The Hope
Herman Wouk
Copyright
The Hope
Copyright © 1993, 2014 by Herman Wouk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan / Ter33Design
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795344114
Contents
Leading Characters
Part One: Independence
1: Don Kishote
2: “Colonel Stone”
3: The Alamo
4: Flour for Jerusalem
5: The Road Is Ours
6: Diamond Cut Diamond
7: America
8: Sam Pasternak
9: The Terrible Tiger
10: The Constellation
11: A Gentile Trade
Part Two: Suez
12: Lee Bloom
13: On to Paris
14: Les Folies-Bergère
15: The French Whore
16: Mitla Pass
17: Musketeers and Omelettes
18: The Race
19: The Foreign Minister
20: Issur Yikhud
21: The Shmata
Part Three: Missions to America
22: Emily’s Letters
23: A Turkish Fantasy
24: Missions to America
25: Dorothy in Oz
26: Lee Bloom’s Wedding
27: The Yellow Flowers
28: President Kennedy Will Deliver
29: Queenie
30: The Growlery
31: The Queenie-Wolf Letters
Part Four: Six Days
32: Casus Belli
33: The Wait
34: Pasternak’s Mission
35: On the Eve
36: Midway
37: The Road to El Arish
38: Death of a Lion
39: Nakhama and Emily
40: Now or Never
41: The Day of the Lord
42: The Wall
43: Banzai!
44: The Bear Growls
45: Encounter in the Growlery
46: The Jeradi Pass
Endnote
Leading Characters
The Barak (Berkowitz) family
ZEV BARAK, born in Vienna, name Hebraized from Wolfgang Berkowitz. Army field officer, military emissary to America, later military attaché in Washington
Nakhama, his wife
Noah, his son
Galia, his daughter
Ruti, his daughter
Meyer Berkowitz, his father, in the foreign service
Michael Berkowitz, his religious brother, a scientist
Lena Berkowitz, Michael’s irreligious wife
Reuven, Lena and Michael’s infant son
The Pasternak family
SAM PASTERNAK, born in Czechoslovakia. Kibbutznik, combat officer, later in military procurement and the Mossad
Amos, his son
Ruth, his estranged wife
The Luria family
BENNY LURIA, Sabra, born in Moshe Dayan’s moshav. Air force pilot
Irit, his wife
Yael, his sister, later Yossi Nitzan’s wife
Daphna, his daughter
Dov, his son
Danny, his son
The Nitzan (Blumenthal) family
YOSSI NITZAN, combat officer, born Joseph Blumenthal in Poland (nickname Don Kishote)
Leopold, his brother (emigrates from Israel to America, changes name to Lee Bloom)
Shayna Matisdorf, Yossi’s first love
Aryeh, son of Yossi and Yael (Luria)
The Cunningham family (American)
CHRISTIAN CUNNINGHAM, a CIA officer
Emily, his daughter
Bradford Halliday, army officer, Emily’s suitor
To
The Israel Defense Force
Above all to those who fell
And to those who survived, to those who now stand guard, and to those who will stand guard until by God’s grace Israel dwells in peace with all her neighbors
This tale of Hope is dedicated
Prologue
The Outpost
“Ha’m’faked!”
No response.
“Ha’m’faked! Ha’m’faked!” (“Commander! Commander!”)
The watch sergeant roughly shakes the company commander’s shoulder. Haganah captain Zev Barak, born Wolfgang Berkowitz, rolls over and half opens heavy eyes. “What now?”
“Sir, they’re coming again.”
Barak sits up and glances at his watch. L’Azazel! Asleep a mere ten minutes, how can he have dreamed such a long crazy dream, himself and his Moroccan wife Nakhama in the Vienna of his boyhood, rowing on a lake, riding a Ferris wheel, eating pastry in a Ringstrasse café? Around him on the ground the militiamen sprawl asleep. Beyond the sandbags and the earthworks rifle-toting lookouts pace the hilltop, peering down at the narrow moonlit highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which here goes snaking through the mountain pass.
