Batya smiled and raised her hoe again, striking the ground in short chops. Exerting her muscles felt good; it gave her a sense of her power. No one here had escaped their past unscathed—they had all suffered—but who had time to indulge in idle thoughts? They were creating a new Jewish identity in the Holy Land, each Jew both a soldier and a farmer. She looked forward to tonight, when they would dance the newly invented dance, so different from tango. Tango was the intertwining of man and woman—the masculinity and resolution of men against the softness and acquiescence of women. Their embrace excluded the outside world. The new dance, a Romanian hora, was about togetherness among a group of equals. With everyone’s arms around one another’s shoulders to create a circle, the slow gait quickly led into a faster beat that could go on for hours. Jumping and kicking in unity, the dancers would bond as they sang at the top of their lungs. Their new songs celebrated their vigor and commitment to rebuilding the land of their ancestors. Batya found it curious that Russian songs that had never been a part of their Jewish heritage had also been nostalgically translated into Hebrew, just like tangele had merged Yiddish culture with Argentine music. Jews adapted in so many ways, assimilating into the societies in which they lived while still maintaining their core beliefs.

Afterward, under the canopy of a night lit by a million stars, they would light a campfire and boil strong coffee. Exhausted from dance but not from the fervor of new ideas, they would speak about socialism and the combined power of laborers, swearing never to be exploited by capitalists. In their just community of the highest values, they would all share in the common good. What were scorpions lurking under rocks or the threat of malaria from attacking mosquitoes when Jews had such a glorious mission to build a fair and moral society? Even in Vienna, a journalist by the name of Theodor Herzl—who, like Batya, had been deeply touched by the Dreyfus affair—had begun a movement to settle the Holy Land and wrote about creating a Jewish state.

From a distance, Batya saw Surale stepping over the low wall of a neighbor’s field terrace, three young children running alongside her and a baby propped on her right hip. As Surale crossed the furrowed lot, Batya waved, and the sight of the baby caused her breasts to wet with milk.

She planted her hoe in the soil to mark the spot where she should return and walked to the edge of her field, where an old sycamore tree cast a welcoming shadow. Surale met her there and handed her a tin canteen, and Batya drank the blessed water from a spring that fed the Jordan River.