At twenty-one, the eternal age of the volunteers who came to us from all over the world for several weeks of work and then returned to their countries, we had to choose one of three possibilities, about which an endless number of rules and regulations had been made.
The first possibility: choose freely to live in the socialist experiment. Even though we were born in it, were children of the system and the place, and even though we knew nothing about any other kind of life, we were supposed to choose, of our own free will, to be in it. After all, on the kibbutz we lived by free choice, voluntarily, not by coercion, like in the totalitarian Communist regimes of the Soviet Union, China or Hungary.
The second possibility: take a year off to work in the regional kibbutz factories among the salaried workers, as the privileged children of the factory managers. The money we earned would not be sent to the kibbutz, but an exception would be made, and we could keep it to pay for a trip abroad.
The third possibility: leave.
We left.
In an instant, we were transformed from children of the kibbutz to the ones who left it.
It was that the kibbutz “children” left, not the communal sleep issue, that tore the kibbutzim apart. The parents’ inability to help their children broke their spirits. The blankets that had irritated them in their beds back when they parted from their children in the hospital could no longer cover them. Their feet remained planted in their voluntary lives, but their hearts leaped out of the kibbutz, beyond the fence, to their children, or to their own youth, which had been left behind. They wandered through their present lives as bereaved parents, wanting one thing more than anything else: to help their children. The rift occurred everywhere. Only a very small number of families were not split apart. Nearly half the kibbutzim children left during that period, some to other kibbutzim, most to cities.
We didn’t blame our parents for anything. On the contrary. We took the iron double beds that Feivel made for all of us in the metalwork shop when we were in the eleventh grade; we took the double bed sheets we received from the communa, a double blanket, two pillows, and left. With a happy heart, but an aching conscience.
A kibbutz is not a village in a pastoral setting, filled with colorful characters, chickens and Judas trees. It is a political act, and we defected. We weren’t traitors, as the ones who’d left ten years earlier, when my oldest brother did, were called; we tiptoed out quietly. We moved beyond the fence, to the place where jackals roamed, and from then on, every visit to our biological parents was a return to what had been the entire setting of our lives.
People who leave home return from time to time to see their family. But with us, it was neither a return nor a visit. The gate—that’s what they call the entrance to the kibbutz where the guard was posted. The gate, which had one meaning when we lived on the kibbutz, had another, totally different, almost opposite meaning, when we left.
Would the rotating guard recognize us? Should we get out of the car and say hello to him? Should we introduce the people with us? We always got stuck at the gate, as if we were sneaking in. And on every trip to Yehiam, the pounding of our frightened hearts could be heard on all the kibbutzim.
We were among the almost 50,000 people who were born and educated on the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim from the time the movement was founded until the end of the era of communal sleeping in the 1990s. We were among another 100,000 children who were members of other kibbutz movements. A total of 150,000 children who grew into adulthood in fifty or seventy years (depending on the particular ideological group and the movement).
Add to that the number of adults who founded the kibbutzim, most of them parents of those children, and others who joined the core groups and youth movements. Some of them left at the beginning, some left later, some were killed in war or committed suicide; most of the founders have already died.
Only these few experienced one of the most extraordinary experiments ever carried out, freely and independently chosen, to build a different world that required a different concept of family and a different concept of home.
But why would a person leave his home and continue to speak only about it? And how he left it? And how he betrayed it? Even after we left, we constantly told each other the myth of our new world creation, the experiment that did not succeed.
Those who left the kibbutz remained, in some sense, part of it. Their new identity as “the ones who left the kibbutz” kept them bound to it, and symbolized, just as their names on the clothes from the communa had, that they still belonged.
Since the kibbutz is an enterprise focused on “doing,” and as such is by nature optimistic and productive, those who remained did not go under when others left. The moment their leaving became a fact, the ones who remained adjusted to it and considered those who left ambassadors of a sort to the urban world. That strange attitude was shared by both groups to a great extent.
Many years before we left, we heard about the others who had left far back in the past. In the Children’s Society, we were proud of them without even having known them. We knew about them through stories that circulated among us and might have been rumors, gossip, or folk tales. We, the children, constantly told each other stories with inaccurate plots and distorted details as if they were necklaces of plastic beads pretending to be glass. Bits of legends blended together in our minds, and sometimes the tail ends of stories about one person were stuck onto a different person.
We were particularly proud of Arik Lavie, the popular singer. We were careful to tell only the parts of his story that were true in order to preserve its brief, fragile existence in our world. The “in our world” is quite exaggerated, since he left once and for all in 1948, twelve years before we were born. He was here at the very beginning, when the entire kibbutz was in Kiryat Haim (and was not yet called Yehiam, but Hasela) and all the members earned their livings working outside it. Arik Lavie had a good profession and earned well—he was an engraver, and like all the members, gave his salary to the kibbutz. He took his second month’s salary and left. But he came back when half the kibbutz was already in the fortress, during the war. He was there on Passover, 1948, during the siege. He taunted Qawugji’s snipers, who were on Tree Hill. He would climb the wall and shout “Ya’alah Muhmad!” then jump down quickly as the sound of the snipers’ bullets whistled through the air.
