Ein Shemer’s neighbors were Arab Israeli villages in the area known as the Triangle, and the Jordanian border was only a few kilometers away; but Avital grew up with a sense of safety. As soon as the last rains ended around Passover, the children went barefoot and didn’t put on shoes again until the first rains of autumn. In winter they ate oranges and grapefruits off the trees; in summer they roasted fresh-picked corn on campfires. Work and play were interchangeable: the children would be placed atop a pen filled with just-picked cotton and jump up and down until it flattened, while a comrade played the accordion. They learned to cherish the hard beauty of the land of Israel, wildflowers growing in porous stone, meager forests of thin pines clinging to rocky slopes. One day, during school hours, a teacher rushed from class to class and summoned the children outside: an oriole had been spotted. Everyone quietly filed out and watched until the bird flew away.
AT AGE FOURTEEN, Avital was chosen by Hashomer Hatzair to become a counselor, leading a group of the kibbutz’s eleven-year-olds. Other counselors told their scouts about the Rosenbergs, the accused atomic spies executed by the American government, but Avital felt incompetent to lead a political discussion.
Instead Avital emphasized the movement’s other values, love of land and hevreh. He led his scouts on hikes, singing all the way. “El hama’ayan!” he called out: To the spring! “To the spring!” his scouts repeated. “Came a little lamb,” Avital sang. “Came a little lamb,” voices echoed. When one of the children wearied, Avital carried him on his back.
“Listen, hevreh,” he told his twenty scouts one evening. “I’m going to set up camp in the forest, and you’re going to have to find me.” The forest was three kilometers away from the kibbutz. But how will we find you? the children protested. “There’s a full moon,” Avital said, smiling. “Just follow the music of the forest.”
He went ahead and, when he came to a clearing, retrieved from his knapsack a cordless phonograph and a recording of Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave. As the music played, he began a campfire. Soon the scouts appeared, drawn by the music and the fire.
AYN RAND IN EIN SHEMER
THERE WAS ONE threat to Avital’s harmonious world: his father, Kuba, Ein Shemer’s architect. Kuba had taught himself the basics of architecture and had planned almost every structure in Ein Shemer from its founding in 1927; later the kibbutz sent him for two years of formal study abroad. Even among the driven pioneers of Ein Shemer, Kuba was relentless. He crammed a drafting table into the tiny room he shared with his wife, Franka, and which was barely large enough to contain bed, table, and dresser. When Avital would visit from the young people’s communal house, he would find Kuba bent over the latest plans.
Kuba longed to build grandly. But his opponents denounced his work as impractical, accused him of preferring aesthetics over need. He designed buildings that seemed to them whimsical, like the Bauhaus-style rounded balcony of the “pink house,” so called because Kuba insisted on painting it pink. They ridiculed his experiments, like placing a kitchenette in the bathroom. When he designed the kibbutz movement’s first two-story apartments, the comrades complained: Why had he put the bathroom on the first floor and the bedroom on the second? And why were the ceilings so low, and where were they supposed to put a broom?
Kuba fought back, turning the weekly kibbutz meetings into shouting matches. His favorite book was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Kuba revered its main character, architect Howard Roark, who champions a classical vision against the crass tastes of society, which ultimately destroys him. Kuba insisted that Avital read the book too. “This is me,” he said, referring to Roark. There was something astonishing in the passion of Kuba, committed Marxist, for Ayn Rand, ideologue of selfishness. But he shared with Rand an identification with the brilliant outsider, the radical individualist misunderstood by conformists.
Avital feared his father’s artistic ego. To a kibbutznik, the word I sounded vaguely immoral. All that was great and worthy in Israel had been achieved by transmuting I into we. When Avital spoke of the work in the orchards, it wasn’t about him as manager but about the team.
Kuba threatened to quit the kibbutz, and Avital worried that one day the comrades would oblige him by throwing him out.
Avital showed artistic talent and loved to paint. But he tried to compensate for Kuba’s assault on the collective with commitment to its harmony. He offered his creativity to the commune, painting holiday stage sets and drawing sketches for Ein Shemer’s mimeographed newsletter.
