I looked around, there was a circle standing around me. A man with a number on his arm pleaded his case to me:
“I don’t know who you are, but the more people know, the better for us. The Kulak is still in charge. Who do you think is sitting here in our camp offices? The same kapos. First they tyrannized us in the concentration camps, and now in these camps. Have you heard about the great Greenbaum’s son?”
A young man interjected. “You’re holding forth already? And always with the same litany —Greenbaum’s son. You do know that he was killed fighting for Israel? He paid in full for his sin!”
“I will hold forth if I want to, until someone listens to me. So, he redeemed his sin. But what about the others? Committees come from America,…
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supposedly to look into things, to investigate, and what comes of it? Not a thing. Why? Because someone always accompanies them. Even Leyvik and Efrat came, dressed like generals, and always accompanied by a troupe of lackeys.”
Here, I interrupted. “They had to dress in uniform. Otherwise, they would not have been allowed in to visit the camps.”
“Who would have stopped them from sneaking into the camps late at night, or early in the morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, and listening to our grief and pain, to uncover the swindles and the scandals?”
Another young man with a number on his arm turned to me:
“I’m telling you, that man is talking nonsense. What kind of complaint can anyone have against Leyvick? He asked questions, did his research, and spoke with a lot of us. He listened to enough justified complaints and unjustified complaints. No argument can be had with Leyvick. If we could only say the same about all the commissions.”
A short, stout, freckle-faced man began to speak rapidly, as though he was afraid people would not hear him out:
“And I’m telling you that Leyvick did not write the whole truth either. He, too, was with the pkidim (officials). He ought to have written that shirts had been sent from America, and the officials wore them. That they had sent meat, and the officials ate it. Have you gotten many meals from the charity boxes? Wasn’t a whole warehouse of American merchandise destroyed in Cyprus, which the officials had been hiding for themselves, to speculate with?”
“But we were not in Cyprus, and neither was Leyvick,” the first young man broke in, “it’s all noise. How could he have written about things that happened long afterwards?”
“Later or earlier,” said the first man, “no one has come to us as one of our own, but all of them as emissaries, official persons. Now this guy,” he pointed at me, “I like. You can see he is an American. I would swear that he is a Yiddish writer. He knew right away who Leyvick is, and he knew about Greenbaum’s son. Yes, he’s a writer. And how did he come to us? Alone,…
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with his daughter, not accompanied by commissioners. He will know the real truth. Tell him, my fellow Jews, how good you have it.”
By now there was a considerable crowd around me. A young woman called out:
“What good does telling stories do? Let him see with his own eyes. Come and look at my tserif: a three by three hole, with eleven people living in it. Three married couples, that’s six people, and (she counted on her fingers) two children — that makes eight — and three unmarried men make eleven people. Nu? Everyone sleeps together in that hole. The beds take up the whole room. There’s no place to turn around. Under our beds are trunks, chests, and suitcases. How clean can it be? Flies, dirt, and mud. Our officials, great brains that they are, couldn’t come up with a way not to put married and unmarried people in the same room. Only if someone has patronage, Vitamin P“?!
“And you had it better in Germany?” the young man countered.
“Of course it was better. There we could do something, trade, make an easy penny or two.”
“Your easy pennies,” said the young man disgustedly. “You could have stayed in that damned country?”
“We could have held out there for years, and then gotten a visa to America or to Argentina. But no! They came to us: Jews, come to Israel! The nation is waiting for you! We need you! Your children will have a future!”
Someone else joined in the conversation, like a soloist in a well-rehearsed choir:
“We came for the benefit of our children. Here, look at this food!” He brought out a plate of food.
“Look. A little grain porridge mixed with God only knows what. A dot of margarine, a small piece of cheese, a half bar of halva and chopped up bits of cucumbers and tomatoes. It’s inedible. Dry and without any flavor. In this heat! Yes, we have enough bread. Huge hunks of it. OK, so for us it doesn’t matter. But is this food fit for children?”
“Our children are dying like flies. There is no hospital. There is a doctor, but only when you don’t need him. They give you a glass of milk a day, but where can you keep
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it? In this heat it goes sour. It’s useless.”
“They brought us here like Moses leading the Jews into the desert, so we would die off, and some of the children would survive to build the country.”
“It would have been better if the ship that brought us here had blown up and drowned us all.”
