We Were the Future

by Yael Neeman

  The plan of those who devised the children’s farms also included the setting up of committees, through which the children would receive training in the work of a branch coordinator, work scheduler, treasurer, etc. As usual in our system, the plans were great and visionary, and the shortness of time was their enemy. Nevertheless, we grew attached to animals and loved the work, despite the cold and the smelly mush we made from bread and water and put in tin bowls for the animals.

  The animals on the children’s farm were chosen on the basis of budgetary considerations, according to the preferences of whoever was in charge of the children’s farm at the time, and with an eye to changing fashion. Usually, there were rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, peacocks, ducks, various geese, guinea hens, chickens, pheasants, pigeons, sheep, goats, and sometimes, ibexes, miniature deer, parrots and monkeys.

  Twice in the history of Yehiam’s children’s farm, which was founded the same year we were born, in 1960, the animals bypassed the committees and entrance procedures, and came out of nowhere. As if they had been drawn to the children’s farm and wanted to join. The first time was at the very beginning. When the Rock children, the kibbutz’s first group, went out to work on the children’s farm, they couldn’t believe their eyes. An exhausted white camel was sleeping at the gate of the farm. The farm was very small then, consisting of only a few rabbits and guinea pigs, and a pair of long-necked geese they called Chava and Yochanan, the names of the two tall kibbutz members of German origin. And suddenly—a white camel. The Rock children gave it food and water, took care of it and loved it from the very first day. A week later, an Arab from Jish arrived and the camel actually ran to him and they hugged each other. The Arab from Jish told them that his white camel had disappeared two weeks earlier. He left fifty lirot for the children in a gesture of thanks for having loved and taken such good care of the white camel that had gone running back to him. The Rock children bought a lamb with the money.

  Ten years later, there was a storm with strong winds, and a Barbary duck landed behind one of the kibbutz buildings. The member in charge of the farm said that it must have come from Ein Yaakov (the moshav located two kilometers from us, right next to Kibbutz Gaaton, but we’d never been there). At night, we told each other that the duck hadn’t come from Ein Yaakov, but from Kansas, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who flew through the air, together with her house, in a cyclone.

  Those were two isolated incidents. Most of the time, our animals, exactly like us, lived exclusively in the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim. The people in charge of the children’s farms in all the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim met for day-long seminars, where they discussed raising animals and the educational aspect of including children in farm work. Those seminars also had a practical side: The people in charge of the children’s farms closed deals to trade animals from one farm to another. For example, in one case, Yehiam’s children’s farm gave Kibbutz Gan Shmuel’s children’s farm some of our excess ducks and the pheasants that had accumulated, in exchange for a donkey and a male peacock.

  We finished our daily work quota at 10:30, and dashed off from the children’s farm, from class, and from the hated bedroom clean-up, heading for the large soccer field, to join the Oak, Terebinth and Anemone kids. We ran so we could get in as much playing as possible until 11:15, when the next lesson began.

  Every day, we split up into groups and prayed for victory, said magic words and swore oaths, if only we would win.

  We didn’t know what made us switch games, how and when we decided to move from the dodge-ball season to the tag season to the hide-and-seek season, to the capture-the-flag season, and then to start all over again. We’d grab hold of the games and play them to their depth and breadth, leaping from the ground to the sky, catching the ball, passing the ball, flying in the air, running the bases, hiding behind cypress trees, forgetting everything around us.

  On Wednesday, between one and three, there was what we called “a rest from resting,” which meant a nap-less afternoon. Once a week, we were allowed to skip the afternoon nap, which we hated so much, and keep playing. All the children in the Children’s Society—the Oak, Terebinth, Narcissus and Anemone groups—participated in the games.

  But the rest of the time, six days a week, we had to sleep between one and three in the afternoon, or at least be completely silent in our beds. We couldn’t read or move or bother the metaplot who, during those two hours, folded laundry and put the clothes into our compartments, polished shoes, and did a lot of other things, depending on how quickly they worked and how much we bothered them. We hated those hours of being frozen in place. Time didn’t move, or it went backwards on the clocks we didn’t have in the children’s houses. We kept guessing the time to ourselves, trying to figure out where the minute and hour hands were.

  Time also froze at lunch when we were stuck at our tables for a long time after the meal was over because we couldn’t get any food down. We felt as if we were stepping on the brakes instead of running, we felt imprisoned. Sitting around the dining room table, we developed a system: We came to our meals with pockets full of small pieces of paper that aroused no suspicion, and we’d slowly pick apart the meat, slip the pieces into the bits of paper, shove the paper deep into our pockets, and in the end, when the metapelet couldn’t see, we tossed the bits of paper quickly into the trash.

  We weren’t really scared of the metaplot who forced us to eat, we weren’t really hurt by the fingernails that dug into our arms when they finally lost patience, or by the way they shook us: One metapelet grabbed our hands, the other our feet—and they shook us. So we’d learn to finish our food next time. We thought about other things during the shaking and we swore to ourselves that we wouldn’t learn any lessons for the next time.