Wearily, Zev Barak gets to his feet in a cold night wind. Unshaven, grimy, in a shabby uniform with no insignia of rank, the captain at twenty-four looks barely older than his troops. He follows the sergeant to an outcropping of rock amid scrubby trees, where the sentry, a scrawny boy in a Palmakh wool cap, points down at the road. Barak edges out on the rocks and looks through binoculars at the moving shadows. “All right,” he says, sick at heart, to the sergeant. “Go ahead and wake the men.”
Within minutes they stand in a semicircle around him, some thirty tousle-headed youths, many of them bearded, yawning and rubbing their eyes. “It’s a pretty big gang this time, maybe a hundred or so,” he says in a matter-of-fact voice, though he feels that in this fight against odds, after months of close calls, he may really be about to die. He has been hearing that anxious inner voice more than once lately. Here he is still alive, just very worn out and scared, and he must keep up the spirits of these weary hard-pressed youngsters. “But we have plenty of ammunition, and we’ve beaten them off before. This hill is the key to Kastel, so let’s hold our ground, no matter what! Understood? Then prepare for action.”
In minutes, Barak’s troops, armed and helmeted, surround him once more. No more yawns now; grim youthful faces under variegated headgear, from World War I tin hats to British and German steel casques, and also some ragged wool caps.
“Soldiers, you’re a fine unit. You’ve proven yourselves. Fight the way you did before, and you’ll repulse them again. Remember, the Russians had a motto, ‘If you have to go, take ten Germans with you.’ So if any of us have to go, let’s each take twenty of them with us! We’ve got the high ground, and we’re fighting for our lives, our homes, and the future of the Jewish people.”
The captain’s bristly round face, pallid in the moonlight, takes on an angry glare.
“Now, I’m forced to say one more thing. When we lost this position yesterday and had to retreat down the hill, a couple of fakers claimed that mere grazes, just bloody scratches, were real wounds. They even let able-bodied boys carry them down.” Captain Barak’s voice rises and hardens. “So now I’m warning you, if any man falls down crying he’s been hit, I’ll look at his wound right away, and if I find he’s shamming I’ll shoot him. Do you hear me?” A silence. “I said I’ll shoot him!”
By the appalled boyish glances as they disperse to their battle stations, Barak surmises that they believe him. In the North African desert, when he was serving with the British army in the volunteer Jewish Brigade, a hard-nosed lieutenant from Glasgow once made that threat. It ended the shamming, and the lieutenant did
not have to shoot anybody. In his foreboding mood Barak feels quite capable of shooting a faker. For months he has been carrying casualties away from skirmishes, and he himself may all too soon be dead or wounded, and need to be carried off. Dim in the moonlight, the sentry on the rock outcrop signals, Not coming up yet. This is a grim part, waiting for the blow; too much time to think of the disagreeable possibilities.
***
But since the United Nations vote that recommended partitioning Palestine, and the brief rejoicing that ensued in the Yishuv—the network of Jewish settlements—there have been few agreeable possibilities. Division into a Jewish State and an Arab State; a bitter drastic shrinking of the Zionist dream, but all right, Barak has figured, let it be so, and let the bloodshed at least cease! The Jews have accepted the resolution, but the Arabs have scorned it, and for five months now hostilities have sputtered between the local Arabs and the Haganah, the Jewish armed underground.
Yet worse is soon to come. For in three weeks—on May 15, 1948, a long-fixed official date—the British Mandate will end, the British government and army will pull out of Palestine in toto, and a showdown is bound to explode. Five neighboring Arab countries are pledged to march their armies into Palestine on that selfsame day, to wipe out the Zionist entity in a week or two. The British Balfour Declaration, which encouraged Zionism, the Arabs have always considered a monstrous illegality, and this is their chance to reverse it. Can the scattered Yishuv really hold out for long, Barak wonders, against all those mechanized armed forces?
