Oneiron

  The story (one of them) begins: breaking up, love, infatuation

  Dovid and Sheila began to prepare for their big move. By day Dovid slogged away in the Herald Square Macy’s men’s department and saved money for plane tickets. Sheila left the band with a joyous slamming of doors and began to study Hebrew under the tutelage of Rabbi Noam Aurbach at the temple on Eighth Avenue, where members of the Reform Congregation Beth Elohim worshipped. “You don’t need God, but you need Hebrew,” Dovid said, and so Sheila obediently began beating the language into her head. She already knew the basics, just like any Jewish girl who had celebrated her Bat Mitzvah, but otherwise she hadn’t used the language. In her family, as in many of the families they knew, Jewishness was more of a curiosity than a living religion. Her family was Jewish because the family’s ancestors had been Jews, and their ancestors had suffered because they had been Jews, and that was why they suffered too, because they were Jews. But no one ever said that out loud. It was “unexperienced trauma”, as Sheila later expressed it with Shlomith-Shkhina’s mouth. Tradition, and the wrongs experienced by their ancestors lived among them, even though little apparent attention was given to either, and because of this they began to take on increasingly strange forms, worming their way under their skins and running amok there; they were all its victims. All except her, Shlomith-Shkhina, who forty years later would shed her false flesh and force the world to see the truth, the suffering from which it was possible to be freed through catharsis. (But it isn’t time for these themes yet, not until Shlomith is sixty-one years old and deathly ill.)

  Sheila and Dovid spent their evenings in the closet on Carroll Street. Dovid made Sheila delicious food and, leading her by the hand, taught her to eat and enjoy. He praised his beloved after each bite, and he also rewarded her with a kiss, because love was the same as food, and they had no lack of either. Dovid first placed a piece of puff pastry pie in his own mouth, between his lips, knelt before Sheila sitting at the table, and then kissed the piece of pie into her mouth. “My little bird,” Dovid cooed, and Sheila chewed and ground the piece with her teeth until the saliva did its job, making the pie soft and ready for swallowing, and then Sheila swallowed, and her strength grew day by day.

  No more food appeared in the chest of drawers. Dovid had asked Miriam to keep herself in check. Dovid had said to Miriam, “Don’t you understand you’re part of the problem?” which offended Miriam to the depths of her soul, even though her psychoanalyst friend had said basically the same thing. (But in a different way! That’s critical. Over a glass of wine, reassuringly and with much encouragement, while that Polack came into her own home to accuse her and make her feel bad, backing her into a corner and making her force her daughter to choose between her and that urchin, and even as she shouted, “Choose him or me!” she knew the answer, that her daughter would choose the meddler; her daughter, whom she had brought into the world and fought tooth and nail to keep in the world, would laugh and turn her back, as if nothing that had happened up to that point meant anything. She would leave with that insane demagogue, and Miriam couldn’t do a thing about it.)

  Sheila’s weight increased, and despite her indignation her mother had to admit, watching through the window as her daughter walked to her lessons with Noam Aurbach, that this apparent recovery delighted her even as it aroused painful questions with no answers, even though it also aroused fear: what was ultimately behind the improvement? She was still angry, hurt, and bewildered, and shaken to her core that some man had that kind of power over her daughter. But there was no getting around the fact that Sheila was filling out. Sheila alternated between horror and delight, delight and horror about her increasing weight, but even in her horror she continued chewing and grinding and swallowing, because Dovid was by her side. Dovid loved her exactly as she was, even her digestion and flatulence.

  In the evenings, once they had eaten and regained their strength, they lounged on their bed they had made on the floor. Dovid told Sheila kibbutz stories that his father’s older brother Zachariasz had recounted in his letters. Zachariasz was, excuse our choice of words, completely shiftless. In the late 1920s, his bosom friend had moved to a kibbutz named Degania, which was located on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, near the Golan Heights, and was the best place in the world, a paradise Zachariasz had to get to as well. Then the war came, and the Germans occupied Łódź. Zachariasz did the only non-shiftless thing in his life: as the Litzmannstadt ghetto was being set up, he slipped away to Israel. His mother gave him money for the journey, because dear Zachariasz was the best of the boys, better than Izajasz, Dovid’s future father, who on the verge of this catastrophe was focused on his future wife, the picture-perfect beauty Agnieszka, and refused to heed any warnings. If someone had to be saved, then let it be Zachariasz, Mama proclaimed in rage, and so Zachariasz was sent away to Degania.

