loved, and even though his parents had always told him, “They’re the enemy!” it was with them that he felt most comfortable.
Once a fortnight he wrote three letters. One to his parents, the second to the daughter of the neighbors in the moshava where he was born and raised, a girl named Ruth Blum, and the third to his schoolmate Nahum. Writing was hard for him, and the length of his letters was determined by the paper he wrote on: long if he found a full sheet and short if a small slip. He would tell them where he was and what he was doing, and to Ruth Blum he added a word or two of affection or longing, and signed all his letters with same four words: “I am Ze’ev. Shalom.”
For a while he worked in Zichron Yaakov, where he heard about a plan to establish a new moshava. He informed his parents and a few friends, among them Nahum Natan. They got organized, borrowed money, and bought land in the new place. The parcel of Ze’ev Tavori was adjacent to that of Nahum Natan, and nearby was the home of another young man, Yitzhak Maslina by name, son of a Hasidic family that had come from Russia in the mid–nineteenth century, before the First Aliyah, and settled in Tiberias. Yitzhak Maslina was already married, to a woman named Rosa, and Ze’ev had known him a long time: before his marriage to Rosa, Yitzhak had worked in her father’s store, where Ze’ev’s father would buy tools and seeds.
They planted trees and vineyards, and built houses, and in that year, 1930, the same year that three of our farmers committed suicide, Ze’ev at age twenty-three married Ruth Blum, who was then nineteen and, a few months after the wedding, displayed a pleasantly bulging belly of early pregnancy.
3
Those years have passed, those people have died, but the stories live on and reinforce one another. A few of them are told here in public, at anniversaries of our moshava’s founding, in renovated versions. A few were published in various studies and books, and a few rustle underground and suddenly peek out and wink:
We’re still here.
Or cry for help—
Let us be known
—and then disappear. So we have such stories as “Stealing the Ransom Money” and “Robbing the Jerusalem Money Changer” and “The Little City Girl Who Drowned in the Ancient Aqueduct,” which are still told in public. While the tales of “The Moshava Boy Whose Eye Was Plucked Out” and “The Moshava Boy and the Prostitute from Tiberias” are only whispered.
The story about the suicide of Nahum Natan—“The Rabbi’s Son and the Neighbor’s Wife”—is told to no one, of course, and certainly not to the general public. But when it occasionally floats to the surface in conversations among family and neighbors—each of them adding or subtracting—it becomes clear that nobody remembers the exact place or date when he killed himself or was murdered, but they argue over the type of rifle barrel in his mouth, if it was a British Enfield or a Russian Mosin-Nagant or a German Mauser, and since his bones were removed from our cemetery many years ago and there is no mark or memorial of him here, there are also those who argue over whether he was Nahum Natan or Natan Nahum, or maybe had a different name.
But all agree that he died in the autumn, on the night of the first rain of the season. This is important, because our area gets an abundance of rain. Some rainfalls are so torrential that they dig new channels in the earth, and the first rain of autumn 1930 was so strong that between its thunder and lightning and the shuttered windows, no one noticed or heard the rifle shot, except for three people: Ze’ev Tavori, who fired it; Nahum Natan, into whose mouth it was fired; and Yitzhak Maslina, whose wife, Rosa—I still remember her, Rosa Maslina, with teeth like a rabbit and legs like a gazelle—demanded that he go outside and clean the rain gutters, which he’d kept postponing despite her insistent nagging, because the rainwater had now started
Once a fortnight he wrote three letters. One to his parents, the second to the daughter of the neighbors in the moshava where he was born and raised, a girl named Ruth Blum, and the third to his schoolmate Nahum. Writing was hard for him, and the length of his letters was determined by the paper he wrote on: long if he found a full sheet and short if a small slip. He would tell them where he was and what he was doing, and to Ruth Blum he added a word or two of affection or longing, and signed all his letters with same four words: “I am Ze’ev. Shalom.”
For a while he worked in Zichron Yaakov, where he heard about a plan to establish a new moshava. He informed his parents and a few friends, among them Nahum Natan. They got organized, borrowed money, and bought land in the new place. The parcel of Ze’ev Tavori was adjacent to that of Nahum Natan, and nearby was the home of another young man, Yitzhak Maslina by name, son of a Hasidic family that had come from Russia in the mid–nineteenth century, before the First Aliyah, and settled in Tiberias. Yitzhak Maslina was already married, to a woman named Rosa, and Ze’ev had known him a long time: before his marriage to Rosa, Yitzhak had worked in her father’s store, where Ze’ev’s father would buy tools and seeds.
They planted trees and vineyards, and built houses, and in that year, 1930, the same year that three of our farmers committed suicide, Ze’ev at age twenty-three married Ruth Blum, who was then nineteen and, a few months after the wedding, displayed a pleasantly bulging belly of early pregnancy.
3
Those years have passed, those people have died, but the stories live on and reinforce one another. A few of them are told here in public, at anniversaries of our moshava’s founding, in renovated versions. A few were published in various studies and books, and a few rustle underground and suddenly peek out and wink:
We’re still here.
Or cry for help—
Let us be known
—and then disappear. So we have such stories as “Stealing the Ransom Money” and “Robbing the Jerusalem Money Changer” and “The Little City Girl Who Drowned in the Ancient Aqueduct,” which are still told in public. While the tales of “The Moshava Boy Whose Eye Was Plucked Out” and “The Moshava Boy and the Prostitute from Tiberias” are only whispered.
The story about the suicide of Nahum Natan—“The Rabbi’s Son and the Neighbor’s Wife”—is told to no one, of course, and certainly not to the general public. But when it occasionally floats to the surface in conversations among family and neighbors—each of them adding or subtracting—it becomes clear that nobody remembers the exact place or date when he killed himself or was murdered, but they argue over the type of rifle barrel in his mouth, if it was a British Enfield or a Russian Mosin-Nagant or a German Mauser, and since his bones were removed from our cemetery many years ago and there is no mark or memorial of him here, there are also those who argue over whether he was Nahum Natan or Natan Nahum, or maybe had a different name.
But all agree that he died in the autumn, on the night of the first rain of the season. This is important, because our area gets an abundance of rain. Some rainfalls are so torrential that they dig new channels in the earth, and the first rain of autumn 1930 was so strong that between its thunder and lightning and the shuttered windows, no one noticed or heard the rifle shot, except for three people: Ze’ev Tavori, who fired it; Nahum Natan, into whose mouth it was fired; and Yitzhak Maslina, whose wife, Rosa—I still remember her, Rosa Maslina, with teeth like a rabbit and legs like a gazelle—demanded that he go outside and clean the rain gutters, which he’d kept postponing despite her insistent nagging, because the rainwater had now started
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