A week later, the three disembarked into the hustle and bustle of the port of Jaffa, where the Arab porters impressed them as aggressive and untamed, and they could not understand their cries. They headed for the Jewish colonies, finding work in the vineyards of Rishon Lezion, Rehovot, and Nes Ziona. Mostly they turned over the earth and prepared it for planting with the help of a hoe. For a day’s hard labor, they earned seven Turkish pennies, barely subsistence money. It is not clear how long they were so employed: one account indicates two years; another, only a few months.10 In any case, they were soon known as hard workers, and Yehoshua Ossowetzky, a former agent of Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Nes Ziona who was now in charge of Jewish settlement in the Lower Galilee, invited them to the newly founded colony of Rosh Pinnah. Paicovich’s building skills could be put to good use there, and they accepted with alacrity.
From that day on, the Galilee was Reuven’s home. The hilly landscape spellbound him. Mount Canaan beckoned him. Within days he had scaled to the top, a curious act in the eyes of the residents of Rosh Pinnah, who felt little urge to commune with nature. He spent several years building Rosh Pinnah and dreaming of farming: of obtaining a tract of land from the baron or the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA).
The dream remained out of reach. Meanwhile, he made a name for himself as a valiant young man, and the matchmakers took notice. In his words, “a meeting was arranged, she liked me, I liked her and, in time, I was married to Chaya, daughter of Reb Alter Schwartz, of blessed memory, and set up home.”11 This depiction may have done for Reuven’s time and society, but it was too prosaic for his sons. They wanted romance. And in their rendering of the parental encounter, Reuven spied a caravan of donkeys descending from Safed to Rosh Pinnah; mounted on one of them was a black-eyed maiden who immediately lit his fire.12 This biblical portrayal is the version that became ensconced in the family saga. One way or another, in 1894 Reuven Paicovich and Chaya Ethel Schwartz were wed.
Chaya came from an old Safed family. Her mother was the granddaughter of the rabbi of Buczacz, a source of pride for Chaya. The family tradition holds that the family had lived in Safed since the Middle Ages; one branch had departed for Buczacz and service in the rabbinate, though following generations had returned.13 Reb Alter Schwartz, Chaya’s father, was one of seventeen young, married yeshiva students to join the pioneer Elazar Rokeach in the establishment of a new farming village. The group purchased land from the Arab village of Ja’uni for what became the Jewish Gei-Oni.
Gei-Oni was plagued by drought, and the colonists lost their assets. In 1882 a Lovers of Zion delegation from Romania toured the country to acquire land for settlement. Captivated by the vistas of Gei-Oni, they bought out the first settlers. Four of the original families refused to sell and joined the Romanian group,14 which renamed the site Rosh Pinnah. One of the four was Reb Alter Schwartz. He, however, soon sold out to the baron, served a two-year rabbinical stint in Alexandria, and, upon his return, began to work for the baron as a supplier, a position he retained until his death. Chaya was his firstborn.15
Reuven and Chaya lived with Reb Alter for some five years, producing two sons during that time, Moshe and Mordekhai. In 1898, construction began on the new colony of Mahanayim, near Rosh Pinnah. Reuven was asked to lend his building skills and guide the newly arrived ultra-Orthodox immigrants from Galicia in the ways of the land. In return, he hoped to obtain a property at Mahanayim and finally settle down to farming. He gave three years of his life to Mahanayim, built a house, invested every penny he managed to save from working at the site, and brought his wife and children to live with him.
But the Lovers of Zion movement that backed the project suffered serious financial and social setbacks. In 1902–3, Mahanayim was abandoned and its lands were ultimately annexed to Rosh Pinnah.16
Reuven found himself back at square one: out of pocket, out of work, thirty years old with a wife and three children to support (a third son, Zvi, had meanwhile joined the family). The future looked bleaker than ever. In 1900 the baron handed over the administration of his colonies to the ICA. The First Aliyah wave of immigration to the land of Israel was in crisis, having lost faith in the enterprise. Farmers of the relatively sound, orchard-based Jewish colonies on the coastal plain upped and left the country by the dozens. Many in Palestine’s new Jewish Yishuv lent an avid ear to the Uganda Plan (the idea of establishing a Jewish colony in East Africa under British protection), for who knew better than they how arduous it was to settle the land of Israel. Reuven decided to try his luck in America, the “goldeneh medineh.” His decision, in 1905, stemmed from a sense of impasse and despair. Should he get on his feet in the United States, he planned to bring his family across. Should he fail, he would return to Palestine. His conscience would at least be clear that he had not missed the opportunity of a lifetime.17
He shared his plans only with his wife, who was once again with child. He divided the little remaining money from Mahanayim into two: half for Chaya and the children, who stayed with her father; the other half for himself. Early one morning he rose, mounted a donkey laden with bags, and rode it to Beirut. From there, he sailed to Marseilles and then on to the United States. Three weeks later he disembarked in New York.
America did not smile on Reuven. He found life on the Lower East Side alien and longed for open, star-studded skies and green fields. He was a diligent laborer earning adequately for the times. But he made no real money. What he did manage to put aside, he referred to as kishke gelt—whatever his gut could spare. After two years, he returned to Palestine. America had turned out to be a false dream.18
Left with no alternative, he swallowed his pride and applied to the ICA for a leasehold at one of the Lower Galilee settlements under development. He explained his inclination for manual labor, his aspiration to live off farming, his yearning for the soil. The officials—as he told it—not only agreed to settle him but even allowed him to choose one of four sites. But when the time came to make good on the promise, Rosenheck, the ICA clerk, reneged on the offer and directed him to Mes’ha, that is, Kefar Tavor.19 Whether fact or fiction, the incident marked Reuven with a life-long hostility toward ICA officials.
It was not a choice area for farming and settlement. The Eastern Lower Galilee gets little precipitation, and natural springs are few. The harsh conditions had driven most of the Arab villagers out in the nineteenth century,20 and the region was overrun with marauding Bedouin. Force was the law of the land. Tribes arbitrarily fought one another, provoked the Ottoman government, and mercilessly attacked village after village. By the close of the nineteenth century, even the most optimistic estimates put the entire population there at only tem thousand.21
In the nineteenth century, destitute peasants were crushed by loans they were unable to repay. Lands slipped out of the hands of cultivators and into the hands of capitalists or the government. The southern part of the Eastern Galilee became state land and was purchased by Sultan Abed al-Hamid; the northern part was taken over mostly by wealthy effendis from Nazareth, Acre, Damascus, and other places. Here, then was an opportunity for Jewish settlement agents to acquire sizable tracts. The largest Jewish land-buyer was Baron de Rothschild. His agent, Yehoshua Ossowetzky, picked up 30,000 to 50,000 dunams (7,500 to 12,500 acres; 3,000 to 5,000 ha) from an Arab living in Syria. These transactions took place in the 1880s and 1890s. Jewish settlement in the area began at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.22
Figure 1. The Paicovich family: mother, Chaya; father, Reuven; and three sons: Moshe, Mordekhai, and Zvi. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the