Leivick in Eretz Yisroel 1937, Part 6

Hard-working Jewish Hands Tear Bits from the Shore to Build a Port in Tel Aviv

Back to Part Five.

Hard-working Jewish Hands Tear Bits from the Shore to Build a Port in Tel Aviv

— One must see with their own eyes to feel the pride of labour — Meal with the workers — Backs and shoulders under the burning sun — The struggle against the waves and with the deep sands of the earth — Jews build a port. —

Jews build a port in Tel Aviv.¹

Everyone knows what a port means to a city. What a port means for Tel Aviv — this is more than we can imagine. This is not only a port for a city, this is: Jews in Eretz Yisroel welcoming the sea, girding their loins to become seamen, sailors, fisherman, off-loaders and on-loaders. Ships from the world might be able to come direct to Tel Aviv, ships from Eretz Yisroel might equally, from Tel Aviv, be able to go into the wider world.

Building a port at the coast of Tel Aviv — this elicited a a great sensation amongst the Jews of the world. But still greater was the sensation in Eretz Yisroel itself, and more still — in Tel Aviv itself.

Not long begun, around half a year ago, started small, with restrained daring, with obscured, and now — arisen energy, untrammelled scope, which races past all calculations.

Over a thousand Jewish labourers, beneath the hot, burning sun, tear bits from the shore of the sea not far from Tel Aviv, tearing sand from the sea’s depths, driving the sea from the shore, calling the sea back to the shore, installing walls, sharp, cutting walls, in the sea-distance, building depots for merchandise, building fishing boats, large bridges, small bridges, and boxcars.

A sandy white area, transformed in storming life, into a great work of creation.

One must see with their own eyes in order to appreciate the significance thereof and feel the pride in the work. And one cannot and one must not neglect the feeling: Pride in Jewish labour.

The Jewish young man and Jewish young woman in the kibbutzes, and in all other labour undertakings, live to show that he, or she, can work, wants to work, lives to make of work a cult, a sublime thing — a contest with the desolate, burning earth, with the flaming winds, with the undulating sand.

A Jewish country — a country of work.

When one speaks about the idea of Conquest of Labour² in its original character, in its relation to making of Jewish people labourers, creators of their own destiny, and rebuilders and re-tillers of their own soil, that is to say, that a man should not cast his construction onto foreign hands or hired, cheap hands — the idea of Conquest of Labour needs to be welcomed.

And so must one see and accept it, because only this needs to be the intent of Conquest of Labour.

And of course certainly, if the idea of conquering the work becomes transformed into chauvinistic miserliness, into excluding or not allowing an outsider — into this category fall the Arabs — to work — certainly such crippling of the idea must be fought, and it must be fought by the Jewish workers themselves.

Those, though, who see in the idea of Conquest of Labour only terrible, chauvinistic miserliness, commit a great sin against the Jewish working-man in Eretz Yisroel. It is simply a sad slander against the passionate thirst of the Jewish people for work; a slander against their pure desire to follow the path of toil and to create positives and possibilities for the newly arrived, who bear their arms outstretched for work and building.

I am far from the faux-sentimental ditty that work makes life sweet. I know from my own experience that physical labour is nothing sweet. It is oftentimes entirely bitter. It destroys and saps the strength; and when one then becomes exploited at work — there can be no talk at all of sweetness. This little song is abused by idlers and exploiters, although in essence it comes from the truth, an inner song, which is indeed present in work — in work, which is in creativity of the mind, the joy of energy.

I am also well acquainted with the joyous feeling of the new Jewish people who wish to be labourers. An entire revolution plays out in a a person then. We have experienced it here in America when we arrived in the epoch of immigration from the old home not-at-all-labourers, and here in America became labourers, strove to become workers. I remember my own impatience, arriving in America, to introduce myself into the ranks of the labourers. The drudgery should be all the greater. Working in sweat. Carrying burdens and ladders and heavy tools on oneself; building, whitewashing walls, papering walls — until exhausted working.

Work — an ideal; work — a path to wholeness, to fulfilment.

If it is so here in America — we can imagine how great the desire for work is in those who come to Eretz Yisroel with a feeling and longing to build a home for the nation, a historical home, to built with their own hands their own history.

Work — the elevation of an entire nation.

In that process there is certainly not excluded the conflict between labor and capital. Capital is capital everywhere, and the worker in Eretz Yisroel is not exempt from the suffering of the worker.