  When the war was over, the old house was bleak: the only people living there were thirteen-year-old Dovid and his mother, who with her newborn son squeezed tight in her arms had succeeded by some miracle in escaping during the confusion of the Sobibór uprising and subsequent mass escape. She was no longer a picture-perfect beauty, for how could anyone be picturesque when her own family and her dear Izajasz and Izajasz’s mother and all his family except for one miserable brother had been killed, when her dreams had been killed, when her future languished in Dovid’s broken stare? Agnieszka closed her mouth up tight. Sobibór, where Dovid had been born and which they had both almost incomprehensibly escaped through a series of coincidences, ceased to exist.

  But the promised land existed. Degania, Israel’s first kibbutz, which the locals called the kvutza, bordered a 166-square-kilometre freshwater lake, which Dovid referenced in the same longing way as Zachariasz by the name Kinneret. Kinneret as in kinor, a violin: the dulcet lapping of the water reminded everyone who stood on its shores of that noble stringed instrument.

  “Close your eyes, and I’ll tell you,” Dovid said to Sheila and kissed her closed eyelids. Sheila’s full stomach gurgled melodiously as her carefully chewed food worked through her intestines, which were used to emptiness but now eagerly delighted in their new work, and squeezed the food rhythmically forward, compressing it into an ever tighter mass free of liquid, into the poop that was soon to come. But first this tale, this bedtime story, then evacuation and copulation, their evening routine, then kissing and more kissing, until sweet sleep came and rocked them toward the next day, once more a little closer to paradise.

  Kibbutz Methuselah: coming to her senses & breaking up (one of the stories ends)

  “Malka. Is. Not. Going. To. The. Babies’. House . . . Tonight!”

  Thus shouts Sheila, red in the face and now Shlomith, but not yet Shkhina. Shlomith as in shalom! as in peace, as in give peace a chance, as in what opponents to the Vietnam War sang in the summer of 1969 and what she still sang to a tremulous tune, to calm herself, four years later. Fundamentally it’s very simple. She had just wanted to be a new person. She had wanted to be a “new Jew”, the kind the kibbutzes grew in almost laboratory conditions, concealed as verdant vineyards, blooming Papaver somniferum poppy fields, bitter lemon groves, and sweet angiosperm dicotyledon Jaffa orange oases. Shlomith (now we must get used to this name again) had wanted peace of mind by the double handful, in ten-gallon servings. But there she now stood, in Kibbutz Methuselah, on the porch of a white stucco house, shouting at her legal spouse as if he were her worst enemy:

  “Malka. Is. Staying. With. Me. Tonight!”

  Of course that isn’t possible. Dovid’s face goes dark with irritation as he stares at his wife, who tries furiously to appeal to him with the strength of her anger. Nearby stands Malka and the nurse to the kibbutz’s five other two-year-olds, the metapelet, as these women are called, in this case a fat, repugnant child-hater named Zmira, whom Dovid blindly reveres. Zmira says aloud what Dovid has also come increasingly to believe within himself: “I’m sorry to say that Malka’s emotional difficulties are being caused by yo
u, Shlomith.” Unfortunately Malka isn’t adjusting because her mother is coaxing her into missing her, because during her daily visits her mother is cunningly creating an attachment that plants the seeds of sadness. That’s why the girl screams and cries and pulls Zmira’s hair and kicks Zmira in the stomach. That’s why each evening’s goodbye turns into a drama where, depending on the point of view, the wicked witch is either played by Shlomith or Zmira.

  But Dovid isn’t interested in different perspectives. Dovid believes one hundred percent in the kibbutz. When the kibbutz says through Zmira’s mouth that it is a parent’s duty to have fun with his child, Dovid believes it and has fun. When the kibbutz says through Zmira’s mouth that parents should give their children a little (but not too much) emotional fulfilment, Dovid does. A little. He tickles three-year-old Moti’s tummy, he rocks one-year-younger Malka in his arms, but he does it differently than Shlomith, who, as she tickles and rocks her children also plants something in them that she shouldn’t plant. How does she do it? And above all: why does she do it?

