In one respect, though, Stern conformed with his contemporaries. Suwalki was a Zionist town. The chaos that rocked the borderlands after the war had deepened the belief that this was no place for Jews. At home and at school the message was repeated. Mordechai and Liza were fervent Zionists. The Gymnasiums principal, Binyamin Efron, made sure his pupils were indoctrinated in the new faith. The regular curriculum was supplemented by ten hours of Jewish subjects history, literature, the study of Hebrew and the Bible. Zionists were aspiring, at one level, to be normal but in a Jewish way. In the land of Israel they would be farmers and sportsmen and soldiers. Contemporary Jewish military heroes were in short supply. Jewish boys had to reach far into the past for role models.
They called their football team after the Maccabees, the rebel army that drove out Hellenized usurpers and restored the Jewish state of Judaea, 160 years before the birth of Christ. If young Avraham Stern did not play football, he felt the excitement in the air and wanted to share in it. When the Zionist Boy Scout movement, the Hashomer Hatzair (The Youth Guard), opened a branch in Suwalki, he became its first leader.
In 1925 the government subsidy to the school was cut and it was forced to close. Most of Avrahams classmates made arrangements to continue their education elsewhere in Poland. Even before the announcement of the closure, the Sterns had been considering sending their son to Jerusalem to finish his studies. A Zionist charity supplied a grant which helped towards the costs. At the age of eighteen, Avraham Stern had already experienced enough dramas to last a lifetime. In December 1925, he left Suwalki with his friend Pinhas Robinson to embark on a new adventure.
The pair landed in Haifa on New Years Day 1926. Stern had no doubt he had made the right decision. In March he wrote to Meir Kleif, a friend in Suwalki: I arrive full of hopes and reverentially touched this land upon which I intend to build a new life full of song, sun and joy I was like an innocent foolish and happy child as I ate and drank from what is ours, when I walked on our land and under our sun the land was so pretty that my soul filled with hope and faith in a better future.11
The boys went to Jerusalem where they enrolled at the Hebrew Gymnasium in the Bukharan quarter, a lively area of the new town growing up outside the Old City walls. Many of the pupils had been born in Palestine and raised in a culture of boisterous informality. Avraham, with his good manners and correct clothes, brought a whiff of the old world to the classroom. He seems to have enjoyed the distinction, teaching the other pupils ballroom dancing and sentimental Polish songs.
The dandyish pleasure in his appearance, the light-hearted love of theatricals and music were a genuine and enduring side of Avraham Sterns nature. But they combined with a sense of destiny and a conviction that a violent struggle was looming that would settle the fate of the Jews. Both aspects of his character were displayed at one of the schools end of term entertainments. He was chosen to recite a poem, and he selected In the City of Slaughter by Hayim Nahman Bialik, a Ukrainian Jew, which described in harrowing detail the 1903 Kishinev pogrom that had radicalized Jabotinsky and transformed the outlook of many Jews.
The poems anger is aimed not just at the perpetrators but at the men of the Kishinev ghetto and their passive acceptance of their fate. These sons of Maccabees had looked on from their hiding places where Crushed in their shame they saw it all/They did not stir nor move/They did not pluck their eyes out/They beat not their brains against the wall. The poem is a lament but also a call to arms. The dead of Kishinev must be avenged and the shame of those who cowered must be wiped away. Henceforth, says Bialik, Let fists be flung like stone!/Against the heavens and the heavenly throne!12
In October 1927 Stern gained a place to study Hebrew literature and classics at the Hebrew University. Among his years intake was a slim, open-faced seventeen-year-old with chestnut hair and bright brown eyes. Roni Burstein was the daughter of once wealthy but now impoverished émigrés from the Ukraine. Stern was captivated and was soon chatting her up. According to his son, Yair, he approached her and started to talk to her and at the beginning she thought he was a Sephardi Jew because his face was dark but then when he found out she was of Russian origin he started to speak Russian to her and quote Russian poets. She nearly fell down. He started courting her and a big love story began.13
The prevailing political atmosphere on Mount Scopus, among faculty and students alike, was liberal and leftist. The adolescent attraction Stern had felt in his Petrograd days for revolutionary communism was long forgotten. His main interests were artistic and he had yet to develop a coherent political outlook.
