The loss was tremendous. Paicovich, only in his early fifties, refused to remarry, whether out of loyalty to her memory or the difficulty of adapting to someone new. The house began to empty out. Even before Chaya’s death, Mordekhai had joined the Bnei Binyamin organization of farmers’ sons to found the colony of Binyaminah. Deborah, fourteen, dropped out of school to assume responsibility for the home and to raise Yigal. Paicovich was never a social animal. After his wife’s death, there were no more visitors to the home and his public prestige waned. Gloom increasingly nestled between the four walls.
Allon wrote of his father as the dominant figure in his and the family’s life. He sketched a man strong and brave, honest and unimpeachable, a proud man standing up to ICA officials, unafraid to take on the authorities or to fight against wrong. In Allon’s hands, Reuven was either the Gary Cooper of the Galilee or a member of the enlightened landed gentry. Contemporaries, however, painted a far different portrait, as did Paicovich’s own memoirs. No one doubted his courage, toughness, or pride. But broad-mindedness or spunk against the “wicked” PICA? Yigal seems to have resorted to wishful thinking. (In the early 1920s, the ICA became the PICA—the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.)
The relations between Mes’ha and the PICA shed light on the character of the colony and its settlers. Mes’ha was founded with the intention that the farmers would stand on their own two feet after receiving an initial loan from the ICA. Reality, however, got in the way. The farmers were not shy about asking for additional assistance, while the officials, by nature, risked being snared into providing support and fostering dependency, despite all good intentions to the contrary.
Affairs came to a head in the 1920s. The PICA was hard put to balance the books, whereas the farmers had grown accustomed to requesting handouts for all and sundry. Their applications centered on important issues, such as water supply, as well as on minor items. When it came to public institutions—the school, the synagogue, the ritual bath or the community center—the residents of Mes’ha took it for granted that the PICA was to erect them. And when the harvest failed, they thought it only right that the PICA pay the government the land taxes due on their behalf. The PICA was fed up: the more it helped the farmers, the less they helped themselves.82
Paicovich was no different. He too enjoyed being on the receiving end of the PICA’s loans and benefits. Notwithstanding the image of a proud pauper that he liked to tout, he was neither all that poor nor all that proud.
His sense of the PICA’s wrongdoing went back to the very beginning, when the ICA’s Rosenheck had refused him the choice of a colony. But it only grew worse, and after the earthquake of 1927 and the ensuing argument over home repairs, his bitterness took firm root. As he told it, the PICA fixed the cracks in the houses of the other farmers, but not his; he ascribed it to the organization’s dislike of him, his pride, and his independence. He dashed off at least four letters to the PICA administration asking that his house be repaired or exchanged for another. In one letter, he noted: “Permit me to mention here that I have already been a farmer at Mes’ha for twenty years and I never come to the officials with a demand for help.”83 He was not eager to turn to the PICA, he said, but it was now a matter of necessity. The administration remained unimpressed: “We cannot, to our regret, meet your request since we have no budget for same.—Besides, it is time that the farmer understood that the maintenance [and] repair of his house comes under his care—not ours.”84 Paicovich did not let up. In December 1934 he again pressed the PICA for repairs and again was told that the “repair of the buildings falls on the farmer, not on our company,”85 as indeed the leasehold contract stated. It was a typical response from PICA officials weary of the endless demands made by Mes’ha’s farmers; it was not a sign of discrimination. Paicovich made no repairs. He left the house in splendid dilapidation as eternal evidence of his being wronged by the PICA.
The PICA-Paicovich cup of bitters grew fuller with another affair, that of the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School. Paicovich submitted Yigal’s application in 1931 and the boy passed the entrance exam. But Paicovich had no intention of paying school fees out of his own pocket. He hoped that they would come from the PICA: it provided six scholarships for which all of the children in its colonies could apply. There were thirty applicants; Yigal was not selected. A year later, Mes’ha’s only successful candidate quit the school, Paicovich reapplied, and Yigal redid the exam. This time Paicovich stressed the fact that Yigal was a motherless boy and noted the importance of an agricultural education for the future of both boy and farm. Again, Yigal was not among the six winners.86
Paicovich may have been unable to afford the fees, although that is open to doubt: according to Allon, the farm owned a pricey, pedigree horse. And when the boy desired a mule, money materialized for this as well. But nothing when it came to education. Reuven did not think that it was up to him to pay for his son’s education, especially since there was a chance that the PICA would. The matter of house repairs and the school episode may have had something in common: Paicovich was not prepared to lay out money for what others could obtain from the PICA free of charge.
The PICA’s impatience with Paicovich reflected its annoyance with Mes’ha as a whole. In 1930, the residents of Mes’ha filled out a questionnaire presented to them by John Hope-Simpson, who was exploring the feasibility of colonization following the unfavorable report on Zionist settlement produced by the British Shaw Commission on the Palestinian Disturbances of 1929. Based on the questionnaire, the village had thirty farming families at the time and a total debt of Palestine £7,000. They employed forty harat families and another thirty-five temporary workers. None of the hired hands was Jewish.87 At the time, the PICA leaned toward a rescue plan devised for the colonies by the Yavne’el “progressives”: intensive farming, smaller units to boost productivity, mechanization (a tractor and a combine), the seed cycle, modern amelioration and fertilization, and improving livestock with superior strains. The entire plan meshed with the problem of Jewish labor. Smaller units and mechanization were meant to reduce manpower and give preference to skilled, trained labor. Yavne’el adopted the program with the PICA’s support. Mes’ha rejected it. One of the voluble opponents to modernization was Paicovich. In Mes’ha’s dispute with the management of the Galilee Farmers Federation, Paicovich charged: “You (the federation) and PICA must change your attitude toward us.”88 In other words, the fault lay not with Mes’ha’s methods but with the attitude of official bodies.
The dispute grew sharper in the summer of 1931, with Mes’ha rejecting every suggestion to change its lifestyle and let the harats go. The PICA imposed sanctions. Spurning a request from Mes’ha’s farmers to help them obtain outside work, it explained: “Even if we had funds for employment at Kefar Tavor—we would not use them in view of the farmers’ negative position on every suggestion to improve the situation and upgrade agriculture. They object to the seed cycle and to any change in working methods—things that already exist at most of their sister colonies in Lower Galilee.” The conclusion was: “So long as the farmers do not change their views on these questions—they can expect no help from us.”89
The colony’s Z. Eshbol complained: “Because of Arab labor, Mes’ha has fallen from grace in the eyes of [PICA] officials and the federation.” In the spirit of Paicovich’s earlier demand, he called for understanding and caution in officialdom’s attitude toward Mes’ha.90 But while Mes’ha refused to “reform,” the PICA refused to extend assistance.
In 1932, a sunken well at Yavne’el fortuitously yielded abundant water, changing the prospects of the Lower Galilee farm and carrying everyone along in a wave of optimism. The discovery seemed to justify the methods of the modernists after the fact. Craving water on their land too, the residents of Mes’ha did not bother to consult the PICA and dug a well at their own expense. The PICA deemed the