The Blogs: Tales of our Homeland #1: Trumpeldor’s Nail

Notes and Suggestions for further reading:

Panel 2 Joseph Trumpeldor Ze’ev Jabotinsky

Panels 4, 7 Jewish Legion The Zion Muleteers of Gallipoli

Panels 5,6 & 7 The story here comes from the excellent Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, by Shmuel Katz. You can preview the book in Google Books. Quoting Jabotinsky it reads:

“… A worker has his workers interests, a soldier has his ideas about caste, a doctor or an engineer his habit. But among us there must arise a generation which has neither interests not habits. A piece of iron without a crystallized form. Iron, from which everything that the national machine requires should be made. Does it require a wheel? Here I am. A nail, a screw, a girder? Here I am. I have no features, no no feelings, no psychology, no name of my own. I am a servant of Zion, prepared for everything, but to nothing, having one imperative: Build!”

“There are no such people,” I said.

“There are.”

I was mistaken. The first of them was sitting before me. He was himself a lawyer, a soldier, a farmer. He went to Tel Hai to seek work with the plow, found his death with a rifle, said, “En Davar,” and died immortal.

Panel 8 The Story of a Sculpture: The Roaring Lion of Tel Hai

Tel Hai Museum in Israel – Roaring Lion Memorial in Tel Hai

Photo by Michael Unterberg

Michael Unterberg (author) and Zvi Ron (artist) have been making comics together since they were classmates in Yeshivah of Flatbush elementary school. They both live in Gush Etzion.