by Yael Neeman
The next stage was an inquiry. They talked to us about trust and break-ins that violated it and were contrary to openness. We replied whatever we replied. The homeroom teachers’ questions and our answers were polite, almost bored.
When the inquiry was over, our parents were asked to come from the kibbutz for a “talk with the principal” of the Educational Institution, in an act composed of patched-together vestiges of urban bourgeois life that had no connection to anything in our world, like single beads without a string, without a plot. Beads that had rolled in from another story. After all, parents never set foot in the Institution, except for several regular, well-planned occasions over the years (to celebrate our graduation, for example).
The punishment was always the same, though they supposedly gave it much thought and consideration each time they imposed it: a week’s suspension from the Institution.
During that week, we worked full time on the kibbutz. That punishment, being suspended from the Institution, was considered a sign of heroism, both by us and the kibbutz members, who had to restrain themselves from patting us on the back. Everyone knew, after all, that work was more important than school, more important than anything.
On Yehiam, where we lived when we were on vacation from the Institution, and worked mornings for two-thirds of the vacation, our lodgings were located on the edge of the kibbutz, on the side of the hill closest to the fortress and the pool. We lived three in a room.
Getting up for work was the opposite of getting up for classes. There was no feeling of vacation. We felt obligated long before we got up, before the alarm clock rang. We got up feeling pressured, responsible. The sound of the alarm clock blended into our dreams, became intertwined with them. First we dreamt that the ring of the alarm clock was a siren. Then we dreamt that we’d fallen asleep when we had to get up for work, and then we startled awake and jumped out of bed.
We got up and dressed, our bodies hurting inside because of the early hour, four or six in the morning (depending on the work and the season), then we walked to the dining hall, drank dark tea from plastic cups and sat down in the truck, hoping we’d never get there, though we knew we would, then wishing we were on the way back.
For the boys who worked there regularly, the fields were a world unto themselves, filled with responsibility, competition, pride, humiliation, driving tractors, operating the various machines. Each year, they were assigned to a more complicated, more prestigious agricultural branch. For us, the girls, the work day was clearly defined and permanent: We worked in the children’s houses most of the time, and we only went down to the fields in a particular season and according to the changing needs of the various branches. Everything was known in advance. Everything was quantified, like the rows and furrows and how much the harvesters managed to pick, or they were measured, like the pears that we measured, each and every one, to make sure they were large enough to be picked. Measured like the pails and backpacks and the containers we filled and emptied into large crates, then went back to fill again.
Bananas, oranges, pears, avocados. The trees, the fruit. The baskets, the backpacks, the containers, the regular ladders, the power ladders, the knives. We climbed up and down, and emptied the baskets and pails and backpacks into the crates. We worked according to the seasons: Sometimes we irrigated, sometimes we tied, sometimes we packed. We picked, removed stones, pruned. We could barely concentrate; we thought about the upcoming breakfast, then about the ten o’clock break, then about lunch. Time will pass; after all, it always passes. Think only about the fruit, the sack. The regular ladders and the power ladders reached all the way to the sky; the tractors drove through mud, through furrows, on the sidewalks and inside our heads, plowing our thoughts. The air was clear.
As the day wore on, the difficulty became worthwhile; it was tangible, you could touch it, as if it had merged with the prize that followed it, and the sweat of fieldwork had its own unique taste, the deep satisfying taste of the field kitchen breakfast, the sweet taste of reward.
But the most important, most valued reward was the objective, momentarily calming proof of a job well done. That kind of proof was given in a written report on our performance, where quantities were written down in detail and compared to the adults’ averages, similar to the newsletter report on the Rock and Grove children, the two first groups on the kibbutz, when they worked in the orange groves for the first time:
During the Hanukkah vacation, the Rock/Grove children went down to pick lemons. They put in 9.6 days of work in only three days, during which they picked 140 field crates—a decent output that does not fall short of an adult’s average output.
The competition between the boys and girls was conducted in an orderly and disciplined manner. For us, this is a good sign for the future, when we want to do harvesting work with our children in the Educational Institution […] We can learn from this brief experiment what we have known for a long time—the great importance of involving our children in agricultural work. And the results are extremely positive, not only in educational terms, but also, and primarily, in farming terms. During those few hours of work, the Rock children proved themselves very able, as they did in other jobs they performed. The orange grove workers will welcome them with open arms any time.
But most of the time, the girls were sent to work in the children’s houses.
The children’s houses had long corridors, no horizon and no seasons. No one wrote words of praise for the metaplot and their achievements in the newsletter. No laundry-folding or shoe-polishing records were ever acknowledged.
From one o’clock until three, we helped the metaplot who were in charge of waking the children: We polished rows of children’s shoes (a row of brown and row of red), folded the laundry that came in sacks from the communa and distributed it to the compartments. Our eyes were on the compartments in the metapelet’s room, where we placed the folded laundry, but the fear came from behind our backs, from the direction of the corridor. We were afraid we wouldn’t finish the job, that one of the children would wake up and slow us down. We wanted to finish distributing the laundry and do other special cleaning jobs before they woke up in pain, or with problems or unexpected desires we might not know how to fulfill.