That changed with the riots of August 1929. Any complacency that might have remained among the Yishuv about the scale and dangers of the task they had set themselves was swept away by the massacres. In Hebron, where a small community of Jews had lived in peace with their neighbours for centuries, Arab mobs killed, maimed and raped, leaving at least sixty-five dead.
These events had the same effect on the Jews of Palestine as the Kishinev pogrom had on the Jews of Central Europe.
The events of August sent convulsions through the Yishuv. They revealed an alarming truth: the Haganah the Defence had failed in its prime task. It had lacked the organization or the means to shield the Jews from what was clearly going to be a continuing threat. Its leaders now set about training recruits and acquiring arms, unhindered by the British who, in light of their own failure to protect their charges, had conceded the notion that, in certain circumstances, the Jews had the right to defend themselves.
Stern was among the new recruits. The Haganah sent him first to a guard post in Jerusalem, then to a village in southern Galilee. By now the trouble was over and there were no weapons available even if violence were to flare up again. On guard duty, Stern passed the hours of darkness staring out into a night scented by the cooling earth, his head filled with melancholy thoughts. He felt, he wrote later, alone and abandoned so distant, a stranger everyone is far from me. Only death is near; only he has not forgotten me.14
After a month in the countryside he returned to Jerusalem. By then, Roni had left for a study course in Vienna and for the next year Avraham would have to rely on the power of his words, poured out in hundreds of letters, to keep the romance going. In October he went to visit his aunt in Alexandria on the train that clacked along the coast, stopping every few miles at Jewish settlements. He described the journey in a letter to Ronis mother. The colonies were surrounded by orchards and plantations, making a sea of green that filled his soul with joy and happiness, he enthused. But, simultaneously, the bucolic sight, glowing with vitality, aroused thoughts of death: I thought how happily I would give my life so that all of Palestine could bloom like these orchards we love Eretz Yisrael more than our lives we are ready to give ourselves and our lives to her.15
At this stage his attachment to Zionism was still romantic rather than practical. In a short time his outlook would change and be replaced by a determination to make his poetic vision of Eretz Yisrael the Land of Israel in something like its biblical dimensions a reality. Career and security, even his love for Roni, would take second place to his pursuit of this end, no matter how distant it might seem. As he wrote to his younger brother David in Suwalki in November 1930, reality is not what it is and appears to be, but what force of will and longing for a goal may make it.16 This belief in the supremacy of willpower carried him through the rest of his life, colouring almost all his actions, a system of belief that simultaneously made compromise impossible yet opened the way to courses of action that seemed to contradict the spirit of the dream.
At this stage his attachment to Zionism was still romantic rather than practical. In a short time his outlook would change and be replaced by a determination to make his poetic vision of Eretz Yisrael the Land of Israel in something like its biblical dimensions a reality. Career and security, even his love for Roni, would take second place to his pursuit of this end, no matter how distant it might seem. As he wrote to his younger brother David in Suwalki in November 1930, reality is not what it is and appears to be, but what force of will and longing for a goal may make it.16 This belief in the supremacy of willpower carried him through the rest of his life, colouring almost all his actions, a system of belief that simultaneously made compromise impossible yet opened the way to courses of action that seemed to contradict the spirit of the dream.
Despite the shock of August 1929, the Haganah remained a defensive organization and firmly under the control of the left-leaning Zionist establishment. Sterns political opinions were hazy and coloured by his poetic imagination rather than hard fact. Events were shaped not by economics and social factors but by heroes and great sacrificial deeds. Among his inspirations were Jewish warriors of antiquity such as Simon bar Kokhba, who rose up against the Romans, and Elazar ben Yair, who in AD 73 or 74 led the Jews of Masada who chose to kill each other rather than surrender to Caesars forces. But they also included modern nationalist figureheads such as Giuseppe Garibaldi who, with a thousand dedicated men, had created modern Italy, and Jozef Pilsudski who in 1918 founded a new independent Poland after 123 years of foreign domination. Stern admired men of destiny, almost regardless of ideology. He could find positive attributes even in Mussolini, Stalin and Franco. In time he would come to believe he was a man of destiny himself.
These were men who did not shrink from violence and Sterns poetry reveals a fascination with bloodshed and death. He might seem a dandy aesthete, but his imagination was filled with visions of sacrificial violence: As my father carried a prayer shawl to Sabbath synagogue, I carry sacred pistols, he wrote in a 1929 poem.17
Sterns attitudes led him naturally towards the Revisionist movement. Its image was self-consciously heroic. It rejected the gradual, democratic approach of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, which relied on Britain to realize the Zionists dreams. If Jews wanted a state, the Revisionist message ran, they would have to take it for themselves. It appeared to have a strong leader in Zeev Jabotinsky, whose impatience and disregard for obstacles put him in almost permanent conflict with the Zionist establishment.
