We Were the Future

by Yael Neeman

  Some of us asked ourselves if the day would ever come again when a member could tap his comrade on the shoulder and say simply, “Give me a cigarette.”

  Zvi Gershon, who was both wartime commander on Yehiam and the inventor of agricultural machines and techniques in peacetime, hit the nail on the head in describing the professional smokers.

  Because with all that the Hungarian smokers had in common, they fell into different categories. The categories of smokers cut across lines dividing urban from rural, members of The First of May from member of the Workers, touching only on the number of cigarettes the smokers consumed. Papa, my mother, Agi, Esther N., Yuda B. were all in the same category: heavy, not fussy Hungarian smokers who went through about three packs a day. They weren’t choosy about the kind of cigarette, and even if they did prefer a particular brand, they always smoked what was available. One cigarette was stuck in their mouth and another waited its turn behind their ear or in their hand, or had been placed on a chair beside them. They lit the cigarettes with matches, not lighters. There were also more stylized Hungarian smokers, but only for the sacrosanct purpose of making people laugh, and they would exhale the smoke through their ears, like Zambo.

  The very best, in a league all their own, were the Szandors. Flawless professionals. The Szandors were master craftsmen of smoking. All the ash of their cigarettes remained hanging in one piece and never broke in the middle. The phrase “flick your ashes” had no meaning for them.

  Zvi Gershon on a “camel,” an agriculture machine that

  he invented for collecting tobacco leaves.

  Even while they were still alive, we called cigarette ash “szandor” in their honor, saying things like “Don’t drop your szandor on the floor, here’s a szandortray.” He was very tall, an ever-present stocking cap on his head, and she was very small. The identical way they smoked made it seem as if there were many more than two of them, as if they were an entire troupe and not just a couple.

  Miriam Szandor, in addition to her regular job, ironed and folded laundry for soldiers on Saturdays. And even when both hands were full of work, the eternal cigarette was stuck in her mouth. Avraham Szandor had the same smoking technique. The cigarettes in their mouths never went out, not even for a second, as they did for every other smoker. And they inhaled constantly. We used to watch them as if they were magicians. Even when our eyes were glued to them and we concentrated, we never managed to see the moment when they switched from one cigarette to another.

  The only time Szandor’s szandor fell was when the famous shot blasted into the Szandors’ room. A stray bullet flew through one window and out the other, and they say it hit Szandor’s szandor on the way, but apart from that, nothing happened. Inquiries were made, however, about who fired the shot and why. But about the fact that there had been a stray bullet, there was no disagreement. The matter was closed.

  Perhaps because of the art of smoking that characterized Yehiam, the most popular branch on the kibbutz was tobacco.

  When they first began growing tobacco, in 1953, it was part of the vegetable garden, which is why it was located on the kibbutz itself and not far away in the fields. That was still before they established the prestigious and productive branches: the citrus groves and the bananas.

  Drying tobacco leaves.

  The beginning was very difficult; the tobacco wasn’t planted properly and mistakes were made in the drying sheds. Diuri, from the Hungarian Workers group, who was in charge of the tobacco growing, thought they should dry the first-year leaves in an open area and close down the tobacco branch. But supervisors from the industrial department of the Agriculture Ministry said that the tobacco plants in Yehiam were uncommonly beautiful and convinced him to continue. After a period of trial and error, Yehiam became the only kibbutz to succeed in growing Virginia tobacco. Kibbutzim that tried to grow it in other areas failed. For a variety of reasons related to the quality of the soil and its salinity, the tobacco that grew there did not burn when put to the test.

  Our tobacco world was shrouded in magic and mystery. Its stars were the planting fields, the “camel,” a machine two-and-a-half meters high invented by Zvi Gershon for spraying and picking tobacco—and rituals that included tying the tobacco leaves on long poles and climbing the walls of the drying sheds to hang them. When the drying sheds were opened, the aroma of tobacco spread throughout the kibbutz like Hungarian perfume.