“A supposedly democratic government, and they don’t let anyone leave the country.”
“If they opened the gates of the country, they would see how many of us would stay here to starve.”
“Good Goyim would treat us better. They are evil! Evil!”
“Not a word of comfort, only empty talk from the officials, and starvation!”
A young man jumped up angrily:
“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! You are telling lies! You are not starving. The garbage pails are full of bread! People who throw away bread are not starving. When we were with the Russians, we would have kissed the hems of the peasants’ coats for the bread going to waste in the garbage cans here. How long have you been here? No one has been in this camp for more than six months. Hundreds of thousands of Jews have landed in Israel. The country is poor, but where are the people who have been here more than seven months? They have been taken care of. You will be taken care of, too. Imagine if fifty million people came to America. That would be the same as a quarter of a million here, a third of the population. You are not fair. You…”
“Aha. look who is on the take,” called out the man with the freckles. “Have you been paid off? Now you’re a little camp official? They do it here like they do over there in Germany. Someone complains and they shut him up by giving him a position.”
“What are you talking about?” argued the young man. “You’ve known me for years. Have I shoved my way to the front of the line? I have a number. I’m alone, left with nothing and no one. I sleep here, and I eat here. Do I live better than you do?”
“So, tell us, where is the money they sent from America? You have it good. You are young, still healthy and strong. You can live on food like this. But what have the children done wrong? Why…
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aren’t they being taught? Why isn’t anyone paying attention to them? They are the future, after all. They’re the ones who will build the nation. We ought to be given work.”
“We’re in a bad way. There is no end to our wallowing. Charity, and more charity. We don’t want to live off charity any more. We want to give to charity.”
People began pressing in from all sides. It was getting too dense and too chaotic. I backed out of the group, and went off to see the kitchen. On the way we looked in the tsrifim and in the tents. Every room and every tent was crammed over capacity. It was narrow and suffocating. They had not exaggerated. Pale children wandered all around the camp, without any boisterousness. There was no sign of any systematic interest in the children.
My daughter and I went into the kitchen. A smell of spoiled food hit us in the face, nearly taking our breath away. The floor was not clean. There were flies everywhere. Two rows of long, slightly greasy tables lined with benches stretched the length of the room. A hundred people sat at the tables. Outside the kitchen windows the immigrants waited their turn with plates in their hands.
We went up to an opening. Below was the kitchen. People were busily working in there, grouped around the large kettles. Two women were serving food to each person who had a ticket.
The ticket was handed over, and one of the women served out a couple of pieces of cooked fish, margarine, chopped cucumbers, a little cheese, and a piece of halva, along with several substantial slices of bread. In addition to the hot meal that was served onto the plates, there was bread, margarine and halva set on the ledge of the kitchen window, which was full of crumbs and leftovers. The food was served extremely quickly. The only few words that I heard from the server were, “Do you want more bread?”
A woman came with three tickets for the three members of her family. She asked them to put all the food on one plate. The server followed her request. The woman stayed standing there. She wanted a couple of more pieces of fish. Without looking at her, the server said:
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“You know, you would have to pay sixty g’rushim in the shuk (market) for a portion like this.[2]”
The woman became angry. “Are you giving me eggs? Am I asking you for Marzipan? What, are you giving me charity out of your own pocket?”
She noticed my daughter and me, turned to me and said quietly, “Oh, so you are the chairman of the secret committee from America? (By now it seems I had already become the head of a secret committee). Here, see how they are treating us.” She turned to the crowd:
“Tell him the truth. More handouts. More charity. More people treating us like beggars and bums. They portion out our food through a window, and don’t even give up forks and knives!”
“Tell them where the forks and knives that were out there went,” came a voice from the kitchen.
“You stole them! It was you!” the woman answered.
I sat down at a table. A group immediately formed around me. Again I heard the same complaints as before, along with stories of suicides, of people who snuck out of the camp and back to Europe, of broken promises, and the main complaint above all: “Why didn’t they tell us the truth? Why did they bring us here, old and sick as we are? Why couldn’t they have left us be?”
