The Land Agent Read Online Free PDF

might be crates of wine, boxes of stockings, buckets full of artificial teeth. Outside in the small garden, ploughshares, an electricity generator, bales of cotton.
    Although they generally spoke Hebrew together, Lev began to learn a little English from Mickey, who, in turn, practised his Yiddish. To Lev’s surprise, it seemed the Jews of Manchester spoke that hybrid of higher German and Hebrew quite fluently.
    ‘
Vas ist de vetter heinte
?’ Mickey would ask him over breakfast each day.
    To which Lev’s reply was always: ‘The weather is bloody hot. But I believe it is raining in fucking Manchester.’
    It was on Mickey’s hectoring that Lev finally changed his own name. Or, at least, his surname. ‘Everyone must have a new name in Palestine,’ Mickey declared. ‘Look at me. Look at Abraham, our forefather.’
    ‘What about Abraham?’
    ‘God changed his name from Abram to Abraham. From “great father” to “father of all nations”. Father of Arab and Jew alike.’
    And so Lev changed his name. A new name for a new Lev. No more Lev Gottleib. But Lev Sela. Lev meaning ‘heart’. Sela meaning ‘stone’.
     
    The offices of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association in Haifa faced the sea, with a view of the harbour that was always being built to turn it into a proper deep-water port. The construction work was a constant reminder to Lev that he should have taken that early advice from Noam’s uncle back in Vienna and invested in cement. Not that he ever had much money to invest. But the breeze into his office was fresh and free. And he earned enough money to live on.
    The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association was commonly abbreviated to PICA. ‘Because it was always PICA-ing up land here and there,’ according to one of Mickey’s English puns Lev could never understand.PICA bought land that it would long-lease to Jewish individuals or collective settlements. It also invested in factories, mills and wineries. The organization was funded by a wealthy benefactor who preferred to remain anonymous to the point it was forbidden to say his name either in public or in private. This person was known simply as the ‘Anonymous Donor’. But everyone knew he was a famous banker, an elderly French aristocrat, one of the richest men in the world.
    While this Anonymous Donor provided funds in support of PICA’s offices in Palestine, Lev knew the real talent behind the Association’s acquisitions and investments, especially when it came to land, lay with his employer and only other staff member at the Haifa office. The man who had once held up the placard advertising for a typist at the Jaffa docks. Samuel Ziv. Otherwise known affectionately as Sammy the King.
    Sammy the King was in his mid-fifties but had all the energy, both physical and mental, of a man thirty years younger. Sammy came from somewhere in Russia, he would never admit to exactly where. He could speak Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, English and French as well as Russian. But it wasn’t of languages that Sammy was the king. It was of the soil.
    Sammy knew everything about alluvial deposits, levels of acidity, what was good for cereal crops, for vegetables or for tropical fruits. Just by smelling a handful of earth he could tell whether it came from the Upper Galilee, the Valley of Jezreel or the Maritime Plain. A taste licked from a wetted finger would inform him whether it lacked potassium, nitrogen or phosphorous. When he unfurled a map across his desk, he didn’t see uncultivated land. He saw its earthly potential. He imagined ploughed fields, orchards and plantations. He saw oranges, grapefruits, dates, almonds, melons and bananas. He heard the hiss of the barley tickled by the breezes from the north, the crack and crinkle of the tobacco leaves drying in the desert
hamseen
. His mind’s eye squinted to the yellow of the sesame fields. Sammy the King was PICA’s man on the ground in more ways than one.
    In the five years Lev had worked for PICA,