  They’ve been happy for four years. Dovid believes so. Four years of joy, but then, after Malka was born, everything suddenly begins to crumble in their hands. Shlomith develops strange symptoms. No, Shlomith is scheming, Dovid corrects himself. In his mind, Dovid assembles piece by piece the ragged image that is beginning to emerge of his wife, his dearest beloved, whom he brought here, away from the evil world, whom he healed and impregnated twice. Now the picture is recognizable again: in it is Shlomith, thankless and resentful Shlomith, mentally disturbed Shlomith. Shlomith has picked up the heaviest weapons of all, their two children, as pawns in her game. Why on earth is she doing this? Dovid clenches his left hand in a fist, crushing this question, smashing it ever smaller as he squeezes his fingers, and then it’s gone, and only the answer remains. Because Shlomith is evil. Evil, evil, evil.

  With Moti everything went perfectly. Shlomith relinquished her firstborn to the infants’ house at four days of age, as was appropriate—at that point she was “OK” with it. She visited the house to nurse their son for six months and not a day more. Only the twenty-four weeks that were allowed. Shlomith even thought it was fun to call herself “the mother organism”—a term Dovid thought up—as she left with her breasts dripping milk to walk the three hundred meters to the other building. It was a good-natured joke they shared: “The mother organism waddles again.” Ha-ha-ha!

  Dovid clenches his other hand in a fist and looks to Zmira, who squeezes the screaming Malka tighter in her arms and starts walking with her bellowing burden toward the infants’ house.

  But Malka isn’t a baby any more. Malka is already a little girl who uses her own brain, and Shlomith knows it. She has a special connection to this child. The girl speaks in very short sentences, only a few paltry words, but her fearless expression illuminates the idea. Malka’s place is with her mother: they both agree about that. But how can she say this to the kibbutz so the kibbutz will believe? To the kibbutz, which speaks with so many different mouths, and increasingly with Dovid’s mouth, which has started to nauseate her, against which she absolutely no longer intends to press her own mouth. Because Dovid has turned evil. Evil! Dovid has joined forces with all of Methuselah against her.

  Shlomith has listened to the voice of her heart, but Methuselah thinks she has committed terrible crimes. A week ago she peeled and separated an orange for her child and received a warning for her trouble. There is only permission to eat in the common dining room, says Methuselah with the mouth of every single member. Personal snacks are the lea-ven-of-pri-va-ti-za-tion, and they also bind children to their mother in an inappropriate way. Dovid agrees. “Don’t irritate them for no reason. Malka and Moti will get to eat plenty of oranges tomorrow.”

  The next morning Shlomith skips her work shift in the barn. The cows moo in agony with swollen udders as Shlomith lies on her back in the orange grove, surrounded by the fruit she has torn from the trees, and weeps in anger.

  Every child is everyone’s child, the Methuselites sing as they plough the fields and sweat in the vineyards, to the same limping tune they try to use with all the hymns meant to bind the kibbutz together, to each according to his needs, from each according to his means. But Shlomith can’t blame Dovid for this. Dovid told her back in Park Slope, as they lay on that mattress with their bellies full of nourishing food and waited for sleep, that professionals raise the children of the kibbutz. Adults have a responsibility to live their own lives. Then it had felt like an almost romantic idea: adults have a responsibility to live their own lives. Not, for example, her mother Miriam’s fussing, meddling life, a nauseating life of self-sacrifice but her own life. In that closet in Park Slope, Shlomith had closed her happy eyes. She had thought of the first years of the twentieth century, the indescribable zeal and ecstasy which had driven Jews to journey there from every corner of the globe. Most came from Eastern Europe, having had enough of stifling ghetto life and cruel persecutions. They came and worked the barren, deserted land . . . Almost deserted . . . Their land . . .

  Dovid swallows his anger once again and lets his hands relax and open. He turns again to Shlomith standing on the porch of the white stucco house and arranges his words carefully. “Zmira cares for Malka just enough and with exactly the right intensity so she can naturally find her own place. And that place is with her peer group. You know that. So why this exhibition again, dear?”

