There were four of us, my three older brothers and me. The first family in Yehiam to have four children.
We came to see our parents at 5:30 and went back to the children’s houses at 7:20, Ofer to the Grove group, Yochai to Pomegranate, Yair to Pine, I to Narcissus.
None of the four of us ever ran away to our parents’ house at night, as so many of the other children did. Maybe we were afraid they’d send us back, or maybe we were afraid they wouldn’t. The children who did run away were humiliated and bitter every time their parents returned them. To reach their parents’ house, they had to cross the entire kibbutz in the dark, in the middle of the night, in the cold and rain. And they were sent back immediately.
We didn’t even try. In our recurring dreams, Nazis marched down the lovely narrow stone sidewalks, passed the reservoir, skirted Abrashka and Rachel’s house at the beginning of the row, and went into our biological parents’ house. Then we would wake up.
We slept in our parents’ house only two or three times during our childhood. For example, in the sixth grade, when kids, exactly our age, with names just like ours, came from other Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim and slept in our beds as part of what was known as “the hospitality program.” The hospitality program, which lasted for three days, was a substitute for the religious-urban-bourgeois bar mitzvah, which was never mentioned in our kibbutz. It was a kind of coming-of-age journey. We boarded Egged busses, excitedly paid for our tickets and rode for several hours in groups of four children, with no adults, until we reached another part of the country. The scenery might have changed, but the trip brought us to a place very similar to our own. Our group went to Reshafim. Other groups, to Mishmar Hanegev and Beit Alfa. For three days, we lived their lives with them, which were identical to ours. We went to class with them, worked with them on their children’s farm instead of our own, and returned on an Egged bus.
Several weeks later, when four children from Kibbutz Reshafim arrived in Yehiam for three days, we gave them our beds, which were identical to theirs, and the heavy yellow bedspreads, and slept in our parents’ house, a strange and terrifying sleep. Our parents’ close proximity seemed sick and crazy, as if we were locked in an embrace with death, which sang us a lullaby. We could hardly wait for morning to come.
The entire Neeman family in Yehiam: the oldest son, Ofer, sitting first on the right, second child Yohai sitting on the left, third child Yair standing behind the parents. Yael is sitting on her mother’s lap.
Most of the Narcissus children had older, Hungarian parents. We never had anyone from outside the kibbutz in our group. Every night from the time we were brought from the hospital, we slept surrounded by walls covered with yellow oil-paint. The aesthetics of the children’s houses, if the word aesthetics can be used in connection with such an ugly place, were based on the absence of color and stimulation. That was part of the system. Four children to a room, two boys and two girls. One in each of the four corners, a nightstand beside each bed. The ugliness didn’t bother us. We overcame it with the gold of our imagination.
The metapelet said goodnight at 9:30 every night, after she finished reading us a new chapter from People of the Beginning, by Eliezer Shmueli, about the guards who rode their noble steeds, or a chapter from The Adventures of Neznaika and his Friends, who flew around the whole world in air balloons. “Goodnight,” we replied, waited for her to close the door behind her, and got up. We couldn’t sleep.
In the hot summer, we dipped our sheets in cold water, shouted “We’re Greeks” at one another, and ran down the corridor in dripping togas that cooled our bodies. If the mosquitoes bit us, we went into the metapelet’s room and put together a concoction that we thought would soothe the bites. One of us was always on guard duty, keeping an eye on the sidewalk that led to Narcissus to warn us if the night guard was coming. If she was, we’d jump into our beds, turn our faces to the wall and pretend to be asleep, trying not to laugh at Moshik’s histrionic snoring. The night guard left after less than half a minute, hurrying off to Terebinth or Anemone. Bye and hope not to see you again. We got up again. Sometimes we didn’t have enough time to jump back into bed, and the night guards would catch us and give us a good talking to. We didn’t get upset because there were different night guards every week, and we were permanent. They didn’t know anything about children’s sleep habits at night. We didn’t know anything about theirs.