A man with a small black beard and an unusually peaceful demeanor sidled up to me and began speaking calmly:
“I hear that you are a writer, sent from America directly to us. That you came here without commissioners. So, write the truth of what I’m telling you word for word. I never expected the holocaust survivors to work or even to be capable of working. But I’m telling you, we do want to work. Those who have gotten out earn their bread honestly. But it is hard, and it’s particularly upsetting that we were fooled. We were promised the moon. We were not told the truth. We have fallen into despair. But under the circumstances…
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the situation is actually not that bad. You can see — no one, heaven forbid, is starving. And we have a roof over our heads, besides. So, what’s the problem? We’ve gotten tired of sleeping twelve to a room. We long for a touch of home, a little normality. We’re sick to death of getting our food through a window and eating all together at bare, uncovered tables, without utensils. We long for a napkin.”
“But I was told,” I said, “that no one stays here for more than six months. After that, immigrants are being settled in the abandoned Arab villages or in the towns. Whoever wants to can go to a kibbutz, or in a workers’ collective.”
“That was all true up to now,” the man replied. “Now the situation is getting harder. There are fewer jobs. The immigrants are losing confidence. We don’t want to go to the Kibbutzim. We don’t want any kolkhozes [collective farms]. We’ve had enough of communal living. It’s not for us.”
“Where are they going to put us?” someone asked. “Where? And suppose they even gave me an apartment, what would I live on? I will starve to death.”
Another man broke in, and another. It became such a commotion that I could not hear anyone. I got up and began to leave. My daughter, pale as chalk, held onto my hand hard.
We were quiet the whole way home. When we got to my brother’s, I sat down on the veranda, shocked and upset. My daughter went into her room, threw herself on the bed with her face buried in her pillow, and broke down sobbing. I let her cry. To tell the truth, I was jealous of her. If only I could had a good cry. It would have been easier for me.
**
*
Friday night an old resident, a Jew who had lived in Israel for around thirty years, invited us to dinner. After we ate, friends and relatives of the old resident came to meet the American. Later in the evening, the subject of the immigrant camps came up in the conversation. I spoke bitterly about the situation of the new arrivals. To my surprise, the…
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residents were not particularly moved by the sufferings of the immigrants. On the contrary, every one of them waved it away, and said, more or less in unison:
“They don’t know how good they have it.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “How do they have it good? Deliver us from such a good.”
The eldest began:
“Their situation is wonderful, compared to what we had to endure before we managed to slog our way through to what we have now. They get food and drink and a roof over their heads. True, it’s lousy food and drink, but they are not hungry the way we were hungry. They have a tserif and a tent. We often had to sleep in the open air. The difference is just that we came here to build a country. They came here because they were attacked, and if they stay there, they will be attacked again.”
“You tell us they are given food with no utensils. Ask them what happened to the forks and knives they were given in their first days there. I could tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. But it’s not necessary. You saw what they are made of yourself. Take, as an example, the business about married and unmarried people living in one tserif, or in one tent. Yes, that is awful. But we tried all kinds of ways of putting them in families, and they wouldn’t cooperate. Try getting someone out who had already grabbed a spot in tserif, even with police. Once in, they would bring in a relative or someone they knew from the camps. They muddled things up so badly that the officials just washed their hands of it. In the new camps, we are going to try to set it up differently.
“As for the children… We have terrible problems with this. You know that they won’t let their children out of their sight? Once, several children got sick with measles. So, they had to be taken to the hospital. There was practically a riot. We prevented a panic only by letting the mothers sleep in the hospital. But you know the camp is right next to the city. A doctor can be called when he’s needed, and in fact, they do.”
“We promised them happiness? Yes, maybe we fooled them a little. We did it for two reasons: They had to leave the camps where they were, and we needed them here. We needed to settle the…
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abandoned villages and towns. We have to occupy the abandoned land. The Negev must become Jewish. If not… I won’t even speak of it. They did not understand that they cannot stay in Germany even if the [DP] camps there are not so bad now. We see a little farther. The don’t understand, but only see what it’s like now. So, we fooled them a little. We did not tell them about all the difficulties they would have here. We are not disappointed in them. We knew we would have ups and downs with them. But in the end, they will adjust and settle in. OK, some will fall by the way. No one gets a country handed to them on a silver platter, said Ben-Gurion.
“But in order for you to have a complete picture of the immigration problem, it would be worthwhile for you to visit an abandoned village that has been settled by the new immigrants. There you will hear a completely different tune.”
Saturday I went off to visit “Khirbet Azzun”, an Arab village near Ra’anana that the Jews had settled with immigrants. The resident from Ra’anana came along with me.