  Dovid speaks to her like to an idiot. And every night when Malka and Moti are taken away from her, she cries. For Dovid, the children’s disappearance is a relief. For Dovid, the children are toys, which someone else can clean up and put away once the games are done. And everyone thinks that’s “OK”. Of course, the whole kibbutz plays with the children! The children are like Harry Harlow’s monkeys, and Shlomith can’t stand it any more. She could let everything else go, including that cigarettes have to be ordered through a committee established for that specific purpose, but ruining children is really serious. Shlomith has noticed a number of concerning things. The young people of Methuselah are apathetic. They’re deadbeat after school, farm work, and homework; they aren’t given a moment of their own time. They always shuffle around in a group, and if you happen to address a personal question to one of them, without glancing at the others, they begin to babble in a way that makes you wonder if they imagine the members of the education committee are applauding behind their backs.

  The most frightening thing is that they don’t imagine. They don’t imagine anything. The ability for imagination has been rooted out of them. When they speak, they’re sincere. All that bullshit comes straight from their hearts. All the platitudes, the banalities, the predigested truths: not the slightest hint of doubt. Not even a second of embarrassment.

  Shlomith’s eyes begin to open. This wasn’t actually emancipation with socialist, Zionist, and Tolstoian flavors, as Dovid had described to her in Park Slope. This was a machine construction program. They were recruited for Methuselah to produce “new Jews”, robots that look like humans but have been programmed to slog their guts out without troubling their heads with revolutionary ideas, who had hands for building a new world but minds untarnished by excessive intellectualism. Who weren’t neurotic shit talkers.

  Even though Shlomith didn’t know it at the time, she wasn’t alone in these thoughts. Around the same time a certain Bruno Bettelheim had visited Atid, another Israeli kibbutz, where he conducted a participant observation study about child rearing. He published his conclusions in 1969 in the book The Children of the Dream, which became a bestseller and one of the most talked-about books of the year. “The kibbutz-born generation is committed to an entirely different Sachlichkeit, a literalness, a matter-of-fact objectivity which has no place for emotions,” Bruno B. said on an episode of 60 Minutes Shlomith didn’t see since she was living the final honeymoon months of her great life change in Israel. “Let’s say they’re more realistic, mechanistic, objective, than we are; less humanistic, less involved,” Bru
no B. continued, adding, “One unique thing about them is that they immediately give up on an opinion as soon as they feel (or fear) that group opinion leans the other way.”

  Finally Bettelheim let loose with both barrels. “A relative emotional flatness may be just the selective factor that determines who stays on in this relatively simple, undemanding environment.” And as if to soften the blow of this claim, somewhat apologetically he added, “Although the second generation of kibbutzniks do not create science or art, are neither leaders nor great philosophers nor innovators, maybe it is they who are the salt of the earth without whom no society can endure.”

  Never before had the father of 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt, received so much hate mail, fully a fifth of which hinted at Mossad exacting revenge on him.

  Although later revelations about Bruno Bettelheim’s personal history give reasons for a wide range of doubts—he fled to the United States after using his connections to get out of the Buchenwald concentration camp, pulled a degree and work history in child psychology out of a hat once in the New World, maneuvered his way into a surprisingly long career as a helper of disturbed children, and then was accused of violence and sexual abuse and took his own life—the conclusions he drew about the kibbutz movement weren’t complete bunk. At least Shlomith’s experiences supported Bettelheim’s claims about the ramifications of the kibbutz ideology, the spiritual banality, the callousness, and the unquestioned group discipline. And it’s also true that someone who lives on a kibbutz and doesn’t trouble her head with critical questions is probably happier than one who goes out to conquer the world.

  However, Shlomith was not interested in lukewarm, evenly distributed happiness. When she encountered her first MASS DEATH OF IMAGINATION right after moving to Israel, she didn’t understand yet what was going on. The Six-Day War in June of 1967 aroused questions in Shlomith, but she banished them deep into the recesses of forgetfulness. She threw herself into the emotions of the community, which was as easy as breathing. Not until later did she unearth the questions again. The numbers were chilling: four percent of the population of Israel lived in kibbutzes and about the same portion fought in the army, but fully twenty-five percent of those who died in the war were from kibbutzes. Five young people from Methuselah died, which was an incomprehensible number given its small size. What happened in those battles? Why did Noam, Yoel, Gidon, Yoske, and Ben-Zion foolishly push their way to the front and put themselves in the line of fire?