My three older brothers and I were like guests in our parents’ house. Our parents didn’t know what size shoe we wore, and when I asked for wooden clogs with a blue stripe for my tenth birthday, they bought me a pair that was three sizes too large. When the clogs finally arrived after having been changed, I ran back to the children’s house at 7:20. The new clogs could be heard from far away, clacking happily on all the stone sidewalks. I had to take them off at the door to Narcissus. They were too private and the stripe was too blue. “We have sandals that Pirosh made in the shoemaking workshop for all the children” (carrot-orange for the girls, brown for the boys), the metapelet said.
We never told our parents stories like the one about the demise of the clogs, maybe because we didn’t want to sadden them. We, adults and children, lived in parallel universes, each universe with its own problems, each with its own difficulties. You don’t burden children with adults’ tears or Holocaust nightmares, and vice versa. We didn’t tell them anything. We said: the words will never pass our lips. Our parents didn’t know anything about our lives and we didn’t know anything about theirs. Maybe the metaplot rebuked our parents about the clogs, maybe not. We didn’t know. We too wanted to maintain equality and didn’t understand exactly how we had forgotten and had dared to ask for our own clogs with a blue stripe.
(The following item appeared in the newsletter, under the headline “The Problem of Sharing and Equality Among the Children”: The kibbutz provides all clothing and footwear, without exception—including house slippers, or white wool. Therefore, no one should have personal items such as clothing, sandals, kaffiyahs, etc.)
Our parents apparently never noticed the series of deer names in our biological family: Zvi (deer), my father’s name; Ofer (fawn), my oldest brother’s name; and Yael (ibex), my name. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have disrupted it with Yochai and Yair, the non-deer names of my two middle brothers. There were other families on Yehiam who had children with a series of thematic names, such as Hadas (myrtle), Vered (rose) and Nitzan (bud). Or Netzer (shoot), Rotem (broom plant), Erez (cedar) and Oren (pine). Nature, of course.
But there were no animals or plants in our biological home, which was headed by two urban people: my mother, from Budapest, in Hungary, and my father, from Torna, also in Hungary, and Vienna, in Austria.
For years, they made do with a hose and a few roses, which hinted at a garden and gardening, and hid the shame of their nonexistent garden. (Gardens beautified the entire kibbutz, not only a member’s house, and an untended garden therefore made the entire kibbutz ugly.) Sometimes, our parents asked us to help them weed or water the garden. Abrashka, our neighbor who lived in the last house on the street, helped them figure out what needed to be uprooted, that is, to differentiate between decorative plants and weeds. He also put his tools at their disposal.
Every few years, they enlarged the paved area a little bit more. Their houses are called “Ein Dor houses,” after the architectural style that was conceived in Kibbutz Reshafim, but came into its own in Kibbutz Ein Dor. The old-timers’ neighborhood in Ein Dor is called Tel Amal (after the houses in the Tel Amal settlement, which later became Kibbutz Nir David). Each kibbutz added improvements and developments, and contrary to stars or plants that are sometimes given the names of the people who discovered them, the buildings in a kibbutz were named after the kibbutz from which the latest model arrived. Kibbutz architecture did not center on the architects or the buildings, but rather on man and his needs.
Nature was never discussed in our biological home. On kibbutz marches or hikes, when we trudged along after the explanations given by Eliezer A., a mushroom expert, we talked about other things and didn’t notice when everyone stopped beside some rare mushroom.
We only had to really pick flowers in the garden once a year: six flowers on Holocaust Day.
We would stand in the doorways of our parents’ houses when the siren sounded, and listen to Yoash’s voice reading the text about the six million, which came through the invisible loudspeaker on the dining hall roof and echoed throughout the kibbutz, as if it were coming from the sky or from hell.
We—Anat, Hagar, Amos and I—stood in the doors of our parents’ houses, ready to go into action. It was always the youngest child in every family who had to pick six flowers at the end of the ceremony, in memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. We didn’t know what our parents were thinking, whether it was about their families who’d remained there, or not, about the homes they’d had there, or not, about the Danube, which my mother said froze over in winter, or about our dry Gaaton River.
