Buffalo Evening News · Buffalo, New York · 27 August 1928
CP-1928-001
Tree Dances for Jew’s Violin, Abandoned in Cause of Zion
Yehuda, Who Gave Up Musical Career to Slave in Palestine, Plays His Fiddle at Midnight.
Meyer Levin, Special Cable to the Buffalo Evening News and Chicago Daily News
Transcribed from the clipping
“Meyer Levin of the foreign staff of the Buffalo Evening News has been working this summer in a Zionist farm colony, or meshek, in Northern Palestine. Toiling 12 hours a day in the hot sun, guiding a plow, wielding a hoe in the fields and trimming in orange groves, he is learning something of the new Palestine pioneers who are trying to transform the ancient Holy Land from an arid desert into a modern homeland. From Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Galicia came his fellow workers in the meshek — at Yazur, near Haifa… MESHEK YAZUR, PALESTINE, Aug. 26. — There is a tree that dances. Trunk and all, it swings itself stoutly with a graceful hop, smoothly with a circling glide, swaying in a ring-around dance around itself. You can easily find the tree that dances. It stands quite alone on the top of Mount Carmel… To understand about the tree you must know about Yehuda. Yehuda that plays on a violin. Wild as a wild Arab! Yehuda works, works, works. He runs, runs! Ach! there is no time to live! And for the fiddle! Ach!… They tell of him that he was born on a boat as his parents were migrating to Palestine. You know his family! Among the wealthiest bourgeoise in Jerusalem. They gave him a good musical education. They wanted to send him to Paris to study. But Yehuda saw there was work to be done in Palestine. Should the work be left to others? Yehuda went to a meshek. Work, work! Ah, there is no time to live! One should have two lives, one for the fiddle, and one for the farm.”
Context added by this archive
The archive had nothing at all from 1928 before this. The phrase doing the quiet work is a simile: a Jewish violinist labouring in a farm colony is “wild as a wild Arab,” and the noun is not describing anybody in the story. Meyer Levin, later the novelist, filed it as a cable from the field.
Cite this item
"Tree Dances for Jew’s Violin, Abandoned in Cause of Zion," Buffalo Evening News, 27 August 1928. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1928-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1928-001
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1928-001.
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