None of us had ever seen Shmuel Amir, who left many years before we were born and lived abroad. He apparently did well in business, but in our stories, he was a multi-millionaire who bought skyscrapers, estates, and finally entire cities in the United States, or according to another version, in Canada.
We monitored the radio, waiting to hear famous former members of Yehiam speak. Surely they would talk about the most important thing, the period when their life was shaped on Kibbutz Yehiam.
And if those who left us did not mention Yehiam, we were afraid that those might be only stories. Perhaps they never happened on Yehiam. Perhaps Arik Lavie never stole a tractor, or shot at Tree Hill, or left because they wouldn’t let him study opera. After all, he didn’t mention it in the interview.
But the not too distant future would arrive like a changing season of the year, and again sweeten the stories, proving that everything was absolutely true, that we had seen only the tip of the iceberg. For example, when Arik Lavie, after becoming a famous singer, came to perform at a kibbutz anniversary celebration, thus retroactively affirming all the stories about those who had left: the singer Chava Alberstein, who was here for a week in the army; Gidon Reicher, the TV personality, who was in the Jerusalem core group; Misha Asherov, the actor, who was on the kibbutz when it was founded, and others.
We believed that since they left, they had each been acting as a city commune with a single member. There, in large cities or throughout the world, they were spreading the ideas of equality and justice, and more importantly, they were talking about the actual existence of Kibbutz Yehiam, five minutes from the end of the world. They earned their money, like their reputations, for us, for the time we would need them. At the moment of truth, they would all return to us, would contribute their formidable fortunes to the kibbutz, and come to lend a hand on the banana plantations.
The beauty of our kibbutz was incredible. We could never get used to it. We all felt unworthy of it and the system. Who could say no to an attempt to create a better, egalitarian, just world? We didn’t say no. We defected.
Before we left, we went back to the kibbutz for a “conscience year.” We felt that we had to give back. Though you cannot really give back, our debt was boundless, stretching from the coastline to the sky, from Yanuh to Petra. But we wanted to reduce it. A year off from the kibbutz seemed to us to be a crater of new debt; we told the French secretary that we wouldn’t take it. We also said no to studying at the university for a degree, which he suggested. And no to driving lessons. We wanted to stop owing, to stop accumulating more and more debts.
During my conscience year on the kibbutz, I met Andrew. He worked on the banana plantation and in the dining hall, washing dishes, and anywhere else the emissary of our conscience, the work scheduler presently on his yearly rotation who would suddenly appear in front of us everywhere, all the time, told him to. The banana plantation was considered the most prestigious branch on the kibbutz, not only because it was productive and profitable, but also because the work was the most difficult. They told us that some of the kibbutzim in the Jordan Valley engraved a bunch of bananas on the headstones of the banana workers who passed away. On our small kibbutz of four or five hundred people, everyone knew who was a good worker.
The title “A Good Worker on the Banana Plantation” was not bestowed on those who did good work on the banana plantation, but only on those who went to work during hailstorms, those who cared about breaking harvest records, packing records, records for the size of bunches; it was bestowed on those who loaded bunches on their back all season and knew how to pile them properly on the tractor carts.
Andrew arrived unvaccinated, caught the conscience disease from us and worked in an effort to satisfy the system. Not only was he a good worker, an excellent worker, but he also seemed to carry around inside him the symbolic medal of valor that was tattooed on our heart—“Conscientious.” We worked out of a guilty conscience for a system that would never be satisfied. We felt as if our conscience was a biological, organic part of our body, like an invisible inner hump.
Andrew was older than most of the volunteers, about thirty, and stayed on Yehiam longer than most of them. He left and came back, left and came back, like a lost son. He was the son of a strict captain who spent his entire life on ships, a father who drank whiskey instead of water. Andrew had been educated in Spartan boarding schools. On Kibbutz Yehiam, he felt at home for the first time in his life.
My departure for Tel Aviv had already been arranged, but I postponed it for a year in order to work on the kibbutz, like a pathetic penitent for something for which there was no repentance: my approaching desertion. Andrew also knew that he had to return to Scotland, forever.
Yael in Tel Aviv, 1980.
