The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land. Patrick Bishop
were treated in the Jewish hospital on the city’s main thoroughfare and the dead buried in a large cemetery on the edge of town, near the Czarna Hańcza river.
There was little friction between Jew and Gentile, though neither community mixed outside of business. ‘It can be said [wrote Shmuel Abramsky] that relations between Jews and Christians were generally tolerable from the founding of [Suwalki] until World War 1. There was no continuous tradition of fanatic anti-semitism. In fact there were no conflicts of interests between Jews and non-Jews.’
Zionism had taken root early in Suwalki. In 1881 a prominent local businessman and Talmudic scholar, Eliezer Mordechai Altschuler, set up the first Zionist foundation, Yissud Hama’ala, to raise funds for a colony in the Promised Land. The following year he set off on an exploratory mission. He left behind a land of woods and water on which the industrial age was rapidly encroaching and landed in a parched, backward world, sunk in medieval squalor. The collision with reality failed to a dent Altschuler’s enthusiasm – one of the essentials of Zionist belief was a contempt for mere facts. He wrote home that, on the journey from the coast to Jerusalem, ‘I descended from my wagon many times and fell to the ground and embraced it, and kissed the stones with burning lips.’6 Eventually, a colony was established and Suwalki was linked to the Promised Land.
It was in this society, invigorated by prosperity and the stimulus of new ideas, that Avraham Stern passed his early childhood. His father Mordechai’s days were spent in his surgery on the ground floor. Liza went to and from the hospital a few blocks away, where she oversaw the births of most of the city’s Jewish babies. According to her grandson Yair Stern, she ‘was the powerful force in the family’.7 Avraham was known as ‘Mema’, a nickname he used in letters to those closest to him for the rest of his life. In 1910 a brother, David, was born. Their upbringing seems to have been a stable and contented one and David’s daughter, Amira, remembered her father talking fondly of the early days in Suwalki.8
In August 1914 came the first tremors of the earthquake that would destroy old Europe. By the following June, Suwalki was in German hands. When the Germans arrived, Mordechai was in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg, either receiving medical treatment or seeking supplies for his practice according to different accounts. He returned home to an empty house. Liza had fled with Avraham and David across the Lithuanian border to her father’s home in Vilkomir. Mordechai was arrested and sent to a detention camp.
The flight brought to an end the longest period of stability that Stern would ever know. For the next six years he was a refugee, reliant on the charity of a succession of relations or, after his mother decided to return to Suwalki, more or less having to fend for himself. He spent some of his exile with an uncle in Petrograd, which was still in a state of revolutionary ferment. Twelve-year-old Avraham worked for the local student cooperative in return for food. He made extra money selling cigarettes. He enrolled at a school and learned to play the piano. He also joined the Pioneers, the Communist Party’s version of the Boy Scouts.
He lived beyond the control of adults, hanging out with young revolutionaries and visiting the Mariinsky and Alexandrinsky theatres. When his parents wrote demanding his return, he played for time, asking to be allowed to finish the school year. In the summer of 1921 he could stall no longer and made his own way home. Without money or documents he was reduced to hopping freight trains, and arrived in Poland illegally, smuggled over the border in a sack on the back of a farmer.
He was barely out of childhood yet he had already had great adventures and witnessed historic events. At first family life was strange and restricting. Father, mother and son found it difficult to reconnect. According to Stern’s biographer, Ada Amichal-Yevin, Mordechai Stern was a distant figure who sat alone reading and ‘never … found a path to the heart of Avraham’.9 Avraham Stern’s son, Yair, formed the impression from conversations with Liza that he was ‘not a father who [cared] a lot about his children’.10 Liza, too, seems to have been too preoccupied with work and a busy social life to engage very closely with her son.
Avraham went to the Jewish Gymnasium on Kościuszko Street just down the road from his home. He had to learn Polish anew, but he had a gift for languages and was soon impressing his classmates with his eloquence. ‘He had his own way of building sentences,’ one of them remembered. ‘He had a captivating way of speaking.’
Avraham Stern stood out from the start. He was a show-off with a compulsion to perform. He organized amateur theatricals and took the best parts. In 1925 he played the title role in his own production of King Lear. He thrilled the Gentile girls at the Polish high school with a poetry reading, and managed to conduct a protracted flirtation with three of them, wooing them with examples of his own poetry. He preferred the company of girls to playing football or swimming in the Czarna Hańcza river with his schoolmates. He seems to have set out to be special. According to his biographer, ‘although he did not behave towards his friends arrogantly, they felt a distance – a certain secret and unexplained space between him and them’. This was seen in the way he dressed – sharply, as observed by the beady-eyed headmistress of the Polish girls’ school who noted disapprovingly the ring that flashed on the young Jew’s finger as he read verses to her impressionable Christian charges. It also showed in the way he froze out anyone who displeased him, behaving as if they did not exist.
In one respect, though, Stern conformed with his contemporaries. Suwalki was a Zionist town. The chaos that rocked the borderlands after the war had deepened the belief that this was no place for Jews. At home and at school the message was repeated. Mordechai and Liza were fervent Zionists. The Gymnasium’s principal, Binyamin Efron, made sure his pupils were indoctrinated in the new faith. The regular curriculum was supplemented by ten hours of Jewish subjects – history, literature, the study of Hebrew and the Bible. Zionists were aspiring, at one level, to be normal – but in a Jewish way. In the land of Israel they would be farmers and sportsmen and soldiers. Contemporary Jewish military heroes were in short supply. Jewish boys had to reach far into the past for role models.
They called their football team after the Maccabees, the rebel army that drove out Hellenized usurpers and restored the Jewish state of Judaea, 160 years before the birth of Christ. If young Avraham Stern did not play football, he felt the excitement in the air and wanted to share in it. When the Zionist Boy Scout movement, the Hashomer Hatzair (‘The Youth Guard’), opened a branch in Suwalki, he became its first leader.
In 1925 the government subsidy to the school was cut and it was forced to close. Most of Avraham’s classmates made arrangements to continue their education elsewhere in Poland. Even before the announcement of the closure, the Sterns had been considering sending their son to Jerusalem to finish his studies. A Zionist charity supplied a grant which helped towards the costs. At the age of eighteen, Avraham Stern had already experienced enough dramas to last a lifetime. In December 1925, he left Suwalki with his friend Pinhas Robinson to embark on a new adventure.
The pair landed in Haifa on New Year’s Day 1926. Stern had no doubt he had made the right decision. In March he wrote to Meir Kleif, a friend in Suwalki: ‘I arrive full of hopes and reverentially touched this land … upon which I intend to build a new life full of song, sun and joy … I was like an innocent foolish and happy child as I ate and drank from what is ours, when I walked on our land and under our sun … the land was so pretty that my soul filled with hope and faith in a better future.’11
The boys went to Jerusalem where they enrolled at the Hebrew Gymnasium in the Bukharan quarter, a lively area of the new town growing up outside the Old City walls. Many of the pupils had been born in Palestine and raised in a culture of boisterous informality. Avraham, with his good manners and correct clothes, brought a whiff of the old world to the classroom. He seems to have enjoyed the distinction, teaching the other pupils ballroom dancing and sentimental Polish songs.
The dandyish pleasure in his appearance, the light-hearted love of theatricals and music were a genuine and enduring side of Avraham Stern’s