Yigal Allon, Native Son. Anita Shapira
did not regard the boys’ actions as overly “disgraceful.” But Zemach and his boys were mortified.
The consciousness of guarding the national honor also came to the fore in another incident: two of Kadoorie’s boys were invited to dine with the high commissioner. One of the two, Sini, was seated next to a British official. All of the warnings he had been given about Jewish honor rang in his ears and whenever the waiter offered him tantalizing delicacies, he courteously asked for a mere mouthful—after all, everyone knew that in polite company one did not exhibit appetite. Sini thus walked away from the meal as ravenous as he had come to it. Amos Brandsteter, in contrast, had been seated next to a Jewish official and had indulged his appetite to his heart’s delight.
School subjects, as described earlier, were aimed at enriching the mind but hardly the soul. Pupils coming from regular high schools arrived at Kadoorie with the intellectual and emotional baggage instilled by humanist-oriented curricula. History, literature, Bible were the foundation stones of education in the city. Allon had received none of this emphasis. Zemach, an author among agronomists and an agronomist among authors as he liked to refer to himself, was alert to the paucity of Kadoorie’s syllabus. He would take the time to converse with students about literature and even ask the capable ones to write papers, which did not fall short of any produced at nontechnical schools.17 For some of the pupils, including Allon, the talks with Zemach opened up new worlds.
But on the whole, their world was small and circumscribed, centering on peers and school matters. They were not bothered by “big questions.” This was true also of top students from educated bourgeois homes. Life revolved around exams, teachers, pranks, soccer, work, and girls—they were ordinary adolescents, after all. The pecking order was determined by physical excellence.
Like the rest of Yishuv society, the boys were affiliated with either the Left or the Right, either Labor or Revisionists. The first twenty-four, as it happened, were equally divided between Ha-Noar Ha-Oved, the youth movement of the Labor Federation (Histadrut), and Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir, which was connected to the middle class. Everyone anxiously awaited the arrival of a twenty-fifth student: Israel Krasnianski, the tie breaker, tipped the scales in favor of Ha-Noar Ha-Oved,18 resulting in the election of an all-“socialist” student council (consisting of Prozhinin, Brandsteter, and Sini). The elected members were a conscientious lot, but their sense of responsibility was no match for Sini’s desire to get his hands on a steering wheel. One night, he and a few others “borrowed” the agricultural instructor’s car and set off for Afula. They knew a heady sense of mastery—they could drive! True, they could not find the rear gear, but this did not make the occasion any less momentous. When it was time to turn around, they simply lifted the vehicle and faced it in the right direction. Back at Kadoorie, they learned that the Arab guard had spotted their exit and reported them to the principal. Zemach made it plain that recklessness was inconsistent with a seat on the student council. By consensus, which was common practice at Kadoorie, Sini was ejected, making room on the council for a member of Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir—Allon.19
Allon had been involved in Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir at Kefar Tavor, where he had actually initiated and established the Mes’ha branch, an act that was a clear reflection of the village public mood: on the right of the political spectrum, yet not too far right. Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir was a middle-class, quasi-youth movement. Apart from socializing, its dominant activity was sports. Most of all, for the youth of Mes’ha, it represented a contrast to the Left, the Left that maligned them and demanded that they employ Jewish labor. Given Mes’ha’s conditions, the mere fact that local youth organized to found a branch of the league was in itself an achievement. Allon’s role in the affair had placed him at the forefront of Mes’ha’s youth. His membership in Ha-Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir showed that he toed the line, that he accepted his father’s worldview. He may have belonged to a poor family in a poor village, he may have been highly conscious of his poverty, but he likened himself to members of the middle class whose rituals and traditions he shared. His friends at Kadoorie, in contrast, who were pampered lads from “established” homes, saw themselves brandishing the socialist flag and identifying in their mind’s eye with the wretched of the earth.20 In substance and the type of youth it attracted, Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir had a petit-bourgeois air. Its “respectable” role models wore cravats at a time when the rest of the fledgling country still sported frayed collars. It lacked the drama and protest of Betar (the Revisionist youth movement), the daring and dedication of Labor youth. In an era when the young thirsted for commitment, it defended no cause. It breathed flat air, free of either danger or great dreams.
Allon remained true to Ha-Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir even after coming to Kadoorie and being exposed to other ways and ideas. However, his co-option to the student council as its representative marked the start of a fast friendship with members of Ha-Noar Ha-Oved, especially Amos and Sini (who was pardoned some months later and restored to the council). The three were to remain on the council until the end of their studies.
His friendship with Ada Zemach scored him an important social point. The principal’s daughter was the only flower in Kadoorie’s female desert. Ada studied at Haifa’s Re’ali School and thus did not live at Kadoorie, but she came home on weekends and vacations. Pretty, delicate, learned, she was unlike any of the girls Yigal had ever met. Though a couple of years younger than him, she was his intellectual superior. She loved literature, belonged to the Left’s literary bohemia that sprouted up around the rebellious poet Alexander Penn, read avidly, and was open to the unconventional and the avant-garde. To Allon, she symbolized the whole new world he was introduced to at Kadoorie. To Ada, a city-slicker, the handsome Allon had the appeal and freshness of a farmer and boy of nature. She was impressed by his horsemanship and attracted by his simple manners. What’s more, the fact that he was older than she and more savvy about boy-girl relationships made up for her scholarly lead. She took pleasure in parading him before her high school friends when he visited her on weekends. At the same time, his involvement in Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir and his petty-bourgeois traits somewhat marred the image of the natural farm boy she had constructed. Still, the fine pair were not together often enough to play up the shortcomings, and their missing one another went a long way to stifle doubts that might have surfaced in a closer relationship.
Figure 6. Ada Zemach. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Allon House Archives, Ginossar.
Their friendship began when Allon worked at Kadoorie before school started. It lasted for four years, until Ada finished high school and Yigal decided to join the Ginossar kibbutz group. It was a young love, significant to both. In the best romantic tradition, they were mostly self-absorbed when they were together, hardly ever discussing either Kadoorie or the great big world. Ada’s head was full of the Spanish Civil War. Allon, like most Kadoorie boys, took no notice of it. But he certainly had a thirst for literature—her chief interest. He was at home in her house and often met her father, which only whetted his appetite. The pupils at Kadoorie liked to believe that Zemach and his wife did not overly approve of the relationship between their daughter and the Mes’ha farm boy, but the truth is that they accepted him as part of the family. He continued to show Zemach respect until the end of his life.21
The idyll was shattered in Yigal’s second year at Kadoorie. Beginning in the autumn of 1935, tensions rose in the country. The fallout from Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia sowed war panic and the economy slumped. A shipment of Haganah arms, hidden in a crate of cement, was intercepted at the port of Jaffa and shook up the Arab street. Even at Kadoorie, events in the country suddenly jerked the boys to attention. Sini reviewed the situation in a letter to his parents, ending on a note that smacked of Zemach: “Hopefully, it will be possible for us to go on building and consolidating. And if it is decreed that the world revert to the pre-flood era, it will find us ready to resist.”22 This curious contradiction between the apocalyptic forecast and the firm confidence that the pupils of Kadoorie (or of the Yishuv) would prevail seems to have been a basic element of education in Eretz Israel: it inculcated a sense that there was nothing the people could not do, no test the people could not meet. The consciousness that catastrophe was sure to come, and that the people would be called to stand in the breach, was inbuilt in the ideology. The appearance of these