We Were the Future

by Yael Neeman

  We believed that when Pirosh went to Tel Aviv and saw fourteen movies in three days, he thought about which of them would be especially appropriate for us. We didn’t know that the decisions were made long before that by the people in the Movie Department of the Histadrut. The movies were passed from one kibbutz to the other. On all of them, just as on our kibbutz, the members gathered once a week in the dining hall—and in summer, on the lawn of the clubhouse—to watch a movie.

  Due to copyright agreements, the movies were copied (from 35mm to 16mm) two or three years after their city premieres.

  The French people on the kibbutz occasionally held discussions on cinema and politics and ran the Classic Cinema Club, where they discussed Eisenstein or Bertolucci. But they had difficulty finding classic films because those agreements, as well as copyright problems, required the Department to destroy the copies after five years.

  On our planet, the present obliterated the past and the future. The classics were destroyed and the contemporary films had not yet been copied for us. We saw all the movies in our own particular order.

  It was the Repertoire Committee of the Histadrut Movie Department that chose which movies to copy. The Movie Department had, in fact, a monopoly on 16mm films in Israel.

  Not only did the Department lack a large, important part of classic cinema, but erotic movies weren’t included in the repertoire either.

  The French members protested against that situation at meetings of the Classic Cinema Club. They asked: Why aren’t films like Emanuelle, The Last Tango in Paris, or What Do You Say to a Naked Lady allowed to be screened, while every karate movie is in the Department, along with every Western? Are karate movies and all the other bourgeois family movies preferable to erotic films that raise many existential questions, they wondered out loud during a discussion that preceded the screening itself.

  After a few years, those movies arrived as well.

  Pirosh also ran the projector at the meetings of the Classic Cinema Club. He never got involved in the discussions. He was in favor of screening all the movies in the world.

  4

  On Saturdays, the men worked in our children’s houses. Some of them were our fathers and some were not. The Saturday shift schedule was organized by the work scheduler. (There was a yearly rotation, ensuring that democracy prevailed among the holders of higher positions.)

  The work scheduler left a small green note in the mailboxes of the men assigned to the Saturday shift. Written in pencil on the pieces of paper were the date, time and place of their shift. There was no room for argument or negotiation.

  As opposed to the special jobs that members were occasionally mobilized to do, everyone knew what the Saturday shifts were: work on every fourth or fifth Saturday doing jobs that had to be done seven days a week (tending to the children in the children’s houses, irrigating and harvesting in the fields, operating the dining hall, and so on). An attempt was made to create a more or less permanent rotation so that the workers could gain experience in the job they did only once every four or five weeks.

  One of the men who took care of us, the Narcissus group, on Saturdays was Feivel, the kibbutz metalworker. Feivel stood above or beside all the disagreements. Everyone respected him, and he did not belong to the French, Israeli or the Hungarian groups. He was Polish, always wore work clothes, and really did work all the time. It was as if he had stepped out of a socialist-realist painting, or out of the ceramic mural that Yoskeh had built at the entrance to the dining hall—a wall that showed myriad images of workers and tools being brandished in all directions, creating a composition so filled with movement that it wasn’t clear what the central image was supposed to be: the worker, perhaps the scythe or the sickle, or maybe even the work itself.

  Feivel continued to work even when the workday was over. He cut iron and welded and soldered tables, shelves and other items that people had asked him to make for them privately, and he never said no.

  Once, when he was working the Saturday shift with our group, Feivel told us that the Russians were no better than the Americans, and maybe the Americans were better.

  “Feivel said that the Americans are a lot better than the Russians,” we told each other that evening after he’d gone to the kibbutz meeting.

  The men who worked the Saturday shift in the children’s houses didn’t know how to braid our hair or make French toast for us. We looked forward to Saturdays, and feared them at the same time. We felt as if we were on a Ferris wheel, knowing we should be enjoying it, but waiting for it to finally end, for Sunday to come. We didn’t know whether the Saturday workers could even gather our hair into a ponytail that wouldn’t loosen immediately, whether we’d arrive at places on time, whether our food would be ready. We stayed awake to tell them when to wake us, even though they knew. We didn’t trust them.

