by Edeet Ravel
You act as if you have special privileges.
RICKY
I thought I did have special privileges. Maybe it’s my
imagination, but didn’t we at one time take long walks
in the field and talk about our dreams? Before you
started going into town to visit your cousin.
RITA
Look, Ricky. I want my own room, I want to do what I
want when I want. I don’t want to be tied down.
RICKY
Don’t give me that claptrap. I know you better than any-
one around here. You always asked me to be with you
when you were alone, to listen to your thoughts, sympa-
thize with your aches and pains. I read Omar Khayyam
to you to help you fall asleep. And when you quarrelled
with one of the girls, on whose shoulder did you cry?
RITA
Ricky, maybe you should find—
RICKY
Let’s get married. How about tomorrow?
Dori
Jonathan’s leaving Eldar! He’s going to another kibbutz with his parents.
I think it’s because of his father. His father who eats blood. Because when I told Daddy about the blood he didn’t want to talk about it but he believed me and he said nothing about Oded would surprise me.
Jonathan’s leaving tomorrow morning. This is our last time in the same Group.
Baby Diary
July 14
The doctor saw the rash, suggested putting [illegible] for a few days. He said it’s not serious, rather something that is common to many babies. She’s very cute. She’s quiet, easy, sleeps well, and is growing. She already doesn’t look like a new baby. Her face is pretty, sweet. The order of her feedings today was: I gave all the feedings 4:00 a.m.–8:00–11:00–3:30–6:30–midnight–6:30. [sic]
Today Naftali took David to Nahariya. I don’t feel pressured to spend time with him. It’s completely different with two children. Even though I feel more confident and calm with Dori compared to my experience with a first child, I want to spend time with David. I also worry about him but I can’t devote myself to him as before. Sometimes it works out that I can be with him the entire evening and sometimes almost nothing at all.
And also all Dori’s accomplishments, I don’t manage to switch with Naftali at the moment that she does them. With David we were always together in the evening. Now I’m completely alone. Naftali visits during the day but it’s not the same.
Dori
That whole business with tying Elan to the bed again. I’m really getting fed up with that business.
At least this time we didn’t have to watch.
Our First Year
4 May 1949. Most of the ploughing for the vegetable gardens has been completed.
The 60 dunams or so of Arab grapevines have been pruned.
One of the buildings has been converted into a chicken run.
A new machine and tool shed is under construction.
Sturdily and attractively designed new tables have been finished by our carpentry shop for the new Dining Hall, which will soon be ready for use.
Our first fifty pullets arrived, and we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of a thousand chicks.
Dori
That Alice in Wonderland.
If you’re going to turn into a pig dear I’ll have nothing more to do with you. I laugh and Daddy laughs and we both laugh until we can’t stop.
Daddy puts on the radio to hear the news. I don’t understand a single word. It’s in Hebrew but not the kind I know.
The man on the radio says good evening and Daddy answers good evening. I ask Daddy why do you say good evening—you know he can’t hear you. Daddy smiles and says it’s friendly.
I make a fist and bang the bump on Daddy’s forehead because that doesn’t exactly make sense. I ask why is Jonathan leaving? but Daddy doesn’t want to say. I ask can we go visit him on his new kibbutz and he says it might be hard to get there. I ask is it far and he doesn’t know what to say. Finally he says it might be complicated to get there. I guess it’s far away across the mountains.
The pundak48 song comes on. I love that song. It’s my favourite song in Hebrew—
And the balladeer said
Never mind never mind
And he raised a glass
To the heroes of the past
In the smoke—whistle, cluck—of the small
pundak
I don’t know all the words and I don’t know what a pundak is or a balladeer but I love the tune and how the balladeer says never mind never mind and the whistle and cluck. I asked Daddy what a pundak is but he shrugged his shoulders and didn’t know what to say. Finally he said a place where people sit. Why would there be a word for a place where people sit?
I actually had a record in Canada with the pundak song but unfortunately I sat on it by mistake and it broke into two pieces. I cried and cried but Daddy laughed. He said he’d get another one but he couldn’t find that record in Canada.
Eldar Eldar Eldar.
Eldar Eldar Eldar
Dori
I really really don’t want to go back tonight. I’m going to say I’m sick and then Daddy will have to stay with me.
I say I think I have fever. Daddy kisses my forehead and says when we get to the Children’s House we’ll take your temperature.