As soon as we left Ra’anana, he waved his hand and pointed to the four sides of a field.
“All this was Arab ground. Jews who passed through could never be sure of their lives. They say that the Arab people would have wanted to live with us in peace if the effendis and the English had not stirred them up. I do not know if that’s true. A Jew has never been secure in Arab territory. In general Jews could not trust the Arabs. They might seem to be good friends and neighbors, but you could never be certain that he would not stick a knife in your back (this formula I heard everywhere and from everyone in Israel). This little piece of land where we are walking belonged to a rich Arab. He was an anti-Semite, a bad one. The Keren Kayamet [Jewish National Fund] wanted to pay him ten times what the land was worth. But he would not sell to Jews. Now his great orchard is abandoned and dried up, his fine house is locked, the fields withered. He ran away and is sitting somewhere in Damascus or Beirut, holding onto his keys. Millions of dunams[3] of land like this were redeemed without need of the blue Tzedakah boxes.
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“The village “Khirbet Azzun” was a poor village. You will see the houses that remain are not worth much. The rest had to be torn down. They were not good for anything and streets needed to be paved. An Arab village does not have any streets. Today you will see a fountain that the English made for them. To hell with both of them. We will pipe water here from Ra’anana. There is another decorated fountain like this right near Ra’anana. We will modernize it and integrate it into our water system. People won’t have to agonize over a pail of water.”
A half-built house was springing up in the middle of a field and a man was there putting on the roof. I was surprised. “On Shabbes?” My resident shrugged his shoulders: “Let that be his worst sin. He is a demobilized soldier. All week he works on the water system with me. In the evenings, he is building himself a house. Saturday is a free day for him, so he grabs the opportunity.”
We walked on and on. We sank up to our ankles in sand. The resident’s mouth never stopped running.
“So, take a look at how this nation lived, how close to God they were! They lived here for hundreds of years, and never laid out a road. We’ve been in Ra’anana for a little over twenty years, and look at our k’bishim (highways)! Is it any wonder that our Sabras beat them one-two-three? It was a war between the twentieth century and the sixteenth.”
“Who planted the cactuses at the side of the path?” I asked.
“We are coming into the village now,” my companion answered, “and wherever there is an Arab village there are cactus fences. We are chopping them out. The cactus draws too much juice from the earth. We are planting cyprus, boxwood, or some other geder-chai, living fence. And here is the village.
We walked up onto a hill where there was a boarded-up well. A short distance from the well were scattered stones from the ruins. We arrived at a patch of cleared ground. There was a very fine chicken coop with a chicken and a rooster, closed in a
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cage. The rooster was speckled, with a red head, the chicken completely white. A bright white egg shone out from the side of the cage. Two goats were tied to a pole that had been hammered into the ground. A man stood next to the chicken cage and looked at the egg. We stopped and asked him, “Is it yours?”
“Yes, mine,” he answered. “You see, they gave us sixty pounds (about one hundred and eighty dollars) when they settled us on the land. I bought the coop, the chicken, the rooster, and the two goats. We have six pounds left. This is the first egg.”
“And the goats give milk?”
“A kilo and a half.”
“And you can get by on that?”
“Well, I’m working on the road crew. But the yard has to be leveled, and my little house is a sieve. I have to renovate it before the rains let loose. I’m up to my ears with work to do. I don’t know where to start. So I stand here looking at my first egg. It’s Shabbes after all.”
We went down the hill. A man had wound wire around tall poles to fence off his place. We went up another little hill. Here there were several houses, right next to one another, freshly-plastered and with new windows. A beautiful little boy lay in a homemade cradle, playing with his rosy little feet. An old woman welcomed us:
“You came to have a look at our palace? There’s nothing to look at.”
The old resident answered her:
“I’ve brought a guest here. He’s an American. He wanted to see how Jews have settled in an abandoned Arab village.”
A young woman in her twenties came out of the house and, following her, a tall, blond young man, as handsome as a movie actor. Happily, the woman said:
“Came to look at us? First just take a look at our treasure. You know, he was born here, in Israel. He is a little Sabra. He will not suffer the way we suffered. He is home in Yidn-Land, the Land of Jews.
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The yard was cleared of stones. In the middle of the yard stood one small sapling. “Did you plant the little tree?” I asked.
“No,” the young man answered. “When I was clearing the ground, I found a bent little tree under a stone. So, I straightened it out, dug around it, watered it, and look at it now. It is shooting up to the sky.”
