by Yael Neeman
In our biological home, time was measured by the glass clock made by Gila, my mother’s cousin, who had lived across the hall from them in the apartment house in Budapest. We loved Gila and Pishta, her husband, and all the glass things they made for us: a nameplate for the door, a table for the living room, jars, clocks and more. They had studied in Italy after the war, and the glass that Pishta blew always reminded us of the glass slipper and the ball. When the hands of the glass clock reached 7:20, we went back to the children’s houses. Sometimes, our parents would be busy with their committees or work, and my brothers would tell them, “Okay, we’ll walk Yuli to Narcissus.” My middle brother Yochai had given me the name Yuli when I was still in kindergarten, and ever since, that’s what everyone on Yehiam called me. I loved the name Yochai had made up for me, and I loved my three brothers more than anything else in the world. (Ofer was older than I was by eleven years, Yochai by six, Yair by five.)
We felt like guests in our parents’ house, and we never interrupted each other with questions like: Did you really say that to him, or did you just think about saying it? Just the opposite. We felt obligated to include as facts all the things we thought about saying but didn’t. And every time we retold a story, we embellished it even more. If we didn’t embellish or change it, we couldn’t retell it because the listeners or we ourselves would be bored. My brother Yoachai kept the rules, and sanctified our right to exaggerate.
We exaggerated so much that I thought Leah Goldberg wrote her poem, “Chan-So-Lin,” about us. I believed that because the poem is about three older brothers and a younger sister who wanted golden slippers and velvet slippers:
There was a man called Chan-So-Lin
Who lived in a house in China
His little daughter lived with him
And three grown sons beside her.
The daughter was a pretty girl,
Her feet were small and slight,
And on each foot a sandal
Made of silk so thin and light.
Each step she took was fast and airy,
Delicate her poses,
She liked to dance and twirl
In a garden full of roses.
She was a “brilliant flower,”
Said her father Chan-So-Lin,
While her older brothers liked to call her
“Little girl of spring.”
When Chan-So-Lin went travelling,
He told his sons: “Protect my daughter,
You three boys, I shall return,
As soon as the Sabbath is over.”
Zvi and Naomi Neeman with their daughter Yael.
On the way back to Narcissus, my brothers would plant me in the holes that Eli had dug for the lumquat or pomegranate trees he was going to plant. We played Joseph the Little Brother, who was left in a pit by his brothers. They also taught me the multiplication table when I was three, and trained me to play catch with Gila and Pishta’s expensive, unique jars. When our parents went out even for a few minutes, we immediately began a tense game of catch, tossing the breakable jars, four at a time, through the air above the floor. Only the training session took place over the carpet. The game itself (called simply “jars”) took place above the floor, and the order in which we threw and caught wasn’t permanent, but was decided upon right before we began our daily game.
When we were on our annual, biological family vacation in the kibbutz apartment on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv, my brothers used to babysit me one evening per vacation so our parents could go to a concert or a play. “No problem, we’ll take care of Yuli,” Ofer told our parents. Before that, my brothers and our parents went through all the children’s movies that were playing and chose one. But after my parents left, we changed the plan. We never went to children’s movies; my brothers looked for the scariest movies and trained me not to be afraid, or we went to see the musical comedy, “Aliza Mizrahi.” We liked staying alone, without our parents. We didn’t know what you do with grown-ups.
When we had contagious children’s diseases—all routines were broken. We’d rest from all the Narcissus activities. We didn’t go to classes, didn’t clean our rooms, didn’t make mush from bread and cold water for the swans and geese in the children’s farm. And at 5:30, we didn’t go in groups to our parents’ houses or see our biological siblings. We forgot that they existed. The outside world sank into itself. And everything was Narcissus, from morning to night.
We didn’t go out at all. Our parents would come to us in the children’s house. We, all the Narcissus children, were sick together: When we had the mumps, we were sixteen children swollen like pigs; when we had the German measles or roseola, we all had red spots; when we had chicken pox, we all washed ourselves with bowls of gentian violet.
When we had a childhood disease, we tried not to bother Dr. Tzuriel, the kibbutz doctor who worked with my mother, the kibbutz nurse. He was kept for the truly difficult moments, when things got out of control. Not that any of us wanted Dr. Tzuriel to come. My mother said he was very smart and funny, but he scared us. An angry Irishman who always ordered us to undress, and we were cold, so cold.
At 5:30 in the afternoon, instead of going to our parents, they came to us, and the ugly yellow oil-paint walls of Narcissus turned into golden dividers. Our parents were different when they came, maybe because now they were guests in our place, and maybe because they were concerned about our fever, which didn’t go down. Those were the only times that my mother read me stories in Hebrew, although she was ashamed about the way she spoke it.