Most of all he tried to be a peacemaker. Kuba felt himself surrounded by enemies? Avital turned the kibbutz into one extended hevreh. The son of Kuba’s worst enemy, Benek, who supervised Ein Shemer’s building projects and resented the extravagant architect, was Rafi, whom Avital had “adopted” in kindergarten and protected against bullies. The two became best friends, and never spoke about their fathers.
AVITAL IN LOVE
TOWARD EVENING, the work in the cotton fields and orange orchards done, the men and women and young people of Ein Shemer walked in silent procession to the cemetery. It was late November 1958, cold and raining. Of course, thought Avital; it always rained on the anniversary of Anatole’s death. The kibbutzniks, wearing US Army surplus coats and shapeless plastic raincoats, walked beneath the limp wet branches of the eucalyptus trees that shadowed the little cemetery. They passed the rows of flat white stones and came to a stone from which rose a modest pillar and on which was chiseled a single word, Anatole’s Hebrew name, “Elimelech.”
Though Avital had only been five years old at the time, he vividly recalled that terrible day in 1946, just before Hanukkah, when Anatole was killed. It began with a rumor. Word reached Ein Shemer that British soldiers were surrounding Kibbutz Givat Haim, searching for “illegal immigrants,” as the British referred to Holocaust survivors trying to reach the land of Israel. Jews from around the area, including forty young men from Ein Shemer, rushed toward the besieged kibbutz.
In fact there were no survivors hiding there, and the British were instead searching for members of the Haganah Zionist militia who had destroyed a radar station monitoring the sea for refugee boats. An overwhelming British force—ten thousand soldiers, backed by tanks—seized the kibbutz.
Several hundred Jews began walking toward a line of British troops positioned near the gate. A British officer ordered them to stop. The unarmed Jews continued to move forward. The British raised their bayoneted rifles. “Onward, for the homeland!” someone called out. No one broke ranks. The soldiers opened fire. Eight Jews, including Anatole, fell.
The crowd gathered around Anatole’s grave. He was Ein Shemer’s martyr, the only member of the kibbutz to have died that day. Even now, twelve years later, the wound felt open. No one recited Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead: Ein Shemer had divorced the God of Israel. But there were passionate eulogies, religious in their invocation of sacrifice.
Avital was watching Ada, Anatole’s daughter. She was standing beside her mother and older sister, revealing only an intense seriousness. Ada, with high cheekbones and slender eyes, was fourteen, and Avital, barely three years older, had decided she was the love of his life.
Avital had observed her qualities. Unusual in someone so young, she seemed indifferent to what others thought of her. She took care of the weaker children, just as Avital did. He noted how she would take responsibility without being asked, like washing the cups and the coffeepot after a campfire. He noted her modesty.
Avital didn’t tell Ada that he intended one day to marry her. For all his exuberance, Avital was shy. He didn’t join the other teenage boys in peeking into the girls’ shower; his friends laughed at how he blushed when they told an off-color joke. But long before Avital dared approach, Ada had felt his luminous eyes on her. In the young people’s dining room, in the forest on overnights, there was Avital, keeping his distance, watching. Peering into me, Ada thought. To her surprise, she didn’t feel invaded but caressed. She wasn’t interested in a boyfriend.
But he does have beautiful eyes—
Avital’s moment came in the orchards. During winter, Ein Shemer’s young people worked for three hours after school, helping with the orange harvest. Avital, in charge of the teenagers, put Ada in his group. He taught her how to clip an orange, leaving a bit of stem for beauty, how to grasp the fruit even when one’s hand seemed to freeze in the wind. When he saw that she was afraid to climb the ladder, he leaped up and held his hand out, and continued to hold her hand even after she ascended. “Pitzit,” he said tenderly; little one.
They met furtively, away from the prying collective. Their rendezvous point was a row of cypress trees that protected the orchards from the wind. Ada confided to Avital emotions she couldn’t share with anyone else, her longing for the father whose absence defined her life. She had been barely two years old when he died. Who was this man who had disappeared into history and whom the collective could recall only through its own most cherished ideals?