  Because of the holes that appeared in our daily routine, we hoped to have adventures. But when we did, we were afraid that we’d made them up, afraid that we’d exaggerated the stories so much that they had destroyed even the kernel of truth they were based on. One Saturday, two minutes before we left for the fortress, Shimon began looking for something, didn’t find it, and cursed, motherfucker. We talked about that at night, after Shimon had gone—had he cursed or not, were the coins we’d found at the fortress really ancient and would they be displayed at an exhibition, and if they were, would there be any mention of the fact that they were discovered by the Narcissus children? We weren’t sure what had really happened. And then there was the drive with Willie, who substituted for one of the regular Saturday workers. He agreed to take all of us, sixteen children, in his small, Israeli-made Sussita van to the Gaaton turn-off. (The members of Gaaton called it the Yehiam turn-off, and we called it the Gaaton turn-off. In any case, there, you could only turn into Kibbutz Gaaton or Kibbutz Yehiam.)

  The men who worked the Saturday shift in our children’s house also read us bedtime stories from the corridor, before the door to the world of grown-ups was closed at nine thirty, the time when the men would say goodnight and go off to the kibbutz meetings.

  There was a kibbutz meeting every Saturday evening. That was one of the only things we knew about the daily routine of the grown-up world, and while they were having their meeting, we, the Narcissus children, held an alternative kibbutz meeting, which we invented. We sat at the doors to our four rooms, wrote minutes, and discussed adding new rules to the games we played at night, for example, “Tushy Sport,” in which each one of us had to pull down someone else’s pajama bottoms, unless they got away and stood in the doorway. We also discussed whether it was legal to remain standing in the doorway for the rest of the game.

  A kibbutz meeting, held every Saturday evening.

  The women would knit while the men discussed kibbutz affairs.

  During the kibbutz meetings in the dining hall, the men spoke and the women knitted. What did the members do on the other nights of the week? We didn’t know. But the kibbutz meetings determined everything: They not only discussed ideological issues, but they resolved all questions related to everyday life on the kibbutz. Kibbutz meetings were the legislature, the judicial and the executive branch: Every departure from the kibbutz—whether extended or brief, for educational purposes or vacations and trips abroad—required their approval. The same was true for every gift the members received, every piece of furniture they wanted to add to their rooms, or assistance they wanted to give to their children or relatives.

  Public and private issues were decided upon at the kibbutz meetings, and committees were elected there. If someone wanted to leave the kibbutz for higher education, the secretariat, the Education Committee and finally, the kibbutz meeting decided whether he would go or wait, and also, what he would study: Did the course of study he wished to pursue correspond to what the kibbutz needed? If it didn’t, he had to adjust himself to the needs of the community.

  The community was an abstract and concrete entity at one and the same time. It was the sum of things tha
t make up an experiment of enormous proportions to actually live the perfect, day-to-day life of a philosophical or literary text. As if the kibbutz had taken not only the Marxist content, but also its philosophical syntax, and turned it into a code by which everyday life would be lived. (In response to a friend’s comment that she couldn’t imagine Marx living a life of equality, Marx replied: “The day will come, but we would do well to take leave of this world before it does.”)

  Usually, the men who worked in the children’s houses on Saturdays did not read aloud another chapter in the book that the metaplot read from, but made up their own stories. Creativity was highly valued in the kibbutz, and so, for example, we never brought each other readymade birthday gifts. It was always preferable to make a clay vase, even if it came out crooked or ugly, or cut out and embroider the edges of yet another bookmark rather than bring a bourgeois gift, that is, a store-bought one. Based on that same logic, it was better to make an effort and invent a story than to read from the book the metaplot read from.

  We especially liked the stories made up by Yoash, Netta’s father, and Hanoch, Moshik’s father. Both Netta and Moshik were in our group. Their families were very close and stood out from the rest of our parents. They had crossed over from one kibbutz movement to another and had come to Yehiam from Kibbutz Palmachim.

