We Were the Future

by Yael Neeman

  The first paved road to the kibbutz,

  a cause for celebration because work could begin.

  Nothing interrupted the old-timers’ work, not quotas that were already filled, not holidays or Saturdays, not even children or rest. As if they were in a huge, boundless laboratory of space and time, they immersed themselves in work and saw the fruit of their labors come to life in the growth of the kibbutz.

  Dov P. said the early years of establishing banana growing as a profitable branch of the kibbutz, from the time he completed his training in 1954, were the happiest years of his life. At night, he waited for morning to come; he had no patience for the night, which interrupted everything, and he would get up and smoke (or smoke and get up) and think about the bananas in the valley, about what each member of his crew would do. Fifteen or eighteen sweaty, drenched members picked thirty tons of bananas in the rain. The record was seventy tons on a single Saturday. They came home dog-tired, but happy. Within four or five years, Yehiam had the largest banana plantation in the area.

  The old-timers were happy in their work. Their reward was their work, and vice versa. We all eagerly followed the yield much the way you follow a drama taking place right in front of your eyes. Breaking agricultural work records was the only possible compensation. There were no salaries or other material benefits. The reward was sweeter than anything material; it was sweet, like art, like the joy of doing for its own sake, as its own reward, like a harvest, like an annona or a banana picked straight from the tree.

  New records for each season were reported in the newsletter: For example, the season’s largest cluster of bananas (42 kilograms); the average weight of largest clusters to the end of February (24.3 kilograms).

  Harvesting bananas.

  New inventions, improvements and innovations in agriculture were most highly praised, since they combined several greatly valued principles: creativity, productivity, and industriousness. Zvi Gershon, along with Yoskeh, invented weapons during the siege. (They made mines and bombs with a pliers, a screwdriver and a hammer. With the additional help of a hand drill, they produced dozens of explosive devices that they spread along the fences, and land mines that they buried on the roads leading to Yehiam.) After the war, Zvi Gershon continued to devise agricultural innovations that increased production. For example, he discovered that by dragging four corn seeders hooked up to the back of a tractor, seeding capacity could be doubled. The newsletter said that people flocked from all the agricultural settlements in the area to see the innovation and copy it for themselves.

  Thanks to the hybridization carried out by Yair Argaman in the orchards, the entire country’s production record for miniature fruit trees was doubled. “Two and a half years after he planted the miniature orchard, we were producing two tons of fruit per dunam7 of land, which is double the normal crop in Israel for trees that age. A crop that size in this kind of orchard is a national record.”

  The newsletter said that scientists, instructors and fruit growers from the four corners of the country came to see that achievement with their own eyes.

  Yaakov R. and Yehuda Harari thought about work all the time, even when the working day was over. They thought about it as they walked, hands clasped behind their backs, as if their bodies had twisted physically into questions and thoughts, and now they were thinking back and forth, plowing their thoughts.

  Even in the children’s houses, when they came for fifteen minutes to tell us bedtime stories before we went to sleep, if they had an idea, they would pace in the corridor, or even in the room itself, which was only about four meters long. They would pace, stop, turn, then start pacing again. They thought about work, became immersed in their thoughts about it, contemplated various ideas, problems and solutions.

  Yaakov R. was the most eloquent speaker on the kibbutz. He didn’t use flowery words, but rather words of action, of persuasion. However, since he was a man of work, he had an occasional attack of hatred toward his own powers of persuasion and refused to speak. And then, like the tug-of-war game played on the Shavuot holiday, the entire kibbutz moved to the other side of the rope and fought Yaakov to make him speak. That’s how it was from the beginning, at the kibbutz meeting on May 20, 1947, which discussed the road-paving holiday. The kibbutz was still split, and the members up in Yehiam wanted to celebrate a great holiday—the paving of a section of the road to Yehiam. The following was said at the meeting:

  “We’ve come up against the problem of the speech to be given at the celebration. The fact that Yaakov is going away for a seminar doesn’t change anything. He can come back for two days to be at the party. Yaakov told the secretariat that he was opposed, and now he has to convince the kibbutz.”