“I saw them get off the truck,” Avital said to her, recalling the day of Anatole’s death. “Completely quiet, as if they were afraid to speak. You felt the silence for days afterward.”
“I’m angry at him for leaving me. Why didn’t he think of his children before making his heroic gesture?”
They were chaste. But that wasn’t unusual. Despite titillating stories in the city about kibbutz life, Hashomer Hatzair discouraged sex between its scouts. A shomer (guardian or watchman) must be pure in thought, speech, and action, proclaimed the movement’s “ten commandments,” and Avital and Ada took those injunctions as seriously as religious Jews took the Ten Commandments. Aside from mixed showers until sixth grade—an experience Avital recalled with embarrassment—there was little intimate encounter between the sexes. The young kibbutzniks regarded each other more as siblings than as potential partners.
Sensing Ada’s need for freedom, Avital was careful not to call her his girlfriend. He resolved to be patient.
“What would you think if I became a combat pilot?” he asked one evening as they strolled on the quiet road outside the kibbutz.
“That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me,” she said carefully. “I don’t want more risks.”
No more risks, that is, among those I love.
“So I’ll go to the paratroopers,” Avital offered.
“That makes me happy,” Ada said.
THE SOLDIER’S SONG
THROUGH THE SUMMER of 1959, Avital, nearly eighteen, had prepared for imminent induction, running and climbing and leaping off the kibbutz’s two-story buildings to simulate a parachute jump.
Avital was drafted into the paratroopers at the beginning of the rainy season. The IDF bus dropped the new recruits off several kilometers from the base. Carrying a kit bag weighted with helmet, ammunition clips, pouches, and canteens, they began running. They entered the base and continued running—and, it seemed to Avital, they didn’t stop running for the next eighteen months. At night they collapsed in muddy boots and rain-soaked clothes for a few hours of fitful rest, often interrupted for moving camp or yet another jog up a hilltop, backpack filled with rocks. Some nights they got no sleep at all, continuing without rest through the next day’s regimen of target practice and grenade throwing and wall scaling and shooting their way through abandoned buildings to simulate urban warfare. Half the recruits dropped out, but Avital persisted.
After basic training, they jumped. Often at night: the door opens to blackness, fierce wind. A soldier stands on either side of the opening to shove out the hesitant. Avital needs no prodding. He leaps, inhaled by the universe. Then the chute opens and the work begins. Check that the strings aren’t tangled, shift the reserve chute from chest to armpit to avoid landing against it and breaking ribs. Approaching earth, release the sack containing gun and ammunition belt and let it drop. Then press legs together, bend knees slightly, and prepare to push back against the rising earth.
Friday evening, after a near-sleepless week of climbing and crawling and navigating in moonless nights, they sat around a campfire and sang. Songs extolling the fellowship of fighters and remembering the fallen, “the beautiful and pure young men.”
Yet even here there was discord. For the first time in his life, Avital encountered hostility for his beloved Hashomer Hatzair. Its acronym, Shmutz, also happened to mean “filth” in Yiddish, and some of the soldiers delighted in that coincidence. Avital laughed when they threw rocks at his tent to rouse him in the morning and shouted, “Wake up, Communist!” No problem, hevreh, I can take a joke—
“You Shmutzniks care about saving the whole world,” a friend said to him. “Why don’t you worry about your own people?”
“We care about the Jewish people and the world,” said Avital. Where’s the contradiction?
Avital graduated officer training school with the rank of lieutenant and was given command of a course for squad commanders. He adopted the same methods of inspiration with his soldiers that he had applied as a youth movement counselor. When a soldier fell asleep during guard duty, Avital sent the offender not to jail but on leave. “Take a break,” Avital said. “And when you understand what you’ve done, come back.” For Avital, rank was merely a technical function: he befriended his soldiers and his superiors. Once, during a training exercise, his fellow junior officers were astonished to see a general hug him.