When the signal for our choreography, picking the six flowers, was given, we all ran into Abrashka’s garden, which was filled with gerberas, tulips, red and white roses. The other gardens didn’t always have six flowers in them. Eli Harari, who also cultivated his garden on the other side of our house, focused more on trees—lumquats and pomegranates—and less on flowers.
After we brought the six gerberas or roses or tulips, according to the tradition established by the Kibbutz Artzi national committee for holidays and ceremonies, but adapted by the culture committee of each kibbutz to suit its needs or local holidays—our parents were supposed to tell us about the Holocaust.
In a kind of balance of terror, we would release each other after a few minutes; the story would be told on a different occasion, “After all, we don’t have to do this just because it’s Holocaust Day,” my mother said every year. Before we took off through the door or the window (we moved the screen and jumped), we tried to remind our parents to put the six flowers we’d picked, the gerberas or roses, in water. But they didn’t always do it. Just as they didn’t always take the things we brought from the children’s house and hang them up or collect them. In fact, they never did.
When we brought a carving we made from an avocado pit, our parents would throw it into the garbage pail without the slightest hesitation. “It’ll get black anyway,” they said, either to us or themselves, we couldn’t be sure, then dropped the lid over it. Sometimes, before the sentence was carried out, we tried to argue that it was a key holder or a bookmark, not just an ornament, that it was something practical they could put to use. Our parents viewed with suspicion and an obvious lack of affection everything we made and brought them at 5:30 from the children’s house: Hanukkah menorahs made with acorn bottoms; bookmarks made from dry red leaves; crooked clay vases. In our house, we knew that none of us was a plastic artist and nothing we made was of any value. Sentimental value was, of course, out of the question—we had no concept of it or words to describe it. In rare cases, usually when words, poems or other sorts of writing, never drawings, were involved, the items were collected and put in the attic. Our parents couldn’t climb up there anymore, and we were in charge of it, determining who was chosen based on changing criteria set by a different brother each time, to go up and bring things down.
Only we knew what was up there, and in what order, and we would throw things down when requested—blankets, pillows, folding beds, Ofer’s poems, a file of letters that had been forgotten there, and then, in a different season, we would wrap the winter blankets and heaters in plastic and return them. “Is everything organized up there?” “Can you get through?” were the questions our parents asked from down below, because for years they hadn’t had any idea of what was happening up there. “It looks great here,” we said from above, “everything’s organized and clean. One look, and you can see what’s here. Don’t worry,” we said, and tossed down a piqué blanket they’d asked for. Then we climbed down on the slats of the wooden shutter we used as a ladder.
In our biological home, time was measured by the glass clock made by Gila, my mother’s cousin, who had lived across the hall from them in the apartment house in Budapest. We loved Gila and Pishta, her husband, and all the glass things they made for us: a nameplate for the door, a table for the living room, jars, clocks and more. They had studied in Italy after the war, and the glass that Pishta blew always reminded us of the glass slipper and the ball. When the hands of the glass clock reached 7:20, we went back to the children’s houses. Sometimes, our parents would be busy with their committees or work, and my brothers would tell them, “Okay, we’ll walk Yuli to Narcissus.” My middle brother Yochai had given me the name Yuli when I was still in kindergarten, and ever since, that’s what everyone on Yehiam called me. I loved the name Yochai had made up for me, and I loved my three brothers more than anything else in the world. (Ofer was older than I was by eleven years, Yochai by six, Yair by five.)
We felt like guests in our parents’ house, and we never interrupted each other with questions like: Did you really say that to him, or did you just think about saying it? Just the opposite. We felt obligated to include as facts all the things we thought about saying but didn’t. And every time we retold a story, we embellished it even more. If we didn’t embellish or change it, we couldn’t retell it because the listeners or we ourselves would be bored. My brother Yoachai kept the rules, and sanctified our right to exaggerate.