His wife turned to us. “Come, I’ll show you our kitchen first. It’s a small room, but that’s because it’s only for two. You cannot imagine the joy of having half a kitchen to myself.”
We went in to take a look, but only one of us could fit at a time. Four empty walls, a couple of shelves, a dirt floor, and a few boxes. On two of the boxes there were little kerosene cookers. Suddenly, the young housewife laughed. I looked at her. She understood my astonishment and said to me:
“You see, I just remembered how my mother used to show off her kitchen floor, in Iasi [Rumania]. The floor was waxed. When neighbors used to come visit my mother, she would show off her kitchen. After they left, the servant would have to re-polish the floor again, because the neighbors had left heel marks. If Momma could see my kitchen now, she would probably burst into tears.”
Next she led us into her living area. It was one room, practically without windows, but the wall was decorated with a rug. There was also small piece of rug on the floor next to the bed. The floor was bare earth, but clean. A large wedding photograph hung on the wall.
“This is our Garden of Eden,” the young woman kept saying. “If I want to, I can play with my baby on the floor. If I want to, I can lie down to sleep. A room for me, my husband, and my child. No one else pokes their nose in here unless I let them in. It’s mine! After the camps, this is a paradise!”
The old resident turned to the group. “People, take photos of the wreckage. Five years from now, there will be beautiful houses here, and trees will be planted around the houses…
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… Children will be running around playing. There will be big gardens with flowers next to every house. You will do it faster than we did in Ra’anana. We did not have a Jewish government. We did not have land. We had to pay for every square meter of earth. You are in a better situation than we were. There’s a Jewish government. You have someone to take care of you. And there is earth, provided you work it. After the victory, there’s enough land.
The old woman broke in:
“Great caretakers! Meanwhile, we haven’t had water for three full days. We have to schlepp water with cans. And when they bring water with a truck, they measure it out to us as if it was wine.”
“It’s ok, don’t worry,” said the resident. There will be water. We are working on a new well. Soon, a week from now, there will be enough for you to shower three times a day.”
“If you’re such a water wizard,” said the old woman, “see to it that there’s enough water to wash the baby’s diapers.”
The young woman sighed. “She’s partly right.”
The young man waved his hand and turned to us:
“Only partly right? My wife is so happy that she is done with the camps and has a little corner to herself, that it seems she can be happy with nothing. I only have two days of work a week. In the meantime, we have not been given any land and, besides, I’ve never been a peasant in my life. It’s three kilometers from here into the city. It’s a sandy road. It’s hard to get there to go shopping. We have to bury the baby’s milk bottle in the ground to keep it cool. There’s nothing to do here except eat and sleep. We live like cattle. The houses we’ve been given are precarious. What will happen when the rains come?”
“It’s not a life for Jews,” pitched in the old woman. “The young she-goat has her husband and baby, so she is content.”
The young woman was defiant:
“Totally better than in the camps, where we had to take charity. And if I want to cry about everything we’ve gone through, I can cry by myself inside my palace, and no one has to see or hear it.”
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She grabbed the child and went inside. The old woman sighed:
“Bless her heart, she is the only one still singing. But she has always been a Zionist.”
We turned back towards Ra’anana. My resident delivered his argument, but now in Hebrew.
“Now you see the other side of the coin. Still not as nice as you might like, but not so terrible after all. They are on their way to becoming residents. We have taken a country, and we have to settle it. If not, the enemy will return. We have to create a new people, and build up a desolate land. We did not want to take the land by force, but you cannot always get what you want. We, the inhabitants, shed our blood to get this land. They, the immigrants, are shedding tears to settle it. As it is written: In blood and fire Judah fell, and in blood and fire will it be established. To that you can add, and with tears, too.
(click to continue with Chapter 5)
[1] The author explicitly prefers the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew, and Yiddish also shares this word for the Sabbath. Neither of the two usual English ways of spelling it, Shabbat or Shabbos, sounds like the Yiddish. The standard Yivo transliteration, Shabes, might be read by English readers as having one syllable. So, I use the spelling Shabbes throughout, though neither standard convention nor academic usage agrees.
[2] About a dollar eighty [Author’s clarification].
[3] [translator’s note]. A dunam is about a quarter of an acre.
The Nation State and the Promised Land 