  Yaakov stood up at the meeting and said:

  “I cannot say anything at that celebration because I have nothing to say. Giving a speech is, in some ways, like art. Just as a person cannot write a poem simply because someone has decided that he must, so it is that I cannot give a speech at this celebration.”

  The decision: To compel Yaakov to speak.

  In favor—20. Against—5.

  The magic of Yaakov’s speeches did not carry over to his writing; nor was he one of the people on the kibbutz who wrote manifestoes, aspired to be a Knesset member or anything else that would utilize his skills. His art lay in his ability to formulate the relationship with the community; his art was bound up with action. When he spoke about something, we could see the various sides of yes and no as if they were the sides of a cube. He once said to us:

  There was only a superficial understanding of the individual-collective dichotomy. The idea was actually that the individual was very important, and it was believed that the more devoted the individual was and the more he did for the community, the more he would develop.

  That was the philosophy, and we accepted it totally. There were always some members who did not contribute very much to the collective—we, who contributed, felt much happier, much more complete, much more satisfied than they did. And to a great extent, we were. They were bitter, and we felt that we were building a world. That is to say, it was not a matter of the individual sacrificing for the collective, but rather it was a matter of the individual developing through the collective.

  Later, Yaakov said:

  There can be no doubt that this perception has not stood the test of reality, the test of time, and today, it is anachronistic. We must not return to it.

  He always contradicted what he’d said, or blunted it, as if he’d packed his perception into a suitcase, and now others had to come along and offer their merchandise. He needed other proposals in order to practice his powers of persuasion.

  Yaakov’s words caused us to go back and forth from thought to reality. When they hit their target, they were like the agricultural innovations—setting new records of reality—or like Ari’s matchstick models.

  Ari had a special status. He wasn’t one of the old-timers; he wasn’t an original core group member, nor had he been added to one later. He was born in the kibbutz, a child in Grove, the kibbutz’s second group, and our groupmate Zohar’s older brother. Since he was twelve the newsletter had been reporting on his handiwork the way it reported on the orchard and banana crops. Ari knew how to build anything with matchsticks. The entire kibbutz eagerly followed the new records he set, which he himself broke every year. The new model was exhibited on the kibbutz holiday. In 1963, after the seventeenth one, the newsletter reported:

  Without any doubt, Ari’s matchstick creations—the Eiffel Tower, the railroad train, the ship bridge—were the greatest attraction. In order to give an idea of the amount of work he invested in them, suffice it to say that the ship was made of 37,280 matches glued together, which is almost 980 boxes.

  Later on, Ari made exact models of the kibbutz houses and the silo.

  When we, the kibbutz members, stood in front of Ari’s scale models, which were displayed on tables, and leaned toward them to see every detail better, we were overwhelmed by the sh
eer number of them. Sometimes forgetting that they were only models, we entered and walked around in them in our minds, and when we remembered that we had to return to reality—we suddenly froze in place with fear. For a moment, everything was topsy-turvy: We were afraid that the kibbutz itself was only a scale model of something much larger, whose creation had snagged in the middle, and that in fact, all our work was in vain, no one was walking behind us to expand the kibbutz enterprise, and what we heard was the sound of our own work shoes clacking on the stone sidewalk. We were afraid that our kibbutzim, like Ari’s scale models, like buildings we’d constructed with temporary beams, were only decoration, the physical embodiment of Yaakov R.’s arguments, an image. As if all the kibbutzim were meant from the beginning to be only the setting for puppets that had escaped from a puppet show and were wandering everywhere on the kibbutz, in the cow barn and the animal pens.

  Ari’s models filled us with a strange intoxication, just as Yaakov’s speeches did, as if both were ladders on which we climbed from reality to the rarified air of the loftiest peaks where records were so phenomenal that they verged on fantasy, and for a moment, we were able to live inside the tower of the dream of justice, equality and truth that we had built in the air.

