On the path of the righteous

Above: The salon of the American Colony Hotel, the home of Anna Spafford. Below: Spafford and two of her daughters. (''American Priestess''/library of congress)

Knowing the ghoulish interest I take in crackpots of every stripe, a friend of mine steered me toward Jane Fletcher Geniesse's "American Priestess: The Extraordinary Story of Anna Spafford and the American Colony in Jerusalem" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26). This is a huge book in scope, being an account of a group of Chicagoans and Swedes who traveled to Jerusalem to await the last trump and who stayed on to play a crucial role in the city during World War I and beyond. It is also the story of an indomitable woman who, through endurance, will, and personal magnetism, became their leader, unmanning all rivals and creating a fiefdom for her family out of a band of seekers.

Anne Tobine Larsdatter Oglende, later Anna Tubera Lawson, then Anna Spafford, was born in Norway and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 4. After tribulations that included a shocking winter in Minnesota and work as a waitress to make her way through school in Chicago, she married Horatio Spafford, a forward-looking Chicagoan lawyer, an ardent evangelical, and friend of Dwight Moody's. The couple had four daughters and lived an increasingly affluent life until Chicago's Great Fire of 1871 wiped out Horatio's real estate investments, leaving him in terrific debt. With that, he pretty much abandoned business - except for borrowing a great deal of money he had no way of repaying. Instead, he turned his full attention to religious matters. Anna, though proud of her husband's religious insight (we are told), was distressed by his improvidence and ground down by the aftermath of the fire. In 1873, a restorative trip to Europe was planned for the family, and Anna went ahead with the four children. Their ship collided with another and sank. The children drowned and Anna, to her great grief, survived.

Meanwhile Horatio was receiving revelations from on high, not the least of them being that old chestnut: It was vital to return the Jews to Jerusalem in order to bring about Christ's Second Coming. He formed a congregation who styled themselves the Saints, later known as the Overcomers, which grew in numbers. The couple had three more children, the second of whom died at a few months old - another blow. By 1881 the family's financial situation was verging on criminal, and it was revealed to Horatio that the end was nigh in every sense. Jerusalem beckoned. And so it came to pass that in September 1881, the Spaffords and over a dozen other Christian souls landed in Palestine, eventually setting up shop in what is still known as the American Colony Hotel. (Its onetime proprietor, Valentine Vester, who died this June at age 96, was Anna's granddaughter-in-law.)

Horatio continued his religious investigations and wandered about the countryside hatching plans for its reforestation. It was clear that the end of time had not yet arrived, though the appearance in Jerusalem of Yemenite Jews, whom the colonists fed and sheltered, was encouraging. The colony lived on credit, lots of it, and on the meager money coming from a couple of wealthy members' trust funds. A band of Swedes (and their money) were recruited and joined the colony. In time Anna, who had been receiving revelations of her own for years, supplanted her husband as top dog. She changed people's names and sundered earthly attachments, separating children from parents, and wives from husbands. No more marriages or conjugal relations were permitted. "Affinities" - the chaste lying together of selected older men and young women - were assigned by Anna. In keeping with this creepiness, such couples who succumbed to temptation had only to confess to her to be forgiven. Later, she reintroduced marriage, but chose the matches.

After Horatio's death, Anna put the colonists to work as virtual slaves, weaving, cooking, and running a souvenir shop, photography outfit, and, most important, the hotel. Anna and her daughters lived high off the hog, taking places in Jerusalem's best society. Had this tale ended there, and I have given you only the merest taste of the book so far, it would have been a triumph. But it continues into World War I and the last cruel days of the Ottoman Empire, on to the mess created by the Balfour Declaration, to the influx of Zionist settlers, World War II, the bloody birth of the State of Israel, on to 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank. For all the injustices within the colony, its contribution to the society outside was tremendous and salutary. Not only did it provide a neutral meeting place for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but its members devoted themselves to nursing and feeding soldiers and civilians, regardless of allegiance, during war and famine.

The terrible tragedies of Anna's life might have broken another woman, but it was her nature to find design and providence in calamity, rather than arbitrary chance or persecuting fate. It was also that temper, augmented by being in Jerusalem, of all providential places, which caused her to see her own love of dominion as righteousness, and exploitation as ordained mission.

You don't have to be religious to feel this way, but belonging to an "intentional community" is a great advantage. A case in point may be found in Tom Fels's "Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond" (Rural Science Institute, paperback, $19.95). Though a cautious, even anxious-seeming book, and not written to please cynics, it gives a ghastly (to me) glimpse of living in one of New England's most famous communes of the 1960s and early '70s, "the Farm" in Montague. It is also a memoir and a following-up of the lives of the people who played roles in what some of them considered an experiment in living and others a step toward bringing the New Age into being.

Fels, a member for a while, was not seeking social or personal transformation, but space, order, and quiet so he could write - three amenities for which group living has never been known. But his portrait of Marshall Bloom is what I'm here for. One of the commune's founders and best known as a social activist and founder of an alternative news service, LNS, he committed suicide a year after the Farm began. Still, he was "a deeply moral young man," according to Fels. He ran up bad debts, aggressively intruded on others, walked around naked, and used "an open toilet in the living room." All with invincible righteousness.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.