  We were born in 1960, after the split within the kibbutz movement, after the Prague trials, after the Doctors’ trial and the Rosenbergs’ trial, all of which took place in ’52 and ’53 and were added to the list of things that were never spoken about, not with us. Nor did we ever mention the rude awakening in ’56 after Stalin’s death. We didn’t know that our eyes had been opened because we didn’t know that we’d been blind, and we certainly didn’t know that the light of our beliefs had been eclipsed.

  True, we sang the Hapoel anthem: “Flames, rise flame, rise, we pound our sledgehammer all day long, all day long. Flame, we are like you, we are like you, our hearts are red. Red.” We didn’t know what a sledgehammer was anyway. We sang, in harmony and with conviction of the Budyonny Regiments riding into battle: “Hey hey hey. Cossack cavalry ride into battle.” We didn’t know that it told of plunderers and rapists on their way to endless fields of slaughter. Nor did we know about Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, what they had in common and what divided them. We had never heard of the gulags,6 and we didn’t know about the millions whose lives had been destroyed because of faith or belief in one of them and not the other. We knew their names the way we knew the names of the generals in the Israeli Army during that period, after ’67 and the Six Day War. We thought they were all heroes who had defeated the Nazis, and now were marching us into a better world: Uzi Narkis, Moshe Dayan, Stalin and Lenin.

  We knew that we believed in the human spirit and expansive lawns. Who could say no to the human spirit? Who could rise up against expansive lawns?

  Moshik and Netta came to us from Kibbutz Palmachim in ’62, when we were two years old. We were told that both families moved to our kibbutz for ideological reasons. “Ideological reasons” sounded quite exotic to us, and Moshik and Netta’s houses were also exotic. Their parents seemed much younger than ours. They were Israeli, not Hungarian, like ours. The furniture in their houses was completely different from the couches and armchairs made in the Kibbutz Shomrat and Kibbutz Hazorea factory, and different from the veneer book cabinets nailed to the walls of our parents’ houses, the shelves lined with books by the Hungarian poets Petofi and Ady, alongside the Even Shoshan Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary.

  They had beanbag chairs, an artillery shell vase that held dried thorns, and a couch with pillows on it. Stained glass adorned the windows in Yoash and Malacula’s house, Hanoch and Nurit’s bell collection chimed, and mobiles hung from their ceiling. The books stood on shelves that rested on bricks, and were interspersed with light and dark blue glass bric-a-bracs. They always gave us refreshments when we came; they spoke differently, laughed differently.

  All of us, Hungarians and Israelis alike, were tourists in our biological parents’ houses.

  Once every five weeks, Hanoch and Yoash did their Saturday shift with us, the Narcissus group. Hanoch told us about Pineto and Tonino, Italian twins from the city of Pisa, who often lost their way in a labyrinth of adventures. Every Saturday evening, he recounted a new adventure, and each adventure had its own labyrinth, which consisted of endless doors.

  When, after much hard work and resourcefulness, the twins found the key to one door, they came up against additional doors and gates, each of which had a separate lock. Between one door and the next, and one gate and the next, they sometimes rested and ate spaghetti or pizza. We also rested during those breaks, feeling the taste of the thin-dough pizza in our mouths, and returned to follow the determined twins breathlessly, until each of their complicated adventures came to a successful conclusion and a sweet, happy end, with Pineto and Tonino driving off on their Vespa to have some ice cream.

  The absolute opposite happened in Yoash’s stories. Yoash didn’t believe in happy endings, or in happy beginnings or middles. He was an unpredictable storyteller. He had a deep voice and could emulate many different kinds of speech. His piercing blue eyes added a dramatic dimension to his stories. He was also the kibbutz’s best reader. It was his voice that boomed through the loudspeaker on the dining hall stage every Holocaust Day, reading the text about the six million, echoing through the kibbutz as if it were coming from the sky or straight from hell.