But the Haganah captain has long since learned to live one day at a time, and one fight at a time. The Arabs have closed the highway below. The Jews in the Holy City are besieged. The hilltop outpost he defends has been taken, lost, and retaken by the Haganah in a desperate effort to reopen the road. Since Roman times, this mountain pass has been the chief access from the seacoast to Jerusalem, Barak’s hometown. From the fortress of Latrun, where the gorge begins, he has been traversing the ten-mile ascent to Kastel and Jerusalem all his life; but now, once relief convoys enter the defile at Latrun, they are being decimated or destroyed. So the Haganah has launched an operation to lift the siege, with a code name Barak thinks all too apt: NACHSHON, after the prince of Judah who first leaped into the Red Sea, when Moses commanded the waters to part. The Jews badly need another miracle like that to give them hope, but—
***
Sudden signal from the sentry: Here they come! Barak shouts his final orders, and his heart races and pounds as his troops go on the alert, bracing for the assault. The Arabs ascend in a swarm, blasting machine guns at the sandbags and hurling grenades that throw up flames and showers of earth. Some attackers fall and roll back down the slope. The rest keep climbing. Standing on a high point slightly back of the breastworks, Barak commands the fight, holding some of his best fighters in reserve. Once the action starts he is calm. When the first Arabs overrun the barriers, he sends small squads forward, calling out, “Chaim, go and back up Roni… Arthur, look sharp, they’re coming around Avi’s position, hit them hard… Moshe, plug that hole in the center, quick!” It becomes a head-to-head melee of crisscrossing blazing fusillades, frantic shouts in Hebrew and Arabic, screams of the wounded. Barak’s battle anger swells as he sees his own boys fall, yelling in agony. No faking this time, of that he is sure! A brief confused deafening gunfight by moonlight, the flashing of knives, and all at once the enemy is running back down the hill. “After them!” Barak shouts, plunging through his troops down the slope, firing as he goes, and he feels a searing crunching pain in his left arm.
PART ONE
Independence
1
Don Kishote
That smashed elbow was still in a crooked cast after a month of repeated surgery, when Zev Barak emerged from a dingy reddish building on the Tel Aviv waterfront, into blinding noontime sunlight and a blistering hot breeze. By then the war with five invading Arab armies had been raging for ten days, and on top of everything else that was going wrong, hamsin, the heat wave from the desert! Bad, bad news for that ragtag new Seventh Brigade, patched up of immigrants and motley Haganah units, on the move toward the Latrun fortress since before dawn. Less than two weeks into this war for survival, the despatches from the other fronts were worrisome enough, but that silence at Latrun was truly ominous; the worst-conceived operation yet, that attack was, and entirely the Old Man’s doing. “Latrun will be taken AT ALL COST!”
Now what to do in this brief breath of burning air? Try again to call Nakhama? But the telephone system was in chaos, like the mail and the electric power. No doubt the British had planned it this way. No silver-platter transfer of essential services; if the Jews wanted a state so much, let them sweat for it.
He strode down a side street to Ben Yehuda Boulevard, wrinkling his nose at the stink of the trash and garbage tumbled everywhere. Anxious-faced civilians were hurrying about their business, though the Egyptians were now twenty miles south of Tel Aviv, units of Transjordan’s Arab Legion were in the city’s eastern outskirts at Lydda and Ramle, and the Syrians were driving down on the northern settlements. No matter what, life went on! Inside the war room of the Red House the battle picture was even more grim than these civilians knew, for near Netanya, halfway up the coast to Haifa, the Iraqis had rolled within ten miles of the sea, threatening to cut the entire Yishuv in two; while Jewish-held parts of Jerusalem were shuddering day and night under the Arab Legion’s artillery barrages, and the city’s hundred thousand Jews were drinking rationed water, and were close to running out of food.
