Some people want to write the “great American novel,” but coming to live in Israel I decided to write the “great Israeli novel.” What would be the key ingredients for such a novel? One must be the story of Zionism, the sacrifice and commitment of the early Zionists, who fought against seemingly insurmountable odds to establish the Jewish State in the Jewish Homeland.
Jack Cohen – The Great Israeli Novel
Some people want to write the “great American novel,” but coming to live in Israel I decided to write the “great Israeli novel.” What would be the key ingredients for such a novel? One must be the story of Zionism, the sacrifice and commitment of the early Zionists, who fought against seemingly insurmountable odds to establish the Jewish State in the Jewish Homeland. Another must be love, the love of the Zionists for each other and for the land of Israel. These are the ingredients that I put into my latest book, “Zionism: A Love Story” that I spoke about at the AACI in Netanya on April 19.
I wrote “Zionism: A Love Story” based on the life of a friend, who I had met 50 years before and with whom I had lost contact for at least 43 years. I met this individual through my cousin when my wife and I visited Israel for the first time in 1963 and I was very impressed by him and his commitment to his ideals and to living in Israel. Yet he was not Jewish, he was an Anglo-Chilean Christian who had met his Jewish wife Zara in England and had thrown his lot in with her and with the Jewish people in the nascent State of Israel. This book is in fact his biography, although because he preferred to remain anonymous I have changed all the names in the book and I called him Elliott Hurst. Nevertheless, “the details of the story and the verisimilitude of the events and places attest to its authenticity.”
Here is a summary of how I came to write the book. I lived in the USA for 30 years. During a visit to Los Angeles I met a man who was a Roman coin collector and he told me he had just returned from a trip to Israel and had bought some Roman coins from a dealer named Elliott Hurst in Haifa. I asked him is this was the same Elliott Hurst who had lived in Hadera, and he replied “how many Elliott Hursts can there be in Israel?” When we made aliyah in 1996 I searched the Haifa phone directory for him, but he was not listed. Unknown to me, his business had failed and he had moved back to Hadera. In 2013 when I decided I wanted to contact him I Googled his name and “Roman coins” and got a hit from a dealer in Wales. He gave me Elliott’s e-mail address and soon we were in contact and met. Elliott gave me some memoirs he had written of his life and with his agreement I put them together and edited a full story of his life.
As I try to show, it was not only love between Elliott and Zara, as a man and a woman, but also their love for socialist Zionism that propelled them as part of their garin (or seed group) to move to Israel to found a new kibbutz. But, before they could do this they went through a two year period of training and hardship, called hachsharah or preparation, at a farm in England called “The Grange.” I quote from the book:
“Now I want to tell you in more detail about our communal life at The Grange, but I don’t know what to put in and what to leave out. There’s so much to tell. Perhaps the best way to begin is to say that never in my life, before or since that time, have I felt myself living with so strong a sense of purpose — so intensely. I am not speaking of the physical regime we imposed upon ourselves — which was punishingly hard — but of a state of mind. It’s not easy to describe. Think of an engine going flat out all the time. Think of a long-distance runner pushing himself beyond exhaustion. Think of soldiers in euphoria of battle, eager to win glory in a holy cause, whatever the cost. We were all of these. We lived in a perpetual state of collective exaltation, driven by the ideals which we had all embraced, and sustained by constant and vociferous mutual analysis and criticism. Those endless discussions began almost every evening, as soon as we were all home from work and showered and fed — and went on late into the night.” (p. 107)
This is the crux of the story, shorn of all political content, it shows how a life of dedication to the Zionist ideal led to the population of the State of Israel. These were not your poor downtrodden, defenceless Jews of Eastern Europe. These were people with a detailed understanding of the sacrifice and dedication it would take to make this unique process of State-building a success. Like many others,they became disillusioned with the kibbutz as a communal way of life and left after five years for life elsewhere in Israel. They suffered thru years of hardship and managed to survive as the State itself did.
They had two sons, both of whom became ultra-orthodox (haredi) Jews and eventually the fact that their father was originally a Christian non-Jew who had not converted became a problem for them. Zara died in 1993, and eventually Elliott remarried to a Chilean Jewish woman. As a result of some clues she did research into his background and discovered that his Chilean grandmother’s surname was Mendoza, a typically Jewish Spanish surname, that indicated that he was of converso origin, namely that his family descended from those Jews who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism and had escaped the Inquisition by moving to Chile. Since this was his maternal line, his sons then accepted him as being Jewish, and so the story comes full circle.
Born in London, UK, lived in suburban Washington DC area for 30 years, moved to Israel in 1996. He has a web site: Jack’s Blog
Jack Cohen – The Great Israeli Novel