  The metaplot were imprisoned in the system together with us, partly prisoners, partly guards. Ever since the early days of the communes, even before the kibbutzim, the women members always found themselves assigned, and assigned themselves, to work in the kitchen, the laundry and the children’s houses. To streamline the work on the entire kibbutz and not to disrupt the men from doing their productive work in the fields.

  The communes, and later, the kibbutzim, decided that children belonged to their parents, but the responsibility of caring for and educating them fell on the entire kibbutz, and all the women, married or single, participated in taking care of the babies, each in her turn, leaving the mothers free to continue their work on the kibbutz.

  Our system was not good to women. On the contrary. The single women, the young women, and even the seventh-grade girls worked in the children’s houses, which were always short-handed. The children’s houses were supposed to free the woman from childcare, but in fact, they imprisoned them in that work—except that they did it with other women’s children. There was equality in women’s work, but it existed only among them, the mothers and the single women, and did not apply to the men, except for their Saturday shifts in the children’s houses once every five weeks.

  During the compulsory afternoon naps between one and three o’clock, we lost patience. We saw the metaplot only as guards, and felt sorry for ourselves in our beds. We couldn’t sleep, we tried counting the seconds, but they trickled between our fingers. Time did not pass. During those two hours, we hated everything.

  Sometimes we got up abruptly, as if our minds were rebelling against our bodies, and our bodies trailed behind them in fear. We couldn’t stand it anymore. Sometimes the metaplot surprised us by not getting really angry, and they used us to help them distribute clean clothes to their compartments; other times, we were punished and banished to the shower room, to sit there on the bench until three. “It’s better than lying in bed,” we told ourselves. “At least we tried.”

  When three o’clock came and the metapelet went from room to room, we jumped out of bed totally awake, and skipped outside. We played until 5:30. We played tag, basketball, dodge ball, hide-and-seek, the freeze game, and paper chase, depending on which game was in seaso
n and what season of the year it was. In the summer, we played tag in the pool, and the rest of the year, we played it on the lawns.

  At 5:30, we went to our biological parents’ house, but we didn’t stop playing. We ran to the large lawn in front of the row of four small houses where our parents lived, we, the children from that row. Our older brothers and sisters were at the Educational Institution or in the army, and we didn’t want to stay in the house, suffocating on the Kibbutz Shomrat Hazorea couches across from the veneer sideboards; we wanted to run. After we wolfed down cake, Anat called me or I called her, and we ran out, every day without exception, to play games we made up. We ran to find things to take to the camp we set up for ourselves on the lawn, a camp for girl soldiers, like the ones who passed through the kibbutz. And once, on one of our search expeditions for equipment for our camp, we passed the Parents’ house, which was right next to our biological parents’ house.

  Real grandparents, who might have stepped out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, lived in that house. Old people were a rare sight in our eternally young kibbutzim, the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim. Officially, they were called “The Parents,” because they were the members’ parents, but everyone called them by the only family title that had made its way into the kibbutz, grandpa or grandma. Grandpa Vilmosch, Grandma Guttman.

  Some of them were the grandparents of Narcissus children, and the others we saw working on the kibbutz, but we’d never been in their house until that visit. They were few in number, most of them Holocaust refugees who lived on kibbutzim thanks to a humane, bureaucratic Hashomer Hatzair clause that allowed them to live near their families, to fast on Yom Kippur and eat their final meal before the fast in the secular dining hall. We had no synagogues. We were proud that we worked on Yom Kippur and ate wild boar that we roasted on campfires. No circumcision ceremonies were held on our kibbutz. No rabbi set foot on it to perform weddings. The dead were buried in coffins, the Kaddish prayer was not said over them, and any mention of the Bible was forbidden. Secular poems by Natan Alterman, Natan Yonatan or Natan Zach were read at funerals.

  Behind the doors to those grandparents’ rooms, it was as if the entire setting had been replaced by a strange and different world. They spoke Hungarian almost exclusively. Their cabinets were covered with embroidered Hungarian doilies and porcelain figures. And they had tons of sweets in their cabinets, as if they’d been waiting for hundreds of children to arrive. After that first time, we went to visit them every few weeks. They were always glad to see us, took white porcelain dishes out of their small cabinets and filled them with candies and wafers. On the way there, we picked bits of grass and handed them to them as if they were flowers. We sat for a minute, looked around, ate sweets. Grandma Vilmosch had bleached blond hair, wore red nail polish and pink lipstick, the only woman on the kibbutz who wore makeup. She was allowed, probably because of that humane, bureaucratic clause. She whispered Hungarian terms of endearment to us, and Grandpa Vilmosch laughed. We said köszönöm szépen (thank you very much) and ran out of there. No one knew about our visits to that old world, that ancient world twenty meters from our biological parents’ houses.

  Yael visits the room of a grandparent.

  At night, after work and lessons and games, and after we returned from our biological parents’ houses and ate supper around the small Formica tables in the Narcissus dining room, and after our biological parents came for the fifteen minutes allowed them and showed us their stopwatches and talked among themselves about work, we went to bed. The metapelet sat in the corridor, and all we heard was her voice as she read to us from Jim and the Train Driver, or from The Water Babies, then said goodnight and left.