Sometimes it can be that a worker, considering his labour not only as a social function, but as a nationalistic one, suffers yet more, feels himself yet more offended and insulted if he becomes exploited.

Leaving all that aside, the industrial labourer in Eretz Yisroel — and the pioneering worker on the kibbutz, certainly, certainly — carries his head very high and proud. He is conscious and responsible and he is thirsty for knowledge and culture. And when he is unemployed, his sorrow is deep, double: He suffers both for himself and from the fact that it is unemployment in Eretz Yisroel.

The idea of and pride in work is to the Israeli worker had achieved a great height. Youth — is work and work — youth. And Eretz Yisroel is generally built of youth.

The waves of the sea storm, but the young arms of thousands of workers storm harder still and engulf the waves. They build a bridle for them — they subjugate the sea.

Nearby meanders the Yarkon River, winding thin and narrow into the sea. And on the other side of the Yarkon rises up the glorious new electric station that Ruthenberg builds.³

Port and electric stations. One not far from the other, for the arm to reach. In the electric station also work about about eight hundred labourers. It seems around two thousand Jewish workers fence the sea and set up electrical generators.

The day is hot. In the wind, one feels an announcement of the khamsin, of burning, boiling winds.

We drive to the port. Dov Hoz,⁴ the vice-mayor of Tel Aviv, Zerubavel, Yoskowitz and I. We drive in an automobile from the City Council. The vice-mayor of Tel Aviv, a labour-representative, is very proud of Tel Aviv and the Tel Aviv workforce. He is good-humoured and lively in his disposition, he is folksy and comradely, he recounts several incidents and jokes, both from his own life as well as the life of Tel Aviv. He speaks about Tel Aviv the way one speaks about their own child. Now the child is a year old, it can just barely speak, move itself, it stands up and falls and strikes itself and screams, and now grasps something in its hand and doesn’t know what to do with it and hurls it and breaks it to pieces — and now, suddenly, see: The child is standing, with head in the rafters, suddenly grown…

Now Tel Aviv is a small village, a pair of little streets in the middle of a sandy wilderness, and now see — Tel Aviv a metropolis, a great city. And now, see, as we establish a foundation for the continuation of Tel Aviv — we build parks, lay out new streets, the second part of Tel Aviv, which will stretch far indeed. Tel Aviv will be a world capital.

Vice-mayor Dov Hoz’s eyes shine and he laughs suddenly, with a loud laughter, like someone who has recalled a very curious memory.

— You know, he says, I was one of those youths who, twenty-five years ago, held Dr. Ch. Zhitlowsky⁵ under arrest in a house and did not allow him to go hold a lecture in Yiddish. We surrounded the house and wouldn’t let him leave, unless he would give a promise that he wouldn’t speak Yiddish. Well, he did a bit.

— Even now, there are probably still those amongst you who yearn for such behaviour, — I say, — those who would want for me to be forbidden to hold readings in Yiddish.

— Oh, today it’s different — Dov Hoz said with certainty. — I’m telling you youthful sins. Today such youth can no longer be ‘heroes.’ Different times. Today we fight such ‘heroism.’

I was satisfied to hear from a labour-representative, the vice-mayor of Tel Aviv, such talk. I knew, however, that there were still, unfortunately, rather enough opponents of Yiddish in Tel Aviv, and young people who can allow themselves to be exploited by demagogues are still also, unfortunately, here. But one this was already clear for me anyway: the settlement has grown culturally, nationalist hooliganism is condemned in most of the country, the influence of work and of socialist thought is strong and needs become yet stronger; and only in socialist thought lies the guarantee against such forms of oppression and debauchery.

Arriving at the place, where the harbour is built, seeing for myself the great revealing picture, there went through my thought like a flash:

Sun — sea — work — socialism — Jewish labourer.

Socialism is still a dream, socialism one must first create. One must. One must and one will. Sun burns over young shoulders, flaming over heads, and arms, bare brown arms, hammers, saws, carrying and hauling. And sand undulates beneath the step and the wind chases it into the sea, and large, powerful cranes — American style — pump and dig and carry from one place to another. Monstrous steel mouths lower on chains into the depths of the water, digging themselves into the sedimentary sand, take a mouthful, lift back up packed, turn in another direction and open wide and spit out a mountain of sand.