We exaggerated so much that I thought Leah Goldberg wrote her poem, “Chan-So-Lin,” about us. I believed that because the poem is about three older brothers and a younger sister who wanted golden slippers and velvet slippers:
There was a man called Chan-So-Lin
Who lived in a house in China
His little daughter lived with him
And three grown sons beside her.
The daughter was a pretty girl,
Her feet were small and slight,
And on each foot a sandal
Made of silk so thin and light.
Each step she took was fast and airy,
Delicate her poses,
She liked to dance and twirl
In a garden full of roses.
She was a “brilliant flower,”
Said her father Chan-So-Lin,
While her older brothers liked to call her
“Little girl of spring.”
When Chan-So-Lin went travelling,
He told his sons: “Protect my daughter,
You three boys, I shall return,
As soon as the Sabbath is over.”
Zvi and Naomi Neeman with their daughter Yael.
On the way back to Narcissus, my brothers would plant me in the holes that Eli had dug for the lumquat or pomegranate trees he was going to plant. We played Joseph the Little Brother, who was left in a pit by his brothers. They also taught me the multiplication table when I was three, and trained me to play catch with Gila and Pishta’s expensive, unique jars. When our parents went out even for a few minutes, we immediately began a tense game of catch, tossing the breakable jars, four at a time, through the air above the floor. Only the training session took place over the carpet. The game itself (called simply “jars”) took place above the floor, and the order in which we threw and caught wasn’t permanent, but was decided upon right before we began our daily game.
When we were on our annual, biological family vacation in the kibbutz apartment on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv, my brothers used to babysit me one evening per vacation so our parents could go to a concert or a play. “No problem, we’ll take care of Yuli,” Ofer told our parents. Before that, my brothers and our parents went through all the children’s movies that were playing and chose one. But after my parents left, we changed the plan. We never went to children’s movies; my brothers looked for the scariest movies and trained me not to be afraid, or we went to see the musical comedy, “Aliza Mizrahi.” We liked staying alone, without our parents. We didn’t know what you do with grown-ups.
When we had contagious children’s diseases—all routines were broken. We’d rest from all the Narcissus activities. We didn’t go to classes, didn’t clean our rooms, didn’t make mush from bread and cold water for the swans and geese in the children’s farm. And at 5:30, we didn’t go in groups to our parents’ houses or see our biological siblings. We forgot that they existed. The outside world sank into itself. And everything was Narcissus, from morning to night.
We didn’t go out at all. Our parents would come to us in the children’s house. We, all the Narcissus children, were sick together: When we had the mumps, we were sixteen children swollen like pigs; when we had the German measles or roseola, we all had red spots; when we had chicken pox, we all washed ourselves with bowls of gentian violet.
When we had a childhood disease, we tried not to bother Dr. Tzuriel, the kibbutz doctor who worked with my mother, the kibbutz nurse. He was kept for the truly difficult moments, when things got out of control. Not that any of us wanted Dr. Tzuriel to come. My mother said he was very smart and funny, but he scared us. An angry Irishman who always ordered us to undress, and we were cold, so cold.
At 5:30 in the afternoon, instead of going to our parents, they came to us, and the ugly yellow oil-paint walls of Narcissus turned into golden dividers. Our parents were different when they came, maybe because now they were guests in our place, and maybe because they were concerned about our fever, which didn’t go down. Those were the only times that my mother read me stories in Hebrew, although she was ashamed about the way she spoke it.