But Stern was above all an individualist. The discipline and structures of a political organization made him uneasy and he had an aversion to accepting orders. When, in 1931, radical elements inside the Haganah most of them Revisionists broke away to form what would become the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), Stern did not rush to join them.
He was eventually recruited by David Raziel, a fellow student at the Hebrew University. Two years younger than Stern, Raziel was reserved and taciturn. He was committed to action and contemptuous of restraints. At the same time he had a firm grasp of practicalities and did not share the quasi-mystical enthusiasms of his friend.
Stern joined the Irgun early in 1932 and underwent a short junior officers course. His first contribution was to write a poem, Anonymous Soldiers, which subsequently became the Irgun anthem, with a melody composed by Roni Stern. Two of the verses sum up the essence:
We are soldiers without names or uniforms
Our companions are terror and death
We will serve in the ranks for the rest of our days
Only discharged with the last of our breath.
On days that are red with blood and atrocities
On black nights dark with despair
Well raise our flag in the towns and cities
On that flag Protect and Conquer will appear.
At this stage these visions bore little resemblance to the activities of Stern and his comrades. He was mostly engaged in propaganda and political agitation, co-editing the Irgun magazine which preached unyielding resistance to Arab demands.
Stern was popular with his liberal-minded professors and his good manners and charm overcame misgivings they might have about his politics. In 1932, however, his activities brought him into conflict with the Hebrew Universitys authorities. The chancellor, Judah Leon Magnes, an American-born liberal rabbi, intended to use the place to foster good relations between Jews and Arabs. When he appointed Norman Bentwich, the former Mandate attorney general who combined Zionism with sympathy for Arab aspirations, to the new Chair of International Peace, Stern helped to organize a protest. One demonstration had to be broken up by British troops at bayonet point. Even though Stern was not present he was suspended for several weeks.
Late in 1933 he left Palestine for the University of Florence, to study classical literature. His studies were interrupted when, the following spring, he was visited by the Irgun leader Avraham Tehomi who offered him the chance to do something significant for the cause.
He asked him to act as the Irguns agent, organizing the purchase of arms from Italian and Polish sources. Stern accepted eagerly. From now on, he would divide his time between Palestine and Europe. He roamed Poland, Romania and Italy posing either as a book salesman or a journalist, a correspondent for the Palnews weekly news magazine. His new work brought him into the Revisionist network in Europe, giving him great opportunities for building both a reputation and a following.
The movement was developing a distinct, radical political identity that put it increasingly at odds with the left. In 1935, Jabotinskys differences with Weizmann led him to pull his supporters out of the World Zionist Organization, and to set up the New Zionist Organization. This would now be the political face of Revisionism. It was supplemented by a militaristic youth organization, Betar, whose main strength was in Poland though branches had also been opened in Palestine.
Revisionism was, nonetheless, a movement rather than an ideological and organizational monolith, an orchestra, in Jabotinskys description, with himself as the conductor.18 He was the towering figure but his authority was far from dictatorial. Banned from Palestine, he had to watch events unfold there from Europe and America. He was nominally the Irguns supreme commander. He was unable, though, to exercise close control over policies and personalities.
Stern agreed with Jabotinsky that the aim of Zionism should be to flood Palestine with European immigrants who would establish a Jewish state inside broad borders that stretched across the Jordan river. They would achieve the goal by force of arms if necessary. But when he first caught sight of the great man in January 1935 in Kraków, at a Betar international assembly, he was not impressed. He wrote to Roni that Jabotinsky was ageing. This is not the same person who could once rouse the masses to follow him.19 Over the next few years his disenchantment would deepen as he grew frustrated with Jabotinskys flexible approach. Despite its treatment of him, Jabotinsky remained an admirer of the British Empire and imagined a future Israel as Britains ally in the region. For Stern, though the Arabs might be their immediate foe, the real enemy was the British who loomed behind them, blocking the road to a Jewish state. Over the next years he would turn against Jabotinsky, thus establishing a pattern of traumatic ruptures with colleagues that would last throughout his life.