AVITAL AND ADA wrote each other regularly, sometimes every day. His soldiers joked about his fidelity: he refused to join them on forays into town to pick up girls—easy for the boys in red boots and berets. On leave, he assisted Ada, who was now a counselor in Hashomer Hatzair. Avital helped her scouts build a bridge across a small wadi. They found abandoned logs, and he taught the children how to bind them without resorting to nails—for Hashomer Hatzair, a violation of nature. Avital confided to Ada his vision of married life: “A home has to be a safe place. Without gossip, without bitterness. No mud, only pure water. Like a flowing stream.”
Toward the end of Avital’s service, the paratroopers prepared an air show for twelfth-graders from around the country, to entice them to volunteer for the corps. Ada’s senior class was invited. Avital was excited that Ada would glimpse something of his life. In these last three years she had refused to ask him about the army, refused to be enchanted by his military persona. She loved the boy of the orchards, not the hero in training. But now, hoped Avital, the two most important parts of his life would converge.
The students assembled on a beach and watched paratroopers jumping from propeller planes. Avital was assigned to security on the beach.
Something was wrong: one of the parachutes wasn’t opening. He’s falling! people shouted. Ada turned away in shock. The soldier fell into the sea. The students were dispatched to their buses before the body was retrieved.
On his next leave home, Avital braced himself for Ada’s reaction. Surely the incident had only intensified her fear of losing a loved one to the all-devouring needs of the nation. But Ada never mentioned it, and neither did Avital.
A COLLECTIVE WEDDING
AVITAL RETURNED TO Ein Shemer and was placed in charge of the orchards. The veterans knew he could be trusted with the future of the kibbutz, because he understood that without constant watering and pruning, this miracle conjured from the void would wither. They saw in Avital and his friends their own vindication. In a single generation—from Poland to Ein Shemer—the kibbutz had created young people who seemed to lack even a genetic memory of exile. The astonishing rapidity with which the rerootedness of the Jews had occurred was proof of its rightness, its harmony with the laws of the universe.
Avital loved the founders. They had come to the land of Israel as teenagers, without family; and when their communities were destroyed in Europe, they became an extended family of orphans. Here they reinvented themselves from children of the bourgeoisie into farmers and welders. One veteran taught himself farming from a Russian textbook, using a dictionary to explain the technical terms. Ada’s stepfather, a self-trained agronomist, i
nvented a new strain of apple. When the veterans went on a hike to the ancient desert fortress of Masada, Avital and Ada volunteered to join them, helping the old people up the steep slope, carrying packs and preparing meals.
They were, friends said, the ultimate couple. No emotional scenes, no raised voices. The opposite of an “agricultural couple,” so estranged from each other you could drive a tractor between them.
IN THE WINTER of 1965, they married.
Avital and Ada would have preferred a civil marriage, but that wasn’t an option in Israel. And so they endured a curt religious ceremony in the office of the “red rabbi,” so called for specializing in weddings of kibbutzniks and not imposing stringent religious demands.
At night the entire kibbutz came out to celebrate—three marriages at once, to cut expenses. Ada wore a light blue dress and held flowers. Avital wore his best khakis. A band sang satirical songs about the kibbutz. The founders marveled at the bounty of chicken and cake and fruit. Ein Shemer’s secretary general, the elected official charged with running the kibbutz, blessed the new couple with happiness and fertility, recalled Ada’s martyred father, and noted the generous buffet. Who would have believed, she said, that we would ever achieve such abundance? “I believed it,” called out Hazan, leader of Hashomer Hatzair, who’d been invited as a family friend. “I never doubted we would reach this day.”
A kibbutznik took snapshots of the wedding couples, but when he tried to photograph Avital and Ada, Avital waved him away. Ada would have liked a photograph of the two of them alone, but she too was uncomfortable being the center of attention, even on her wedding night.
A CRISIS OF FAITH
KUBA’S FEUD WITH the kibbutz worsened.
“Why can’t you compromise, Kuba?” Avital demanded of his father. “Why is everything a struggle?”
Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation Page 3