In the sixth grade, we ourselves had still been in the children’s houses; in the seventh, we were made assistants to the metaplot; and in the eighth grade, we were metaplot. Women and girls worked in the children’s houses, where more helping hands were always needed.
Mistakes you made in the children’s houses were unlike mistakes you learned from in other jobs, in the fields, working with tobacco, in the kitchen or the gardens. Mistakes in the children’s houses had a ceaseless melody that began before work and continued after it. The threatening melody of a barely averted disaster that might still happen.
Once, one of us put a boy in a bathtub of boiling water by mistake; another time, one of us forgot a child on top of a missile. It was a tall missile that had been built for the kibbutz children’s holiday. The children’s holiday was an addition to the kibbutz holiday, another celebration of the kibbutz enterprise. The tall missile was the pride of all the children’s holidays. It was four stories high, with a spiral staircase that took climbers from one story to the next, which grew progressively smaller. The boy was forgotten on the highest landing, at the top of the missile. He was three.
He was rescued when his screams were heard by a passerby. He’d apparently been there for fifteen minutes. That was our groupmate’s first day of work with those children as an assistant to a replacement metapelet. They had both taken the children to the playground, to the swings and the missile.
The boy’s mother told our groupmate about it at supper. She didn’t reprimand or lecture her; she simply told her about it quietly, as if she were telling her a story about another child on a different kibbutz with a different metapelet’s assistant. She didn’t talk about it with any adults on any committees, not even with the regular metapelet, and there was no investig
ation. We were apparently saved, and nothing happened. We were in the eighth grade then.
Working in the kitchen at the Educational Institution.
We talked about it on the yellow bus that took us back to the Educational Institution. We felt that we should think about all the things that could happen when we were in charge of a large group of children. We thought we should count them constantly; after all, even in our Narcissus group, Izhar had been forgotten once and left on the Ahziv beach. We should have learned then, we told ourselves. But we’re only assistants to the metaplot, we said, trying to calm each other down, you can’t learn everything in a single day. But we didn’t calm down. We relived mistakes in our minds, the way we had relived the goals we made or missed in the Children’s Society on the soccer field the previous year. We wanted to excel without making mistakes, not small ones and certainly not mistakes like that. There were no records set or broken in the children’s house. It was a level plane with no horizon.
The veterans who worked in the fields, the children’s houses, the dining hall and the shoemaking workshop, in all the workplaces had accumulated hundreds of days off. We, on the other hand had just begun to work, along with members of the other groups who were becoming part of the system, and volunteers who had been infected by it, and we felt unworthy of it. There was no end to what you could do because initiative could always find more and more ways to be productive. Even if we finished all the obvious things, like folding all the laundry or polishing all the shoes, wrapping all the bunches of bananas and picking all the citrus fruit—there were always more and more special projects, and when they were finished, there was an endless number of more efficient, improved ways to do them.
Just as there was no beginning or end to work, so it was with us. It was difficult to differentiate between us and work.
We were afraid to ask questions about work, afraid to be a burden, to slow down the grown-ups, to diminish their productivity, to stop the system from moving forward.
We never satisfied the system, mute and gentle as it seemed, never asking anything for itself, seeking only to be considerate, to make no demands: “Each according to his ability.” But who knows how to truly measure ability; it has no bounds or limits. Our system was never satisfied. We felt guilty.
Work demanded not only diligence or a particular number of skills. We could acquire some, the ones that could be learned, but it was more like an additional sense, an additional dimension, an additional organ. It was both outside and inside us. As if work were above us and encircled us. We were replaceable; it was not.
The Hashomer Hatzair enterprises were identical and functioned in total synchronization. All of us, from all the kibbutzim and educational institutions, moved from place to place in perfect coordination. We did so in our sixth grade hospitality program. We did so on our week-long annual trips and in camp during the summer vacation with the Children’s Society: We went to camp in Kibbutz Zikim, swam in their pool, jumped off their diving board and slept in their beds, and they came to Yehiam, played tag in our pool, ate around our Formica tables and slept in our beds. We switched places only with them on our planet, the kibbutzim of the Kibbutz Artzi Hashomer Hatzair movement.
In the seventh grade, when we were twelve and went to the Educational Institution with fourteen other children from Kibbutz Shomrat, and another 160 older kids from Gaaton, Yehiam, Evron and Shomrat—of course, they were also from the Kibbutz Artzi and Hashomer Hatzair—we learned that their childhoods had been filled with the same personal experiences that had filled ours, and later, on the movement’s excursions and in the seminars on Givat Haviva, we met many more who shared the dream that was our lives.
The more our world seemed to expand, the narrower it became, until it was like a world of fun-house mirrors. Our private lives were reflected in the dreams of others: our older siblings, people from kibbutzim in the far-off Negev desert, in the Sharon area, in the entire country. Everyone had private memories of the night guard who didn’t come or who came at the wrong moment, and everyone pretended to be asleep. We all remembered the same recorder song books and the upside-down day when we stayed awake all night, until dawn, and we all remembered the rest from resting every Wednesday, when we were allowed to skip our nap between one and three in the afternoon and could keep playing on the field.