  7

  Thanks to the fortress and the hill, Yehiam was saved from the low-ceilinged, uniform decor of the kibbutzim. The steep inclines made bicycle riding impossible, and boredom did not overlay it like fog.

  The natural setting of Yehiam was wild and colorful, as if the buildings had been dropped into a nature reserve below the fortress. The kibbutz was rampant with flowers, bushes, trees, grass, rock gardens, soil enriched by pine needles, and there were brown, green, yellow, pink and white corners everywhere. Different flowers bloomed every season, and trees lost their leaves or filled with green.

  When darkness fell, the volunteers looked up at the sky, enchanted. They explained that in the cities they came from, the buildings and lights hid the sky, so they didn’t know, or had forgotten, that there were so many stars. They lay on the lawn in front of the dining hall and in the open area in front of the fortress, their faces tilted up to the sky to better see the Milky Way.

  The darkness around the kibbutz was a totally black, but non-material presence. You could walk through it, shorten the distance from one place to another. The stars shed their light from the sky, and on the ground—the fireflies. The chicken coop workers wrote on the bulletin board: “If you’re interested in the coop and what we do in it, and also want to see a festival of animals at night, you’re invited to see deer, wild boars, snakes and jackals.”

  After work, the volunteers sat at the pool, in the fortress, in the clubhouse or on the dining hall lawn and wrote long, long letters to their families, covering thin stationary paper with their rounded handwriting. They described the Crusader fortress for them, and the Milky Way, the weeping willow that stood on the lawn near the swimming pool, the Judas tree at the entrance to the kibbutz, the brightly colored oranges they’d picked at noon that day, the jackals and the wild boars.

  We walked on the stone sidewalk. We collected acorns from under the oak trees to use their bases as candleholders for the crooked Hanukkah menorahs we made. As we walked, we turned over stones to see earthworms crawling on the pine needles.

  We were never able to comprehend what Yehiam had been before, that there had been nothing here but the fortress, nothing. Twenty years ago, it was all barren.

  The fortress and the land around it was purchased in 1938, eight years before the kibbutz was built on it. The people of the northern district of the Jewish National Fund bought it in the internal competition they had going with the southern district. The land was very problematic because it was not arable. It was all rocks. The beauty of the fortress was of no use as far as building a settlement was concerned. In his book From the Edge of the East and Deep in the Heart, Mordechai Shachevitz wrote:

  It consisted of 3,342 dunams of rocky land of unimaginably hostile wildness. Only fifty or sixty dunams of it were workable, most of it around the fortress, and only a very small bit of land west of it, in the middle of the craggy area.

  This land was bought, despite the fact that it was totally unsuitable for a settlement, because of the competition between those involved in land purchase: The people in charge in the north wanted to prove to [Yosef] Weitz that what Yoav could do in the south, they could also do in the north. […]

  The land was purchased from a Christian Arab named Hawa, father of the poet Ramonda Tawil [and grandfather of Suha Arafat], who was very active in the war the Palestinians fought against us. How the land came into his possession, God only knows. His forefathers apparently received it from the Turks in one of the weird ways those things were done in the last century, and if they paid for it at all, it was most certainly a very small amount. […]

  A Bedouin tribe, the Arab as-Suweitat, lived mainly in the small western part of this land and grew tobacco. The purchase agreement called for them to leave, and though they had already received the compensation that was coming to them, they refused to go and hoped that their intransigence would be rewarded with compensation a second time.

  The members spoke about Israel Caspi, the kibbutz’s first gardener, as if they were speaking about a miracle that happened, without mentioning the forbidden word, miracle (because miracles occur independently of man, ex nihilo, and on the kibbutz, we believed in cause and effect, in man and his actions, which is why the word vision was always used). They said that his visions could not be believed. Because what he saw was so extravagant. Almost imaginary.