  We said goodnight, waited a minute for her to walk far enough away, then returned to our lives. At the time, we were preoccupied with the new technique we’d developed to keep us from sucking our thumbs. The four of us in our room (“ours” for that year—every year they’d re-organize the rooms so there’d be equal opportunity), the last room, hadn’t been able to stop sucking our thumbs. In the end, we accidentally happened upon the way to do it: We found the metaplot’s hand cream in their closet, tried it on our hands, and then, when we put our thumbs in our mouth, we discovered that they had a horrible taste. We spread the cream on our hands every night after the metapelet said goodnight and left. It did the trick quickly for all of us, except Zohar. He couldn’t stop sucking his thumb even with the help of our new technique.

  In a most extraordinary step that we couldn’t explain and talked about for years afterwards, Zohar was given candy every night to help him in his efforts to stop sucking his thumb. Colorful round pieces of candy in a small dish placed on a chair near his bed. That was how they used to give us all candy once a year, on our birthday. Zohar’s candy dazzled our imagination at night, like rare fireflies. We wanted some. Equality had twisted our hearts, and Zohar was tormented by the fact that only he had candy, so he shared it with all of us. We sat on our beds in the last room of the Narcissus group—Ronen, Hagit, Zohar and I—each of us with the most glittering piece of candy in his mouth, and decided that from that night on, anyone who farted after the metapelet left had to admit it to all the other kids in the room and tell a story about one subject only—caca. We voted unanimously in favor of the idea. And so our nights became filled with castles of caca, cities of caca, people of caca who did caca things. Until we got tired of that too and moved on to something else.

  12

  When we were twelve years old, in the seventh grade, everything changed in a single day. We left mountainous Yehiam, we left Narcissus and our teacher Rivka and moved to the Oshrat Educational Institution, which was adjacent to the flat landscape of Kibbutz Evron. We ate there, went to classes there, slept there. We lived there.

  We were driven twice a week to Yehiam to work in the fields and the children’s houses. Afterwards we went to visit our parents in their rooms, drank instant coffee and ate cake there, then were driven back to the institution. And we went to Yehiam again once or twice a week just to work and come back.

  The row of Narcissus kids who used to trail like a centipede behind Rivka to see the arbutus trees on the way to Tree Hill unraveled, and with that unraveling, other activities disappeared: We no longer played soccer or dodge ball on the field; we didn’t sail on rafts in the reservoir pond; we didn’t sit in a U-shaped formation in class when Rivka spoke or in groups of four around our little Formica tables when we ate.

  The countryside changed too, as if all the scenery had been moved aside, exposing an empty stage behind it: There were no fireflies at the institution, no salamanders, no squills, no carobs, no figs, no Judas trees.

  Not only was there no nature at the institution, but there was no scenery either. It didn’t overlook anything. It consisted of a collection of functional buildings—a dormitory and classrooms for each group, a building that served as a dining room and a building that housed a library and a reading room—surrounded by unimaginative lawns.

  We moved to live with 180 youngsters, ranging from seventh- to twelfth-graders, from four kibbutzim (Evron, Shomrat, Gaaton and Yehiam), with that eternal freedom of choice.

  We didn’t ride to work on Yehiam and back in our GMC anymore, but in a yellow bus belonging to the Mateh Asher Regional District, together with kids from Kibbutz Gaaton whom we picked up on the way down to Evron or dropped off on the way up to Yehiam. Yehiam was always the furthest away, the highest and the most isolated, and we no longer sang “We’ll rejoice in Yehiam” on the way to the kibbutz. The song had been left behind at the edge of the horizon of the past, like our baby teeth.

  The last of the adults left every day at three in the afternoon, at the end of the school day, and went back to their kibbutzim. We stayed at the institution day after day for six straight years.

  Sitting in front of the dormitories at the Educational Institution.

  Educational institutions of this type were not common to all kibbutzim, but existed only in those that belonged to the Ha
shomer Hatzair movement. In 1931, the first such institution was founded on Mishmar Haemek. Our school, Oshrat, was established in 1961. When we went there, in the early 1970s, there were twenty similar educational institutions in the entire country, all built on the same model and given the names of the regions where they were located: Tabor, Gilboa, Ainot Yarden, Maleh Habsor, Mevuot Hanegev and so on.

  The educational institution was built on the model of a Hashomer Hatzair independent camp, adjoining one of the kibbutzim, but separate from it. Both the proximity and the separation of these institutions from the mother-kibbutz were deliberate: to distance and protect the youngsters from the decadence of bourgeois life lying in wait for them with their families, and the older kibbutzim that had already become corrupted; and at the same time, to provide them with the opportunity to learn the values of work, productivity and cooperation through a select staff that would convey the educational doctrine in a direct and non-controlling manner.

  Each kibbutz was obligated to assign the job of training the future generation to their most suitable teachers, educators and metaplot, who together were the educational staff.

  According to the Hashomer Hatzair educational worldview, youth is not merely an intermediate stage between childhood and adulthood, but a significant period in and of itself. The educational institution was supposed to give these young people full autonomy, in a democratic setting, to manage their lives independently in the present, and to provide them with the best training for their future as members of their kibbutzim.