Yigal Allon, Native Son. Anita Shapira
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in contrast, symbolized the new world: the company of young people, a hazardous location, a tractor instead of a plow, creating something from scratch. More than an explicit worldview, it was a proclamation of belonging to a dynamic current, to the Yishuv’s creative forces at the time.
There was also the question of his future relations with Ada. Ada had finished the Re’ali School and was also considering her next move, whether to go to a university and study literature or join Allon on a kibbutz. Two things were clear: she would not go to Mes’ha and he would not pursue further studies. But going to a kibbutz together was an option. In the end, Ada chose to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was the termination of their four-year relationship.48
The decision to leave Mes’ha and the Paicovich farm was very difficult for Allon—comparable, perhaps, to the decision of Diaspora youngsters to quit home and country and make aliyah to the land of Israel. It spelled rupture with a wealth of loyalties: childhood landscapes, the land and the farm, the father who nursed hopes and had expectations of him. Like pioneering aliyah, it was a new start and complete break, clean, clear-cut, life defining. It molded his life, but also his father’s—for there was no one left to shoulder the burden of the farm now, and Paicovich was seventy. The choice was between Allon’s life and his father’s. At that moment of hard—even cruel—truth, the nineteen-year-old Allon found the strength to opt for the future.
The meeting at which he announced his decision to his father must have been one of his greatest trials. According to Allon, Paicovich told him that he had the right to do as he saw fit—even if he had not consulted his elder. But by saying that he, Paicovich, would go on living at Mes’ha, the lonely old man saddled Allon with a heavy sense of responsibility for his father’s fate.49 Emotional blackmail comes in many forms and is not necessarily direct. Paicovich may have hoped that Allon’s decision was not final, that he would think better of it and return to Kefar Tavor.
A chain of events now conspired to turn Allon’s intent into fact. Paicovich took sick and Allon had to hospitalize him in Haifa, near the home of his daughter, Deborah, and her family. Allon meanwhile stayed on at Mes’ha, having promised his father that he would not go to a kibbutz until the summer farm work was done. After the reaping, threshing, and storing of grain, he was faced with a dilemma: his father was in a hospital in Haifa, where the family wanted him to stay, with or near his daughter or one of his sons. Allon was all alone on the farm and the farm was a yoke around his neck: a homestead with livestock and poultry could not be left for a single day. It was one thing to talk about leaving, another to actually do so when there was no one else to take over. That summer, lonely and in a ramshackle house, he was more conscious than ever of the noose his father had placed on him. He was suffocating. In this mood, he decided that if he wished to live, he had no choice but to dismantle the farm and sell off the inventory. Only a draconian measure could free him of his native village. Only thus could he be the master of his fate.
It was a daunting decision, likely fueled by desperation and the typical egoism of the young. His mind made up, he acted quickly, feverishly. Livestock, poultry, wheat—everything was sold off. Every cow he let go added to his sense of freedom. In the end he was left with a pair of mules, a year’s feed of barley for them, and a wagon. He harnessed the mules to the wagon, loaded the feed, and set out, a man alone on the perilous roads of Eretz Israel in the summer of 1937.
He headed for Netanya and his brother, Zvi. He had done his calculations. He figured out that if Zvi were to hire out the wagon and mules for work in Pardes Hannah, the earnings would allow Reuven Paicovich to live comfortably. After spending the night at Kefar Hasidim, Allon and his wagon arrived in Haifa in the morning. He sped to the eastern train station where his brother Eliav worked, only to be reprimanded: how had he taken it in his head to make the dangerous trip from Kefar Tavor to Haifa?! But this was nothing compared with Eliav’s fury when he heard what Allon had done. Beside himself, he ran to get Moshe, the eldest brother and his superior on the railway. Allon now felt the wrath of both brothers. How dared he, without consulting anyone, eradicate the toil of decades at a single stroke? Worse still, Reuven had to hear of it while hospitalized. Allon chose to let his brothers inform their father. He took the mule wagon and continued along the coastline from one brother to another, from Mordekhai in Binyamina to Zvi in Netanya, being met everywhere with shock and rage. The further he journeyed, the more the magnitude of what he had done sank in. He was terrified by the thought of the inevitable encounter with his father. But Paicovich’s reaction was surprisingly mild. After hearing what Allon had done, he was silent for a moment. Then, he turned to his sons: “And you let him travel alone in these times?”50 By the time Allon came to visit, Paicovich had no scolding or preaching for him. Whatever anger he may have felt succumbed to relief that the boy was unharmed, despite his rashness.51
Neither his brothers’ fury nor fear of his father’s reaction made him regret the deed: by selling the farm he had purchased his freedom, and nothing equaled his sense of liberation. He dispensed with self-reckoning; it had been a campaign for his own self opposite his father’s great shadow. And, as in every campaign containing an Oedipal component, Allon emerged with a sense of victory mingled with guilt. In time, the guilt produced Bet Avi. The triumph produced Yigal Allon.
Chapter 3
Ginossar
Allon’s posthumous papers contained a draft for the opening of an autobiography beginning with his move to Ginossar: “The heavy truck pulled up at a … junction, one of the roads leading to the settlement of Migdal. The genial driver from Kibbutz Kefar Giladi parted from me with a warmth underlined by wishes for full integration into the kibbutz. … I hefted my heavy knapsack onto my back and crossed the road on foot towards the young kibbutz. I crossed the Rubicon, and did not look back.”1
Yigal’s crossing of the Rubicon meant forsaking his father’s world for that of his young friends. The generation gap deepens in times of revolution and rapid change. Even if parents belonged to Eretz Israel’s founding generation of brave, hardy revolutionaries, so great were the differences between them and their children that communication became forced and superficial. Things were worse still in the case of most of the parents, who had only recently disembarked on Jaffa’s shores. Their understanding of what was going on in the country was limited, their lives passing in a kind of partial fog of bewilderment and incomprehension.
It is little wonder, then, that the youth bred in Jewish Palestine regarded themselves as a tribe apart from their parents and adults in general. Their primary frame of reference was the peer group. It, in every sphere, determined the behavioral norms, from articles of fashion to styles of speech, from the approach toward school to the attitude toward parents. The power it exerted on its members—virtually tyrannical—was seen as an expression of their release from adult authority, of an exodus from bondage to freedom. The peer group, or hevreh as it was called, was a company of willing partners to a particular path, a specific lifestyle.
“Good” hevreh went to live on a kibbutz. Going to a kibbutz entailed identifying with a youth group. Such was the force of the perceived generational differentiation that it lent the sense of togetherness an emotional bond reserved in other societies for tribe or family: here, the hevreh were the tribe. Those who didn’t “belong” felt like outsiders, out of place, ostracized.
The fact that Yigal went to a kibbutz was above all a mark of belonging to the hevreh. Graduates of the Kadoorie school had no doubt that joining a kibbutz was the right thing to do. Choosing Ginossar was accidental. Kadoorie had a visit from Yehoshua Rabinowitz (Baharav), a member of the Ha-Noar Ha-Oved (HNHO) kevutzah (group)2 at Migdal. He spoke to the graduates about the hardships of life at Migdal in the Ginossar Valley, about the attempts to settle on the PICA lands along the Sea of Galilee at the mouth of Wadi Amud—an area that teemed with lawless gangs and where no Jewish plowman had ever set foot. He painted a picture fraught with tension and hazard: shortly before his visit, armed bands had fallen upon members working in Migdal’s orchards and wounded one of them. Knowing his audience, he overstated the perils: night after night, there were gunshots, he said. Their imagination lit, Kadoorie’s hevreh decided to go to Migdal.3