  With the years, the Virginia tobacco grown on Yehiam made an excellent name for itself and Zerah Gahal, the national tobacco king from Dubek, the city cigarette factory, would sometimes come to the kibbutz, smell the tobacco, stroke the leaves, impressed by its quality.

  The parents and children of the members, the mossadnikim, volunteers and group members worked with tobacco. It was everyone’s favorite place to work. On days when there were fierce hailstorms and the workers couldn’t go out into the fields, they came to help sort and pack tobacco leaves in the sheds.

  The tobacco branch closed down in 1971 and we, the Narcissus children, grew up in the shadow of the closing and never had the chance to work there. When we passed the old-timers walking up or down the narrow and steep stone sidewalks, we said hello to all of them. That’s what we were taught—a kind of bourgeois-European custom that had survived the New Child regulations.

  When we bumped into Diuri, our groupmate Hagit’s father, we knew that they said he had never recovered from the kibbutz meeting where it had been decided to stop growing tobacco, which despite the certificates of excellence it received every year, was no longer profitable. Since the tobacco branch had been closed down, Diuri’s gentle smile was marred by a small cloud of sadness that went with him everywhere, like a column of smoke. When we met him on the sidewalks, we saw the tobacco sheds in our mind’s eye.

  We said good morning or good evening to him and nodded in mute condolence. After all, we were children and couldn’t vote at the kibbutz meeting to overturn the decision to stop growing tobacco.

  Leaving sadness behind, we ran down to the field to play prisoners or dodge ball, or up to the reservoir pool to sail on the rafts we’d built for ourselves from boards.

  9

  There were four of us, my three older brothers and me. The first family in Yehiam to have four children.

  We came to see our parents at 5:30 and went back to the children’s houses at 7:20, Ofer to the Grove group, Yochai to Pomegranate, Yair to Pine, I to Narcissus.

  None of the four of us ever ran away to our parents’ house at night, as so many of the other children did. Maybe we were afraid they’d send us back, or maybe we were afraid they wouldn’t. The children who did run away were humiliated and bitter every time their parents returned them. To reach their parents’ house, they had to cross the entire kibbutz in the dark, in the middle of the night, in the cold and rain. And they were sent back immediately.

  We didn’t even try. In our recurring dreams, Nazis marched down the lovely narrow stone sidewalks, passed the reservoir, skirted Abrashka and Rachel’s house at the beginning of the row, and went into our biological parents’ house. Then we would wake up.

  We slept in our parents’ house only two or three times during our childhood. For example, in the sixth grade, when kids, exactly our age, with names just like ours, came from other Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim and slept in our beds as part of what was known as “the hospitality program.” The hospitality program, which lasted for three days, was a substitute for the religious-urban-bourgeois bar mitzvah, which was never mentioned in our kibbutz. It was a kind of coming-of-age journey. We boarded Egged busses, excitedly paid for our tickets and rode for several hours in groups of four children, with no adults, until we reached another part of the country. The scenery might have changed, but the trip brought us to a place very similar to our own. Our group went to Reshafim. Other groups, to Mishmar Hanegev and Beit Alfa. For three days, we lived their lives with them, which were identical to ours. We went to class with them, worked with them on their children’s farm ins
tead of our own, and returned on an Egged bus.

  Several weeks later, when four children from Kibbutz Reshafim arrived in Yehiam for three days, we gave them our beds, which were identical to theirs, and the heavy yellow bedspreads, and slept in our parents’ house, a strange and terrifying sleep. Our parents’ close proximity seemed sick and crazy, as if we were locked in an embrace with death, which sang us a lullaby. We could hardly wait for morning to come.

  The entire Neeman family in Yehiam: the oldest son, Ofer, sitting first on the right, second child Yohai sitting on the left, third child Yair standing behind the parents. Yael is sitting on her mother’s lap.

  Most of the Narcissus children had older, Hungarian parents. We never had anyone from outside the kibbutz in our group. Every night from the time we were brought from the hospital, we slept surrounded by walls covered with yellow oil-paint. The aesthetics of the children’s houses, if the word aesthetics can be used in connection with such an ugly place, were based on the absence of color and stimulation. That was part of the system. Four children to a room, two boys and two girls. One in each of the four corners, a nightstand beside each bed. The ugliness didn’t bother us. We overcame it with the gold of our imagination.

