The following is the last in a series of columns in which local community members write about Jewish books for summer reading.
This week’s column is by Leon Cohen, op-ed editor for The Chronicle.
The Los Angeles Times in 1972 called Meyer Levin (1905-1981) “the most significant American Jewish writer of his time,” and his work won the praise of the great Ernest Hemingway.
Today, his books appear to be out of print and generally forgotten.
Nevertheless, at least some of his work is still enjoyable and gripping, as I found in exploring one of his biggest works for The Chronicle’s summer reading series.
Levin, a Chicago-native, was especially celebrated for his novel “Compulsion” (1956), based on the sensational Leopold-and-Loeb murder case of the 1920s, and for the film based on the novel (1959).
Yet the majority of his works involved Jewish themes. Levin was an impassioned Zionist who apparently worked on a kibbutz in the 1920s and created one of the first novels about kibbutz life (“Yehuda,” 1931).
He was also a journalist who worked for, among other organizations, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He was one of the first correspondents to see and write about the Nazi murder camps; and he helped make a documentary film about the smuggling of survivors to pre-Israel Palestine after the war.
Among his last works were two epic novels about the founding of the state of Israel, “The Settlers” (1972) and “The Harvest” (1978).
A paperback copy of “The Settlers” (Pocket Books) had been lurking in my library for years. But despite the lavish praise quoted on the cover and inside page (“surely the ‘War and Peace’ of all the books ever written about Israel,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times), I had yet to pick up and read this 900-page tome.
I finally decided to grapple with it for this series, since it looked like just the kind of book in which one could get lost for a summer.
But it took me only a couple of weeks to get through “The Settlers.” Although far from the quality of “War and Peace,” it is an absorbing and well-told saga.
The novel tells the story of the large Chaimovitch family that in the early 1900s flees the anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia to settle in Palestine when it was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It presents their adventures through the end of World War I and the coming of the British Mandate.
The members of this clan are much more believable human beings than the near super-heroes of Leon Uris’ novel “Exodus,” which covers the same subject.
No ‘Zionist archetypes’
Patriarch Yankel is an unsuccessful small trader who decides to become a farmer in Eretz Yisrael. He is religious and short-tempered, and he has a hard time with the newfangled ways of his children.
His wife Feigel is meek and modest, yet has a tough streak necessary to deal with her husband, and to bear — and sometimes lose — children in that dangerous place and time.
Of their many children, three are the primary carriers of the narrative.
Oldest daughter Leah is the kind of girl and woman who used to be called “strapping” — big, strong, able to plough and harvest like a man; yet also capable of graceful dancing and passionate love.
Oldest son Reuven is an ascetic idealist with an instinct for agronomy. He becomes a gardener to a pasha (high ranking Ottoman official) in Damascus for most of World War I, and a valuable inside man for the Yishuv (the pre-Israel Jewish community in Palestine).
Second oldest son Gidon is a dedicated farmer and a seemingly natural soldier. The Turks deport him, but he joins the British army and sees vividly described action in the Gallipoli debacle and in the conquest of Palestine.
As often is the way with historical novels, fictional characters encounter real ones in “The Settlers”, but Levin makes it believable and natural that various Chaimoviches would meet Joseph Trumpeldor, A. D. Gordon, Vladimir Jabotinsky and others.
There are a few spots, however, where Levin falls into the trap of giving the reader little “news bulletins” that seem less natural.
For example, Gidon has an Arab friend who after the war happens to mention to Gidon that he has acquired a copy of the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
While the Arab friend says he thinks it is nonsense, he tells Gidon that his relative, Haj Amin al-Husseini, does believe it. This constitutes a clumsy foreshadowing of how al-Husseini, an historical person, would become the Mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi ally.
The narrative is also somewhat awkward in never giving any dates. I have some knowledge of the history of this period, but I sometimes got confused about what was occurring when.
And some people may find the book’s sexual frankness off-putting and may wonder whether at least some of it is really necessary; others may find this to be an important way that Levin makes his characters real people instead of Zionist archetypes.
But overall, Levin gives the reader a very fine sense of how these dedicated pioneers lived, yearned, and struggled against disease, locusts, Arab bandits, Turkish and British officials — and even against each other — to create the foundation of what would become Israel.
“The Settlers” makes an excellent summer read, and it left me wondering what would happen next to the Chaimoviches.
Unfortunately, while copies of “The Settlers” seem readily available in the Milwaukee Public Library system, in used book stores and online, copies of the sequel, “The Harvest,” seem to be more scarce. Maybe next summer.
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