He asks if I want him to carry me and I climb on his back. If only the Children’s House was a thousand kilometres away.
Before you know it we’re here. Daddy lets me down and tells Shoshana I promised Dori we’d take her temperature. Shoshana brings the thermometer to the entrance. Daddy never comes in more than the entrance unless it’s for my goodnight kiss. Shoshana hands me the thermometer but somehow it slips and falls on the floor and breaks into tiny pieces. Shoshana and Daddy burst out laughing.
Everyone has to stay away while Shoshana picks up the pieces with a dustpan because if mercury gets into your body you die.
Daddy and Shoshana laugh some more and then he leaves. I don’t understand this at all. How come if the thermometer broke it means I’m not sick? And how come if a thermometer breaks it’s funny?
I begin to cry. I sit on my chair and cry right through supper. There’s tongue for supper. A cow’s tongue. Disgusting if you ask me but I’m hungry so I eat it. I eat it and cry and Shoshana laughs at me because I have to stop crying every time I take a bite.
Baby Diary
November 22
I handed over the 2:00 feeding to the Minder, Edna. How strange it was not to come to her again at that hour! I felt something was missing. But it seems I didn’t regret it as much as I did when I handed over the feeding with David. My work keeps me so busy and so utterly depleted of energy, that the extra rest is quite simply healing. But that’s not to say that I don’t feel a sense of longing. I hurry to her earlier than the other mothers, to kiss her delicious soft cheeks, to hug her close to me.
She turns in a circle on her belly. Today she did a full circle. She also raises her legs forward, a hint of the crawling that will soon come. She’s patient, kind-hearted, and always happy.
She won’t receive a full bottle but rather pudding in a cup. She doesn’t suck much at that hour anyhow.
Dori
Usually Shoshana wakes us in the morning but today we woke up by ourselves. There’s no one here—only us.
We go wild. Lulu and Gilead come into our room and we all get wild together. We scream and yell and jump on the beds. We spill the peepee from the potty on Elan’s bed.
Elan gets very scared. He stands on his bed with his back against the wall and his hands against the wall and he shivers and smiles in that worried way. I feel bad for him but I try not to think about it. He makes tiny scared sounds while he shivers. We push him down on the bed. He tries to get up and we push him down again.
Only Skye doesn’t join us. She stays in her bed and watches.
Our First Year
18 May 1949. Worked in our vineyards today, elevating the vines on crossed stakes. Long, black, gnarled vines, twisting along the ground, with the green new growths being stuck up into the air like giant fans.
Beautiful day; every morning the long walk down the slope, a gothic descent from our castle-like home along stony paths strung with thorns, slabs and tables of rocks, with ants, chameleons, and busy insects covering the earth with a lacework of agitated life and movement.
The view from the south hill towards the village is toy-like, magical. Fig trees like flat candy dishes on a white stem of glass, the olive trees like balls of rich, deep silver-green, the terraces like pebble fences, the fields of poppies and the blue stuff like a wash of water colour, the aluminum roofs on the wood huts gleam with an intensity that makes them more fierce-looking than the sun, the brown ploughed patches, the fields of grass, the parched boulders and out-croppings—can anything in the country compare with our Eldar?
Dori
Everything is taking me a long time today. The other children already left to visit their parents but I’m still eating my bread and jam.
It’s quiet in the Children’s House with no one here. I get that feeling again—the feeling that I have Doreet’s big loose face. I’m very ugly with that face.
My hands are full of sticky jam so I go to the sink to wash them. I’m wondering—do your hands get cleaner the more times you wash them? I wash my hands over and over and then I run very fast to the Room without touching anything and I say to Daddy do my hands look clean? And he says yes very clean and I say really really really clean? And he says yes really really clean but I can tell he’s only trying to make me happy.
That was an experiment. I proved that if you wash your hands one time or a lot of times it’s exactly the same. Exactly exactly the same.
Precedents
Out, out damn spot!
Dori
It’s our day to go to Galron. Everyone’s shouting microbus microbus! But you know what? In the end a microbus is just a small bus.
I sit next to Skye. Suddenly I remember about the shelter. I ask Skye do you know what a shelter is? Skye says they’re in case the Enemy drops a bomb on us.
I say a boy asked me to do sex in there. Skye says he asked Hagar too but it hurt so she told him to stop. I heard her tell my sister. I say I didn’t like him. Skye says he’s new here.