How long could it go on this way? In the scrawny Hebrew newspapers stories of victories and heroism abounded, some true enough; but there were plenty of rotten stories, too—cowardice, desertion, profiteering—that could never be told about this frightening time. Zev Barak tried to see things as they were, a habit of thought learned on the battlefield; and he feared that this tenuous new “Jewish State” might not last out the month of May in which it had been declared. Still, since Ben Gurion had bulled ahead into history and run up the flag, there was nothing to do now except hang on and fight. En brera! (No choice!)
The cast was a nuisance that now and then drove him mad with itching, but the elbow was healing and he could shoot a gun. For better or worse, the fateful battle to open the Jerusalem road was already on at Latrun. That was where he should be right now, with his battalion. But the Old Man had assigned him as liaison officer between the old Red House war room and the new unfinished army HQ in Ramat Gan. In plain fact he was now just a jobnik, running secret orders and messages in a jeep for the Prime Minister, safe duty away from any front. Being the son of Ben Gurion’s boyhood friend had its plusses and minuses!
***
When Ben Gurion had summoned him from the hospital on May 15, the very day the Arab armies invaded, he had not been told why he was being sent for. The Old Man wanted him in his Ramat Gan office, and that was that, so he awkwardly got out of bed and into uniform and went there. When he arrived Ben Gurion simply waved him to a chair, ignoring the heavy cast on his arm, and went on talking to his chief operations officer, Colonel Yadin.
“I tell you it’s an order, Yigal! You will form a new brigade, and with it you will reopen the road to Jerusalem once for all! And to begin with, you will take Latrun.”
The last British troops, except for a small rear guard, were departing from Haifa. The day before, Ben Gurion had solemnly declared that the little patchwork Yishuv was now a state called “Israel.” Yesterday an aging pugnacious Zionist politician under the Mandate, today David Ben Gurion was already the Jewish Churchill, giving ringing orders to his army chief. Trouble was, the army itself was just the same old militia, nine diminished and utterly worn down brigades, deployed on five fronts or shuttling between them to face the advancing Arab army invasions. Unlike Ben Gurion, the armed forces had not been transformed overnight; nor in fact did he himself look much changed, in his faded open-collar khaki shirt.
“Form a new brigade? Tak
e Latrun?” The chief operations officer peered at Ben Gurion, gave Barak a side-glance, and wiped his bald brow. By training an archaeologist, Colonel Yigal Yadin at twenty-nine was a seasoned underground planner and fighter. “That fortress? With what? With whom?”
“It will be done! B’khal m’khir [at all cost], I say! Or will we let Jerusalem starve and surrender?”
“Ben Gurion, the recruit camp is empty. And where do we get more armored cars, field guns—”
“Empty? Why empty?” The paunchy old man looked to Barak and jutted out his chin in the way that Barak knew meant trouble, heavy eyebrows a-bristle, wings of white hair floating out from his tanned pate. “Wolfgang, weren’t you in charge of training the refugees in the internment camps on Cyprus?”
“Sir, I did lead the training in some camps, but—”
“Good, I thought so. And aren’t those same Jews now pouring into Haifa by the boatloads? Hah, Yigal? What will they do in the middle of a war—pick oranges? Form a brigade with them.”
“With those immigrants? Their drilling in Cyprus was nothing, Ben Gurion, they marched around with broomsticks—”
“What broomsticks? Nonsense.” The Old Man turned on Barak. “See here, Wolfgang, when you came back from Cyprus you gave me very good reports on them. Did they drill with broomsticks? Is that true?”
“Well, wooden guns, sir,” said Barak. “That’s all the British allowed. We managed clandestine drill with small arms, but—”
Colonel Yadin broke in. “Ben Gurion, they’ve never shot a rifle, those refugees! They’ve had no combat training, not even target practice, and—”
“So give them training for a week or so, Yigal. Issue them rifles and show them how to shoot! They’ll surprise you. They’ve got something to fight for now, their own country.”