When we had chicken pox, my father told me that when they had them in Vienna, their parents burned their books because they thought that books had something to do with spreading the disease. They burned his copy of Max and Moritz. The stories our father told us were filled with life, as if they were three-dimensional, like small shows. And many times, when they were over, they remained present in our rooms, frightening us, as if the happy endings hadn’t dispersed them. My father loved to make himself laugh with his stories. He’d get into our beds in the children’s house and hide under the blanket and the heavy yellow bedspread. When we sat down on it, there he was. We jumped in fright. In the evenings, after he finished telling a story to all the children in the room and said goodnight, and after the metapelet had also said goodnight and gone, he’d stand outside, under the window of our room, and make the sounds of the wild animals he’d told us about earlier, or of the fierce winds that had blown away an entire city and its population in the tale he’d just recounted. We were terrified. We couldn’t sleep. Our nights were fear-filled anyway, full of the concerns you should put out of your mind before you go to sleep: We were afraid that terrorists would break into Narcissus, that the Nazis would break into our parents’ houses; we were afraid of jackals; we were afraid that the Alon children would come and cover us with toothpaste; we were afraid of Nachman Farkash, the criminal who kept breaking out of prison and roamed the mountains.
Every Purim festival had a unifying “theme” that dictated what the costumes would be and inspired the plays that were written for the holiday. In the third grade, the theme was “peoples of the world.” Five of us were Swiss. Our parents came to perform in Narcissus, wearing costumes that coordinated with ours. They were dressed as a delegation of Swiss mountain climbers. Using heavy ropes, they climbed onto our Formica tables, which our imaginations had transformed into glaciers. The yellow oil-paint walls looked like snow-capped mountains. Our parents yodeled a few times, and then my father was lost in an avalanche. The climbers called to him over and over again, but couldn’t find him. He was declared “missing.” Even though I cried with horror at the loss of my father in a snow avalanche, he didn’t appear or peek out for even a moment to show himself. He didn’t come back until the end of the evening, clumps of cotton in his hair to represent snow, having miraculously rescued himself from the top of the mountain, so he said, even under the ferocious weather conditions. It wasn’t until two hours after Indians skinned tigers in fro
nt of us, and Dutchmen stuck their fingers in huge dikes, that my father came in from the cold.
The roseola attacked on Monday, the best day of the week, magazine day. Every Monday, Mishmar L’Yeledim, the children’s supplement of the Al Hamishmar daily newspaper, arrived. When I was sick, my father and I sat together and were carried away into Mishmar L’Yeledim.
Since I had a high fever, I told him that I wanted to write a letter to Dvora Omer, the writer of children’s books, but was afraid to ask the Questions and Answers column for her address because they always printed the questions and I was embarrassed. So we wrote a letter to the newspaper, asking them to mail Dvora Omer’s address to me privately, at the Upper Galilee Mobile Post, and not to print it in the paper. If possible. If not, I thanked them in advance and asked them not to respond at all. To my great surprise, they sent it to me privately.
I wrote a long letter to Dvora Omer in which I told her that I wanted to be a writer. She answered me in her own handwriting (my father stressed that when I complained about the contents). He also pointed out that she’d replied relatively quickly (I think it took about a month, which seemed like an eternity to me), considering that she received many letters from many children. And I pictured my letter drowning in a pile of letters sent by children from all the kibbutzim.
My father said that she’d written me a long letter responding to everything I’d written in mine. All of that was true, but I was very disappointed. Dvora Omer did in fact respond nicely and politely to many of the things I’d written to her, also about the kibbutz. After all, I knew she was from a kibbutz, too. But her response to my statement that I wanted to be a writer pierced me like an arrow. She wrote that you never know where life will lead you. She wrote that she herself had wanted to be a baby’s nurse, and she was a writer. So you can never know (she repeated). I considered that letter a deathblow. What does that mean, you can never know? What does that mean, where life leads you? I was very upset by the possibility that I’d be a baby-minder. My father argued that that wasn’t what she said, and he was right, but it was no consolation. Logic might help you understand, but it offers no solace.
My mother, who was the kibbutz nurse, told all the Narcissus children: “If your fever doesn’t go down by tomorrow, Dr. Tzuriel will come to examine you.” Our temperature went down that night, we were all healthy. We didn’t want Dr. Tzuriel to come. We preferred him to stay in the clinic or in his house.
10
On our planet, there was no money or talk about money. Money wasn’t used as a means of exchange, and there were no salaries.
This is what all the pretty girls from the Oak group sang at Kibbutz Yehiam’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, glittering in the ultraviolet light, one of the Kibbutz Artzi’s innovations in the ’60s:
No, we know nothing about taxes and fees
But we know about flowers and trees
We know their value and their might
Because we were born to the sun
We were born to the light.
And we, the Narcissus group, sat in the audience, in long rows below the fortress, and watched the Oak girls, mesmerized. At night, when the celebration was over, we went back to Narcissus, and after the metapelet said goodnight and left, we got up to rehearse. We sang the song over and over, turned off the light in the corridor, and alternately, in the bedrooms, used the white sheets we removed from the beds in an attempt to achieve even a tiny bit of the divine aura that had encircled the pretty Oak girls. They were three years older than we were, but an immeasurable distance from us. Later, in our beds, we continued to dream about the magical staging of the song, the hand-waving, the turns, the purple light illuminating everything.