When we had chicken pox, my father told me that when they had them in Vienna, their parents burned their books because they thought that books had something to do with spreading the disease. They burned his copy of Max and Moritz. The stories our father told us were filled with life, as if they were three-dimensional, like small shows. And many times, when they were over, they remained present in our rooms, frightening us, as if the happy endings hadn’t dispersed them. My father loved to make himself laugh with his stories. He’d get into our beds in the children’s house and hide under the blanket and the heavy yellow bedspread. When we sat down on it, there he was. We jumped in fright. In the evenings, after he finished telling a story to all the children in the room and said goodnight, and after the metapelet had also said goodnight and gone, he’d stand outside, under the window of our room, and make the sounds of the wild animals he’d told us about earlier, or of the fierce winds that had blown away an entire city and its population in the tale he’d just recounted. We were terrified. We couldn’t sleep. Our nights were fear-filled anyway, full of the concerns you should put out of your mind before you go to sleep: We were afraid that terrorists would break into Narcissus, that the Nazis would break into our parents’ houses; we were afraid of jackals; we were afraid that the Alon children would come and cover us with toothpaste; we were afraid of Nachman Farkash, the criminal who kept breaking out of prison and roamed the mountains.
Every Purim festival had a unifying “theme” that dictated what the costumes would be and inspired the plays that were written for the holiday. In the third grade, the theme was “peoples of the world.” Five of us were Swiss. Our parents came to perform in Narcissus, wearing costumes that coordinated with ours. They were dressed as a delegation of Swiss mountain climbers. Using heavy ropes, they climbed onto our Formica tables, which our imaginations had transformed into glaciers. The yellow oil-paint walls looked like snow-capped mountains. Our parents yodeled a few times, and then my father was lost in an avalanche. The climbers called to him over and over again, but couldn’t find him. He was declared “missing.” Even though I cried with horror at the loss of my father in a snow avalanche, he didn’t appear or peek out for even a moment to show himself. He didn’t come back until the end of the evening, clumps of cotton in his hair to represent snow, having miraculously rescued himself from the top of the mountain, so he said, even under the ferocious weather conditions. It wasn’t until two hours after Indians skinned tigers in front of us, and Dutchmen stuck their fingers in huge dikes, that my father came in from the cold.
The roseola attacked on Monday, the best day of the week, magazine day. Every Monday, Mishmar L’Yeledim, the children’s supplement of the Al Hamishmar daily newspaper, arrived. When I was sick, my father and I sat together and were carried away into Mishmar L’Yeledim.
Since I had a high fever, I told him that I wanted to write a letter to Dvora Omer, the writer of children’s books, but was afraid to ask the Questions and Answers column for her address because they always printed the questions and I was embarrassed. So we wrote a letter to the newspaper, asking them to mail Dvora Omer’s address to me privately, at the Upper Galilee Mobile Post, and not to print it in the paper. If possible. If not, I thanked them in advance and asked them not to respond at all. To my great surprise, they sent it to me privately.
I wrote a long letter to Dvora Omer in which I told her that I wanted to be a writer. She answered me in her own handwriting (my father stressed that when I complained about the contents). He also pointed out that she’d replied relatively quickly (I think it took about a month, which seemed like an eternity to me), considering that she received many letters from many children. And I pictured my letter drowning in a pile of letters sent by children from all the kibbutzim.
My father said that she’d written me a long letter responding to everything I’d written in mine. All of that was true, but I was very disappointed. Dvora Omer did in fact respond nicely and politely to many of the things I’d written to her, also about the kibbutz. After all, I knew she was from a kibbutz, too. But her response to my statement that I wanted to be a writer pierced me like an arrow. She wrote that you never know where life will lead you. She wrote that she herself had wanted to be a baby’s nurse, and she was a writer. So you can never know (she repeated). I considered that letter a deathblow. What does that mean, you can never know? What does that mean, where life leads you? I was very upset by the possibility that I’d be a baby-minder. My father argued that that wasn’t what she said, and he was right, but it was no consolation. Logic might help you understand, but it offers no solace.
My mother, who was the kibbutz nurse, told all the Narcissus children: “If your fever doesn’t go down by tomorrow, Dr. Tzuriel will come to examine you.” Our temperature went down that night, we were all healthy. We didn’t want Dr. Tzuriel to come. We preferred him to stay in the clinic or in his house.