  Yoash was the kibbutz gardener. In terms of his education and skill, he was much closer to being a landscape or urban architect. He did his gardening job as if his life depended on it, as if he considered “decorative garden,” the bureaucratic phrase of kibbutz architecture, the entrance gate to a much wider world. As if he understood, like a Bahaist disguised as a kibbutznik, that underlying the carobs, the lawns and the cyclamens there was an entire religion.

  We were afraid of the plot twists that awaited us around the bend in Yoash’s stories, especially in the true stories he told us.

  Yoash told us every detail of the stories of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Judean Desert. He loved to teach us. He didn’t decorate his stories with drawings.

  On other Saturdays, before he said goodnight and went to the kibbutz meeting, Yoash told us about mountain farming. Yehiam is a mountain farm because it’s built on a hill that is more than 400 meters high. That has many implications, some of them economic. For instance, when the fields are far away and you have to drive to them. There are also problems in supplying water to a mountain kibbutz. To illustrate his story, he read us an item that appeared in the newsletter.

  Under the title “Stepsons,” Yaron, a field worker, wrote:

  One of the problems of our kibbutz is that the fields are very far away from the houses. This geographic distance creates a physical and emotional separation, and sometimes we (the field workers) feel like “stepsons” of the kibbutz. I don’t want to complain, but I do want to suggest one thing that will improve the situation: making all the kibbutz workers (including craftsmen and service providers) aware of the special situation of the field workers so that we don’t feel that out of sight is out of mind.

  There is another solution, which we are not interested in: for us to become more autarkic, a kind of “agricultural farm” owned by the kibbutz. We consider ourselves an integral part of the kibbutz and want very much for the present split to be eliminated.

  These problems, raised by Yoash’s stories, troubled us for a long time after he left. We thought about what we could do, discussed the issues at our kibbutz meetings, which we held every Saturday evening at the doors to our rooms, and tossed out a great many ideas that led nowhere.

  When Yoash read us poems, he was different, as if he were singing, not reading. On those evenings, he brought us actual books—by Ayin Hillel, Leah Goldberg or Oded Burla—and his dramatic voice became lighter and happier. Of the poems he read to us, our favorite was Oded Burla’s “We picked meadow flowers today.”
/>
  We picked meadow flowers today,

  Liron and Tamir and I.

  Liron picked tall stalks,

  I chased after locusts,

  And Tamir called out: Look what I picked!

  We rode the train yesterday,

  Liron and Tamir and I.

  Liron counted bridges,

  While I read a book,

  And Tamir asked: Who’s driving the train?

  And on it went until Yoash read the last line: “And Tamir drew a scribble,” which made us think about the scribbles of the Anemone kids, who were a grade below us in the Children’s Society, and the childish, illogical things they did, and we laughed and laughed, then went back to thinking about all that until we fell asleep.

  5

  Kibbutz Yehiam stands on an isolated hill at the foot of a Crusader fortress whose beauty can be seen from far and wide.

  In his book 1967, Tom Segev describes the founding of our kibbutz, Kibbutz Yehiam, quoting from the diary kept by Yosef Weitz, a leader of the Jewish National Fund, whose son, Yehiam, was killed in a Palmach operation in 1946:

  Three months after the Night of the Bridges, Yosef Weitz traveled to the Arab village of ‘Zib, north of Acre, and from a distance observed the place where Yehiam had been killed. “I couldn’t go right there and prostrate myself and search for the drops of blood which the earth had soaked up,” he wrote. Looking east, he saw the remnants of Qala’at Djedin, or the Heroes’ Fortress, an impressively tall stone tower built by the Crusaders that had become a stronghold of the Galilee ruler Daher el’Omar. The sun was setting, the tower “glimmered and lit up the entire area, all the way to Haifa.” And then Weitz knew; he swore that this would be where Yehiam’s monument would rise. A new Jewish pioneering settlement had to be built here, in this place, for defense, for forestation, and for agriculture. “The fortress shall be renewed and it shall be ours,” he wrote, “and above it shall fly the name of Yehiam, a token of innocence and dedication and sacrifice, and by its side an eternal flame shall send light into the distance.” This endeavor, Weitz told his wife, Ruhama, would be their solace. Thus Kibbutz Yehiam was founded.