  The metapelet said goodnight at 9:30 every night, after she finished reading us a new chapter from People of the Beginning, by Eliezer Shmueli, about the guards who rode their noble steeds, or a chapter from The Adventures of Neznaika and his Friends, who flew around the whole world in air balloons. “Goodnight,” we replied, waited for her to close the door behind her, and got up. We couldn’t sleep.

  In the hot summer, we dipped our sheets in cold water, shouted “We’re Greeks” at one another, and ran down the corridor in dripping togas that cooled our bodies. If the mosquitoes bit us, we went into the metapelet’s room and put together a concoction that we thought would soothe the bites. One of us was always on guard duty, keeping an eye on the sidewalk that led to Narcissus to warn us if the night guard was coming. If she was, we’d jump into our beds, turn our faces to the wall and pretend to be asleep, trying not to laugh at Moshik’s histrionic snoring. The night guard left after less than half a minute, hurrying off to Terebinth or Anemone. Bye and hope not to see you again. We got up again. Sometimes we didn’t have enough time to jump back into bed, and the night guards would catch us and give us a good talking to. We didn’t get upset because there were different night guards every week, and we were permanent. They didn’t know anything about children’s sleep habits at night. We didn’t know anything about theirs.

  My three older brothers and I were like guests in our parents’ house. Our parents didn’t know what size shoe we wore, and when I asked for wooden clogs with a blue stripe for my tenth birthday, they bought me a pair that was three sizes too large. When the clogs finally arrived after having been changed, I ran back to the children’s house at 7:20. The new clogs could be heard from far away, clacking happily on all the stone sidewalks. I had to take them off at the door to Narcissus. They were too private and the stripe was too blue. “We have sandals that Pirosh made in the shoemaking workshop for all the children” (carrot-orange for the girls, brown for the boys), the metapelet said.

  We never told our parents stories like the one about the demise of the clogs, maybe because we didn’t want to sadden them. We, adults and children, lived in parallel universes, each universe with its own problems, each with its own difficulties. You don’t burden children with adults’ tears or Holocaust nightmares, and vice versa. We didn’t tell them anything. We said: the words will never pass our lips. Our parents didn’t know anything about our lives and we didn’t know anything about theirs. Maybe the metaplot rebuked our parents about the clogs, maybe not. We didn’t know. We too wanted to maintain equality and didn’t understand exactly how we had forgotten and had dared to ask for our own clogs with a blue stripe.

  (The following item appeared in the newsletter, under the headline “The Problem of Sharing and Equality Among the Children”: The kibbutz provides all clothing and footwear, without exception—including house slippers, or white wool. Therefore, no one should have personal items such as clothing, sandals, kaffiyahs, etc.)

  Our parents apparently never noticed the series of deer names in our biological family: Zvi (deer), my father’s name; Ofer (fawn), my oldest brother’s name; and Yael (ibex), my name. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have disrupted it with Yochai and Yair, the non-deer names of my two middle brothers. There were other families on Yehiam who had children with a series of thematic names, such as Hadas (myrtle), Vered (rose) and Nitzan (bud). Or Netzer (shoot), Rotem (broom plant), Erez (cedar) and Oren (pine). Nature, of course.

  But there were no animals or plants in our biological home, which was headed by two urban people: my mother, from Budapest, in Hungary, and my father, from Torna, also in Hungary, and Vienna, in Austria.

  For years, they made do with a hose and a few roses, which hinted at a garden and gardening, and hid the shame of their nonexistent garden. (Gardens beautified the entire kibbutz, not only a member’s house, and an untended garden therefore made the entire kibbutz ugly.) Sometimes, our parents asked us to help them weed or water the garden. Abrashka, our neighbor who lived in the last house on the street, helped them figure out what needed to be uprooted, that is, to differentiate between decorative plants and weeds. He also put his tools at their disposal.