Skye reads the sign on the road. She knows how to read because her father taught her. I think I know who her father is. I think he’s the serious man with the moustache. Serious like Skye.
Transcript of Meeting August 1961
Topic:
Integration of Outside Students—Parental Votes
Chair:
Amos Atar
Amos:
It was suggested at the last meeting that the parents of
each high-school grade be allowed to decide by majority
vote on integration for that grade.
This is our umpteenth meeting on this topic and I’d
like to make a request that points which have already
been made should not be made again. We’re here to vote
on a specific topic which came up at the last meeting but
which we didn’t have time to discuss.
To summarize the points which have already been
made, I have made a list, which I’d like to present, in no
particular order:
a) segregation reminds us of Jim Crow;
b) we need members and these children are more likely
to stay if we integrate them completely;
c) if we don’t take in outside children, our own chil-
dren won’t be able to be educated here as we don’t
have the numbers to create a high-school facility,
and that means we’ll only see them on the weekend;
d) children who may be disturbed, wild, or even delin-
quent will have a bad effect on our own children and
may bring discord into their lives;
e) this has nothing to do with Jim Crow because these
children are not average children and our doubts
have nothing whatsoever to do with race or city
background (on the contrary, we want as mixed a
population as possible) but with the fact that many
of the children are troubled due to early experiences;
f) we are teaching our children to accept and educate
others and to be inclusive—what better opportun-
ity is there to put those values into daily practice;
g) we believe the influence will work in the other dir-
ection, and this belief in education is at the heart of
all we hold dear;
h) it is our moral duty to help others in need, and to
quote the Talmud, “if I am only for myself, what
am I?” not to mention Marx et. al.;
i) these are Israeli children and their conditions have
been deplorable, the country must do all that it can
to help them, and we are duty-bound to try and
remedy the neglect they have suffered;
j) we don’t have the resources to accept high-school
children and segregate them so it’s either integrate
them or not take them at all;
k) we are doing more than our share already—we’ve
taken in many social service cases largely at our own
expense;
l) can we afford a high-school in the first place?
m) we have successfully integrated the young out-
side children sent to us by social services;
n) not everyone agrees that this has been an unquali-
fied success.
Have I covered everything?
Varda:
Thank you, Amos, that’s very helpful.
Naftali:
Yes, very well done.
Amos:
What we’re voting on today is the proposal that came
up last week. The proposal is that we allow the parents
of each grade to vote on whether they agree to integra-
tion for their children. And now I would be most grate-
ful if someone else took over as I’m running a fever and
should really be in bed.
Dori
We’re here!
The Galron Group is much bigger than ours. Their teacher is called Carmella and her hair is really the colour of caramel. What surprises me is that her hair is puffed! I guess they don’t care as much about things like that in Galron. Or else they care but Carmella doesn’t care.
Mummy says hair that’s all done up makes women look like they have a cake on their head. It makes Mummy laugh to say a cake on their head and I laugh with her. But Carmella doesn’t have a cake on her head. She only has a bit of a puff.
Carmella has a nice smile. She’s a sleepy person. She likes to sit on a chair and when she needs something she asks a child to get it for her. She asks very nicely with her nice smile. I like her.
We play with new toys. I find a hammering toy. We used to have a hammering toy in Eldar but I haven’t seen it in a while. I like that toy. You hammer the pieces of wood down through the holes then you turn it around and hammer them the other way. It sounds boring but it’s fun. Fun to see the pieces go down until they’re flat. Boom boom boom.
Carmella writes a sentence on the board and tells us we can copy what she wrote on a piece of paper and draw a picture underneath. We all sit at tables and copy the words and draw pictures. Then we go out to the playground to play. Then we have juice and crackers and then the microbus comes to take us home.
I like school.
22 September 1955
Two Killed and Ten Wounded in Infiltrator Attack
Infiltrators yesterday shot at a bus heading towards Meron. Our correspondent in Safed reports that at 7:30 PM the Haifa-Safed bus was atta
cked on the incline between Kibbutz Eldar and Meron, about 150 metres from the moshav. Gunfire opened from two positions and two hand grenades were thrown.
The wounded driver maintained control of the vehicle until the last minute and was able to prevent it from rolling into the wadi. He had time to call out, ‘I have a gun, take it,’ before collapsing. The shooting continued for three to four minutes. A truck driver stopped to assist the passengers. Armed Meron residents rushed to the scene and helped the wounded. One of the dead was a tourist from the United States.