It was as if the cards were shuffled every time, mixed well, but still—with impossible probability—we were all dealt totally identical cards. That’s why the Week of Broadening Horizons seemed so glittering to us. We didn’t switch places. We traveled. Not only did we travel, but we went to places that were very different from ours: an Arab village, a religious moshav, a young kibbutz, and Tel Aviv.
Apparently the repeated debates on the status of work as opposed to that of society and culture were what caused the various institutions to add letters to the acronym WBH (Week of Broadening Horizons): WBWH (Week of Broadening Work Horizons); WBSH (Week of Broadening Social Horizons); and WBCH (Week of Broadening Cultural Horizons).
For two or three days in the tenth grade, four days in the eleventh and a week in the twelfth, we learned, worked and lived inside the new shape we were exposed to, we lived a different life.
In the tenth grade, all the members of the Hashomer Hatzair educational institutions traveled (each separately, unaware that the others were doing the same) to a nearby Arab village. We went to Tamra for two days.
Although Tamra was only nineteen kilometers from the Oshrat Educational Institution in Evron, we knew hardly anything about the boys and girls our age who were hosting us. Nor did we know what to ask, where or what to begin with: the end of the 18th century, when, according to the local tradition, the place was founded? Or maybe 1948, when many residents who had been driven away from the surrounding area had joined them? Or 1956, when Tamra was officially designated a local council? Despite the “brotherhood of peoples,” such an intrinsic part of kibbutz doctrine, we neither knew nor learned the history of the neighboring Arab villages. They knew a great deal more about us. Our hosts’ parents were “one of us”—some of them were paid workers on our kibbutzim, the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim.
In the morning, we went with them to their huge school, which was so different from ours: Its walls were exposed and peeling; it was cold because there was no heating; the equipment was broken. We had a literature and a geography lesson with them. In the literature class, we learned Bialik for the first (and last) time in our lives, and in the geography class, we learned about the structure of a port city, we learned that it was logical to build one that backed onto land.
In the evening, we paired up and walked to their houses with them. There was a TV in every house, not like on the kibbutz—one in the entire Institution. That evening, a political satire show was on, and we felt somehow uneasy: if we didn’t laugh at the same things, would a gap of awkwardness open between us if we seemed ungrateful?
Before we went to bed, our hosts asked us where we’d like to sleep, and let us choose between a room where all the mattresses were, and a different room that was empty. Hesitantly, we chose the empty room, thinking that it would be less embarrassing, but they moved all the mattresses to the room we chose and came to sleep with us.
We felt constantly embarrassed, our movements were clumsy, our responses to their questions froze in our mouths, and we felt as if we’d invaded a home that wasn’t ours. Suddenly, we were sleeping with a family. We didn’t know what was more alien to us—the Arab food, their pile of mattresses, their school—or maybe simply living with a family.
We were relieved to go home, to our Institution, to our wanderings, our life. Every detail of their homes lived in our minds like a short story, like a stage set.
A week after we returned, Netta received a letter from Tamra—one of the boys wrote that he’d fallen in love with her. “I think about your blue eyes and your blond curls all the time,” he wrote.
In our junior year, some classes went to religious kibbutzim and moshavim, an
d some went to a “young kibbutz,” which usually meant a different or experimental kibbutz.
We went to Kerem Shalom, the western-most kibbutz in the country, near the Egyptian-Israeli border at Raffiah. The story of Kerem Shalom was like a socialist legend, told to us over and over again by different sources. They said it was a kibbutz that had never become morally corrupt or bourgeois. They said that on Kerem Shalom, everyone swam naked in the pool. They said that on Kerem Shalom, there were spontaneous kibbutz meetings—if something bothered someone, he rang a bell and everyone dropped everything and came running. Nothing was frozen in rules and regulations, or set in stone. As if everything there truly began at the beginning. They said that the members of Kerem Shalom were ideologues who demonstrated against the injustices of the settlers in the Gaza Strip and northern Sinai, organized petitions, and refused to rest until true peace and justice reigned here.
The experimental version of the kibbutz was established in the ’60s by a core group known as Gilat (made up of people from well-to-do families), which was the first core group of kibbutz members’ children who, like us, were graduates of educational institutions. During the first few years, another group of kibbutz members joined them, and in the following years, two core groups of urban youth who weren’t members of youth movements joined them as well. Those core groups—Shalom and Avshalom—became known later for members who had become writers, film producers, designers, editors of books and newspapers.
We arrived at the kibbutz and worked for five days. We all slept together in a sports hall at the far end of the kibbutz. When we arrived, we were told that we hadn’t come at a good time, that the kibbutz was in the midst of a great upheaval because several important members had left after another split that had occurred. Nonetheless, they sent someone to the hall to see us after work (wearing blue work clothes, of course; kibbutz ideologues of every stripe, conservatives and experimentalists alike, always wore work clothes when they spoke), to tell us how everything began, and then they took us to observe a kibbutz meeting.