  Every few years, they enlarged the paved area a little bit more. Their houses are called “Ein Dor houses,” after the architectural style that was conceived in Kibbutz Reshafim, but came into its own in Kibbutz Ein Dor. The old-timers’ neighborhood in Ein Dor is called Tel Amal (after the houses in the Tel Amal settlement, which later became Kibbutz Nir David). Each kibbutz added improvements and developments, and contrary to stars or plants that are sometimes given the names of the people who discovered them, the buildings in a kibbutz were named after the kibbutz from which the latest model arrived. Kibbutz architecture did not center on the architects or the buildings, but rather on man and his needs.

  Nature was never discussed in our biological home. On kibbutz marches or hikes, when we trudged along after the explanations given by Eliezer A., a mushroom expert, we talked about other things and didn’t notice when everyone stopped beside some rare mushroom.

  We only had to really pick flowers in the garden once a year: six flowers on Holocaust Day.

  We would stand in the doorways of our parents’ houses when the siren sounded, and listen to Yoash’s voice reading the text about the six million, which came through the invisible loudspeaker on the dining hall roof and echoed throughout the kibbutz, as if it were coming from the sky or from hell.

  We—Anat, Hagar, Amos and I—stood in the doors of our parents’ houses, ready to go into action. It was always the youngest child in every family who had to pick six flowers at the end of the ceremony, in memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. We didn’t know what our parents were thinking, whether it was about their families who’d remained there, or not, about the homes they’d had there, or not, about the Danube, which my mother said froze over in winter, or about our dry Gaaton River.

  When the signal for our choreography, picking the six flowers, was given, we all ran into Abrashka’s garden, which was filled with gerberas, tulips, red and white roses. The other gardens didn’t always have six flowers in them. Eli Harari, who also cultivated his garden on the other side of our house, focused more on trees—lumquats and pomegranates—and less on flowers.

  After we brought the six gerberas or roses or tulips, according to the tradition established by the Kibbutz Artzi national committee for holidays and ceremonies, but adapted by the culture committee of each kibbutz to suit its needs or local holidays—our parents were supposed to tell us about the Holocaust.

  In a kind of balance of terror, we would release each other after a few minutes; the story would be told on a different occasion, “After all, we don’t have to do this just because it’s Holocaust D
ay,” my mother said every year. Before we took off through the door or the window (we moved the screen and jumped), we tried to remind our parents to put the six flowers we’d picked, the gerberas or roses, in water. But they didn’t always do it. Just as they didn’t always take the things we brought from the children’s house and hang them up or collect them. In fact, they never did.

  When we brought a carving we made from an avocado pit, our parents would throw it into the garbage pail without the slightest hesitation. “It’ll get black anyway,” they said, either to us or themselves, we couldn’t be sure, then dropped the lid over it. Sometimes, before the sentence was carried out, we tried to argue that it was a key holder or a bookmark, not just an ornament, that it was something practical they could put to use. Our parents viewed with suspicion and an obvious lack of affection everything we made and brought them at 5:30 from the children’s house: Hanukkah menorahs made with acorn bottoms; bookmarks made from dry red leaves; crooked clay vases. In our house, we knew that none of us was a plastic artist and nothing we made was of any value. Sentimental value was, of course, out of the question—we had no concept of it or words to describe it. In rare cases, usually when words, poems or other sorts of writing, never drawings, were involved, the items were collected and put in the attic. Our parents couldn’t climb up there anymore, and we were in charge of it, determining who was chosen based on changing criteria set by a different brother each time, to go up and bring things down.

  Only we knew what was up there, and in what order, and we would throw things down when requested—blankets, pillows, folding beds, Ofer’s poems, a file of letters that had been forgotten there, and then, in a different season, we would wrap the winter blankets and heaters in plastic and return them. “Is everything organized up there?” “Can you get through?” were the questions our parents asked from down below, because for years they hadn’t had any idea of what was happening up there. “It looks great here,” we said from above, “everything’s organized and clean. One look, and you can see what’s here. Don’t worry,” we said, and tossed down a piqué blanket they’d asked for. Then we climbed down on the slats of the wooden shutter we used as a ladder.