  Clearing the ground of stones and rocks to make way for the Yehiam fields.

  Anywhere else in Israel, the members said (maybe when Yoash told us about a mountain kibbutz, maybe they told each other about it on the stage on one of the kibbutz holidays), you could simply plant grass, flowers and trees. But Yehiam, which was excellent as a fortified military post on an isolated hill, provided nothing a settlement needed to survive. Everything had to be brought from the valley: earth, water, food, ammunition (to survive in the face of enemy gunfire and to use for blowing up the rocks and preparing the land).

  The sound of dynamite, which was always used to blow up the rocks in Yehiam so that the land could be used for planting, accompanied by a warning cry, which was shouted loudly before every explosion, could be heard many years after we were born. Yehiam was built on rocky land. Preparing every dunam for agricultural use required hundreds of days of tenacious, backbreaking work: exploding the rocks, removing the broken pieces and building gradients. The second stage was the transport of soil from the valley, and only after that could grass, flowers and trees be planted. It took hours of grueling work and enormous sums of money to build each house. In order to plant the lawn in front of the dining hall, for example, more than two hundred truckloads of earth were brought from the valley.

  Those who worked with Israel Caspi said that he had a mental image of what the vegetation, sidewalks and rock gardens of the kibbutz should look like. An image of everything that was not there. And it led him to become an expert in all things that stood in the way of his vision: paving walkways, cutting paths, building fences. He became a construction expert, an experienced tractor driver (including heavy equipment), and a plumber.

  Since he wanted to preserve the natural landscape as much as possible, he built the sidewalks from the local stone, not cement. He used local rocks to create natural rock gardens. He brought Judas trees—which painted the entire kibbutz purple—from the wadi and planted them in Yehiam, and like a painter, he searched the nearby natural environment for all the other colors he’d seen in his mind and brought them to Yehiam for planting.

  When the War of Independence ended, he pruned the withered branches of the oak bushes, which had been gnawed at by goats and were completely flat and gathering dust on the dining hall lawn (of course, there was no lawn or dining hall yet). He said that those bushes would grow into beautiful oak trees. You can�
�t believe him, the members said. As the years went by, the kibbutz filled with trees, some of which he had uncovered and pruned, and others he had planted: decorative trees and wild trees, elms, pines, cypresses and others beside the oaks and terebinths that had grown from pathetic, faded bushes into dark-foliaged trees. In the early days of the kibbutz, everything had been exposed and arid—you could see the distant countryside and the sea from everywhere on Yehiam—and suddenly, you had to go up to the fortress to see above the treetops that covered everything with dense, thick vegetation.

  During those early years between 1949 and 1951, Yosef Zaritsky painted his famous watercolor series, “Yehiam,” from the fortress on Yehiam. His abstract paintings perfectly depicted the idea of ex nihilo creation.

  A ceremony laying the cornerstone for the first brick building in Yehiam, 1950.

  Winter was the most beautiful season on Yehiam. The clouds and the lightning hung low over our heads, and the rain gushed down the narrow stone sidewalks. No one picked the cyclamens, narcissi or anemones that carpeted the kibbutz like brightly colored lawns.

  Stories of Israel Caspi’s deeds were told outside of Yehiam, and this is what the Al Hamishmar newspaper wrote about him in 1952:

  A significant experiment in methods of mountain forestation, whose results might have far-reaching effects for years to come—was done by Israel Caspi, a young forester on Kibbutz Yehiam in the Galilee. His method is based on the Lysenko method used to forest the steppes of the Soviet Union, and consists mainly of planting dense “nests” of oak and other tree seeds in larger quantities than has been usual in Israel. Some of the seeds fuse with others because of their close proximity, and with their joint strength, grow into healthy and robust seedlings. This new method is still in its inception, and according to Israel, years of experimentation are still necessary to draw final conclusions. What is already clear, however, is that the pace of growth is faster, which will allow for a more rapid development of natural groves.