At the end of that year, I went abroad for the first time. Neither as a city person nor as a kibbutznik. I went as part of my job as a double agent, as an escort to Avital, a girl in a group I worked with during that conscience year. Her father, who had been in the French core group, left the kibbutz and went back to Paris. He was anxious for her to visit him there during the summer vacation, that is, the vacances. She was afraid of going abroad, of Paris, of the family, of the vacances. On the kibbutz, there was no family and no vacances. We worked full time for two thirds of the summer vacation, and went to the movement camp on the Sea of Galilee or the Jordan River for the remaining time. She wanted someone to look out for her, and took me. She was no less a part of my leaving the kibbutz than I was part of her visit to her father, who had left a long time ago. On the plane, she said that she could actually manage by herself and just wanted me to stay close to her. There, in Paris, her father arranged an apartment for me to live in. I woke up every morning to a world spun from imagination: tiled sidewalks, streetlamps, beauty that was immersed in soft gray light, so different from our constantly blazing sun. I woke up every morning to buy a croissant. And during that month, while Avital was still spending time with her father, I went to visit Andrew, who had returned to Glasgow, this time forever. He sent me a ticket for a luxurious bus that went from London to Glasgow, to come and visit him. I took the bus, but felt like Ayelet, who flew on the wings of her imagination in our favorite Kadya Molodovski poem:
Far away in Warsaw,
A marsh, a yard, a house.
There lives Ayelet, pretty girl,
With her blue parasol.
[…]
Ayelet longs to wander with the larks,
Until the day grows very, very dark.
Her mother calls out to the girl,
The windows chime and ring.
The father, black from soot,
Bangs his hammer as he calls:
Hurry home!
There is thread to be woven,
Patches to be darned,
Knots to be tied,
And buttons to be sewn.
[…]
Ayelet hitches wheels in a row,
And makes a train that travels to and fro.
The whistle blows, Ayelet goes,
Off to which distant lands – who knows?
I turned my head on the luxurious London-Glasgow bus to Glasgow to see who was calling me, who knew that I was there. And for a moment, I realized that no one was calling me to go back to work, no one was calling me at all. For the first time in my life, I was free.
I stayed in the huge, gorgeous, remodeled apartment where Andrew, his brother and a friend lived—the three of them were artists and architects who had designed it. They gave me my own room, a room with gilded walls and a huge bed, white sheets and fluffy pillows. The ceiling was very high and strewn with stars that they had molded into it. I lived in an apartment with three men, in my own room, on my own floor. Everything was different. They climbed a ladder into a pantry to take down enough sugar for the three teaspoonfuls I took. They never used sugar and loathed instant coffee, the sweet drug of our lives. We went to pubs and plays and to see the houses planned and built by Mackintosh, the Scottish architect. We went to Edinburgh to see a play, and they took me to see their parents in their kilts, and to visit their architect friends. I moved awkwardly in nice-to-meet-you hugs. We didn’t hug and kiss on the kibbutz. During the city hugs and kisses, we stopped breathing, executed our roles in the coerced, artificial choreography for what seemed an eternity. We didn’t hug our parents, our biological siblings or our fellow group members. Only the urbanites, and only if we had to.
We talked until morning. They ordered Indian food and asked me: hot or medium? I said hot. They asked again, politely, if I was sure. I said yes, of course, and thought, they’re weird, these Scots. Hot, let it cool off. But it was spicy, and they laughed endlessly about the mistakes I could never anticipate. I had no idea about food or about English. After all, we didn’t have to learn. We didn’t know anything. Not Arabic, not English, not Hebrew.
On the way back, waiting in line for the ferry in Dover, someone struck up a conversation with me, asking in stilted English, “Haven’t I didn’t meeting you in Ireland?” I recognized him; he was a year or two older than I was, but one of the people who had built the movement’s acclaimed zip lines. After completing his official job, he’d volunteered to build long, twisting zip lines for others, which would begin at the skyscraping tops of eucalyptus trees, and end at the Jordan River.
I replied in Hebrew: “We must have met at a zip line; a beam must have fallen on us and that’s where we know each other from, not from Ireland.” He recognized me, and I remembered his name. Shmuel. He looked like a man who had descended the Eiffel Tower on a zip line. Shorts, high shoes, a wallet sticking out of his back pocket, a wallet that would be stolen from him on his first metro ride in the city. He was going to Paris, he said, he didn’t know anyone. He had no place to live.
Our city apartment was never ours. It was at the disposal of the entire movement. And even if Dov, Avital’s father, left Yehiam a long time ago and returned to Paris after giving up on the possibility of building a new, progressive world, he certainly had to know that he couldn’t say no.
I have a place, I told Shmuel, filled with guilt about the luxurious circumstances of my life, made possible by the kibbutz and by Dov, Avital’s father. I told him that he could sleep in my apartment on the fifth floor, the attic apartment that Dov gave me for a month, but not in bed with me. But actually, there was no other bed there, and not even a kitchen. Okay, so with me, but no touching. That was acceptable among us, among our fellow group members. Although he did not grow up with us in Narcissus or Seagull, he was exactly like us.