In the morning, our dreams about the song were interrupted by the always sudden opening of the shutters by the metapelet, and her sharp “good morning,” full of yellow sunlight. Some metaplot said, “Good morning, time to get up,” and others updated us: “Good morning children, three soldiers were killed at the Canal last night. Let’s go, get up.”
We all got up in unison, sixteen children, eight boys and eight girls; we brushed our teeth in unison, and standing in a silent, well-practiced line, took turns at the sinks, the toilets, in front of the mirror, where the metapelet braided our hair impatiently. We waited for Rivka to come to teach us.
Rivka was our teacher from the beginning of the second grade until the end of the sixth. In the seventh grade, we were sent away to the educational institution. We were sent away not only from Yehiam’s lovely countryside, but also from our teacher Rivka, and from our golden schooldays, the days of the “Subjects.”
Boys and girls taking a shower together.
Yael’s older brother, Ofer, is in the middle.
Rivka loved us all, and never discriminated against or favored anyone. She didn’t lose patience or raise her voice. Every Tuesday, we packed sandwiches and halvah and went out for a day-long excursion: to Yanuh through the wadi, to Tree Hill, to the duck lake near the fortress, to Anemone Hill, to the bridge, to the bear dens.
We had no exams or grades. The method used to teach us was called “Subjects.” Rivka—who also taught the Rock group, Yehiam’s first group, as well as the Pomegranate children, who were six years older than us and included my brother Yochai—would switch subjects every month or two, in synchronization and coordination with the other Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim and the Educational Center in Oranim. Within each subject, we covered other areas of study such as geography and history.
In “World Explorers,” we learned about Magellan and Columbus, about the North and South Poles and the equator. We learned that in Australia, the water spins around in the sink counter clockwise. We all chose the country or the explorer we were most interested in, and wrote a paper about him and the country he discovered.
When the subject was “Kadya Molodovsky,” we read her poems, which were our favorites, about poor children in the small towns around Warsaw, and we performed them at the end-of-subject party.
During solar and lunar eclipses, we went outside with pieces of glass and sooty mirror fragments to look at the changing shapes of the heavenly bodies. At night, Yoash taught us to pick out the North Star, the Milky Way and Ursa Major.
We observed tadpoles and salamanders in their natural habitats, in the reservoir, or in different-size aquariums and at varying temperatures.
The Narcissus group listening to a lecture.
When the subject was “Field and Garden,” we prepared the ground for a vegetable garden and planted beds of cabbages, kohlrabi, radishes, peppers and tomatoes, and put scarecrows between them to keep the birds away.
When “Fire” was the subject, we split into groups and went out at night to the hills inside and around the kibbutz—including the fortress and Ein Yaakov—and sent signals to each other with flaming torches made from canvas sacks doused with kerosene.
For “We Cook,” we learned about the peoples of the world, their cultures and their lifestyles through their food. At the end-of-subject party, we cooked the food of various peoples and invited all the kibbutz members to a restaurant where we served it. They chose their food from the menus we made, and we were their waiters and cooks.
When the subject was “Weather,” we learned about cumulus clouds and rain clouds, about winds and dew, and the first and last rains of the season. We went to the orchards to see the rain gauge that Yair Argaman had devised and improved, and we anxiously followed the changing rainfall averages on the precise charts he drew, which appeared in the kibbutz newsletter and on the bulletin board.
When the subject was “Mail,” we learned what a stamp, an envelope and a telegram were. We corresponded with children our age, after we picked their addresses out of a hat that was placed on Rivka’s desk. At the same time, children in Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim near and far picked our addresses out of a hat. We all learned the same things at the same time. Our activities and our memories are identical.
I wrote to Rina on Kibbut
z Shomrat (three years later, we were both in the Educational Institution on flat Kibbutz Evron, but when we corresponded, we still didn’t know each other):
Dear Rina,
How are you? These are the animals we have on our kibbutz: sheep, a goat, a monkey, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, and the birds we have are peacocks, ducks, all kinds of geese, guinea hens, all kinds of chickens, pheasants, pigeons, all kinds of parrots. If I write down all the names of all the animals that we have on our kibbutz (the different kinds of pigeons, for example) the list would be very long.
What kind of animals do you have there?
Your friend,
Yael
We put our letters in envelopes, wrote the addresses and pasted stamps on them, then watched Rivka Ofir, the technical secretary, stamp them. We accompanied the envelopes to the red car that would take them to places throughout the country via the mobile post, and we waited expectantly for the replies that would tell us about the animals on the other children’s kibbutzim or about the average rainfall in the big wide world.
The last thing we did on the subject of “Mail” was open a post office branch and sell envelopes and stationery to the kibbutz members, for paper money. They also bought telegrams, and our messengers rushed off to deliver them to their destinations.