And the sea allows them to do what they will. It is angry, but it allows it. It has a choice. It deals a blow with a drove of waves, and springs back. The waves scatter in spattering foam and die. And also so the burning sand — it allows one to do all that they will and is not even angry. It isn’t like the sea. On the contrary, it’s good-humoured, soft and submissively fluid. It slips beneath the step, is warmly friendly, from moment to moment it becomes hot and hotter.

And now look: Shipbuilding. Curving ship skeletons of bent wood. Pot-bellied skeletons. Cunningly turned wood. It smells fresh, resinous. Shipbuilding to astonish one: Look, where have they learned it, youth from Poland, from Romania, from Kovno? In Slobodka, in the Chofetz Chayim Yeshiva, they’ve learned to bend planks and make boats from them?

Quick hands become quicker still, fervent eyes become yet more fervent, and shoulders flinch still more when they see us on the shore amongst them. All the hands, how they would lift and all the mouths, how they would call out:

Our sea. Our sea. Our sea. Our sun. Our sand. — Oh, how we burn! Oh, how we toil! Oh, how our hearts rend sometimes, and how the knees sometimes bend and fall to the sand. They wish to lie down. They wish to rest. Sorrow sometimes rattles the teeth. Hard drudgery penetrates our limbs…but our sea, our sea! What should we do with our sea and with our bodies? We want to rebuild here — we want to go away to a another place and build again. We want to bare our arms and our bodies under the naked sun.

— Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. Shalom…

Sea and — electricity. Sand and — dynamo engines. On the other side of the Yarkon — the new Reading station. The same flaming sun and the same arms and backs and shoulders. Bending, lifting, moving from east to west, from north to south. Steel columns, mysterious apparatuses, wrenches and electrical fittings. Savagery of sparks and stillness of secrets…

— Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. Shalom.

— Electricity, electricity. Electricity. Electricity…

— Say something for us. Give us a greeting from America. And first of all — be welcome with us. Come eat with us in the big meal tent. Twelve o’clock signal. Come with us, come with us, come with us…

Of course I’ll go with you. Of course we’ll eat together and sit together at the big, wide tables. Of course we will say something, recount. A greeting? — Certainly a greeting. A great greeting. Dole out the bread, set out the plates. A shame, only, that you — are in work-clothes and I — a necktie.

Perhaps take off the necktie? And perhaps not? Work-clothes aren’t foreign to my body. White overalls, smeared in paint and in clay — my overalls. Well — so what should the lips say? Where are the words? Where are they? Take an electrical spark and pass it over all the lips. Take the huge, huge hammer and let it down upon the chosen word and split it, like one splits an atom…

Yes, brothers! Split the word as one splits an atom…

We sit at a table with hundreds of workers who build the port and the new electric station. And hundreds stand crowded in the barrack and outside. We try the modest feast of work and midday-rest.

Eat. Eat. Eat. Look one another in the face — the harbour will receive guests, the wires will light lamps.

The feast is ended. The workers flare up again.

My eyes cannot be torn from the extraordinary image:

A caravan of camels walks over the Yarkon river, there and back. The camels help build the port, they carry on their humps heaped burdens — there and back, there and back, around ten camels, one behind the other, tied together with rope. A drawn-out caravan. The tall humps rise, the long, obedient necks stretch out forward, quietly patient, and legs bend slowly, placidly, rhythmically, and the wide hoofs tread in sand and in water — measured, majestic step.

So much pathos and so much fatalistic destiny is there in the tread of a camel caravan. Such proud obedience and such certainty, it recalls something eternal.

In the bend of their knee, so much simplicity and so much stillness; in the swaying of their hump — so much goodness and duty; in stretching out of their neck — so much prayer-like pleading, so much melancholy.

Thousands of pairs of hands wrestle with the waves of the sea and with the deep sands of the earth. Giant lifting machines roar, growl, turn on all sides, conscious of their modern electrical might and — the caravan camel treads with the same stride as three thousand years ago. It isn’t impressed, it doesn’t turn its neck to take a look to the side. It walks patiently, measuredly, in calm certainty, and the loaded hump sways, sways.

H. Leivick, Tog, 22 December, 1937

On to Part 7.

Interior of the finished Reading Power Station, borrowed from Wikipedia.

1. Tel Aviv Port only partially operated post-1948 and closed in 1965.

2. Kibush haAvoda — Zionist policy of preferential hiring of Jewish labour.

3. The Reading Power Station on the Yarkon.

4. Labour Zionist leader. It greatly amuses me that Leyvik House is on Dov Hoz Street.

5. Chaim Zhitlowsky, Socialist, philosopher and writer.