by Yael Neeman
Daily life as run by the youngsters consisted of attending classes during the day, working on their kibbutzim in the afternoon and organizing a full social life at the institution in the evening. (In a social structure similar to that of the adult kibbutz, various democratically elected committees were responsible for planning Friday nights, holidays, dramatized trials, choirs, a newsletter, etc.) In addition to their work and social and cultural life, the youths were Hashomer Hatzair counselors in the educational institution and in the neighboring city branches, and volunteered in the surrounding development towns. They chose extracurricular activities they they were interested in pursuing in greater depth and could be studied outside of the institution as well: music, dance, drama, sports and others.
These institutions were called educational institutions, as opposed to schools. The teachers were called workers and educators, the students were called chanikhim (derived from the Hebrew root chinokh, which means “education”) to stress that studies were not the major focus, but only part of the practical and ideological agenda. There were no matriculation exams or final grades. The motivation to study was supposed to come from within and not be imposed from without. Social life and activities in the youth movement were no less important than studies. And all of that was underpinned by our belief in the sanctity of work—three or four times a week, after classes, we worked in the kibbutz fields or children’s houses. The system’s ideologues saw the educational institution as the last stage in the education and training of a kibbutz member. The boys and girls who graduated from the educational institution had been born on the kibbutz, had absorbed its values from the very beginning, and had not been damaged by the bourgeois institutions of family and education. They would lead the kibbutzim and the city dwellers, who came from the various city branches of Hashomer Hatzair to fulfill their ideological dreams in the kibbutzim, to a better world.
During his years in the institution, the new child would mature into a new man living on a kibbutz, fully connected to and involved in the life of the country. Or, in the words of Shmuel Golan, one of those who shaped Hashomer Hatzair communal education, describing the graduate of an educational institution:
A man of the kibbutz, a man of the soil, a brave fighter, educated, sensitive, a man of the movement and the party, with a personal moral code and a collective conscience, active in all the above mentioned areas.
Children from four Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim attended the Oshrat Educational Institution: not in every kibbutz were children born every year. Our group consisted of children from only Yehiam and Shomrat. On the first day of the seventh grade, the ones from Shomrat were welded to us and we were welded to them. There were children we didn’t know from other kibbutzim in a number of groups above our grade level. We were a relatively small group, twenty-six children. We weren’t called Narcissus anymore, but Seagull. Boys and girls continued to live together, mixed with children from Shomrat, four in a room, one in each corner.
It was difficult for us to talk about the institution in chronological order. We didn’t remember the beginning, the way things happened or the reasons for them. Suddenly we were there with the green suitcases we had each received at the end of sixth grade right before we moved. We used the suitcases to take our dirty clothes to the laundry on Yehiam and return the clean clothes. We washed our underpants and bras ourselves in our showers, or we were supposed to. Because of the democratic autonomy of the Youth Society, we did what we wanted to do and didn’t do what we didn’t want to do. So that we didn’t shower every day and we didn’t do our wash every day, and that, of course, is putting it mildly.
Slowly, gradually, we also stopped visiting our parents on the kibbutzim. We went to Yehiam, worked there and came straight back to the institution. It was hard for us to bridge the gap between the two worlds. We didn’t know whether it was because we missed our old lives or the opposite, because we didn’t. We had left civilization and the grown-ups behind us. We sat in the bleachers above the institution basketball court and read the letters our biological parents occasionally sent us with the teachers who came from Yehiam. They sometimes sent a cake with the letters or asked why we didn’t come anymore.
We couldn’t explain. Psychology and family seemed very distant to us, even fictional, like fairy tales that began “once upon a time.” And that notion never dissolved. It was basic, like a prime number. Life there, on green Yehiam, was as alien to us as a visit to our parents, with the piece of cake they always served us on a glass plate and that we ate with a spoon or a small fork, sitting on an armchair or a couch made in the Kibbutz Shomrat Hazorea furniture factory. In the institution, we crossed over to a different cultural bank, completely forgot what a spoon was, or a glass plate or a couch. Our parents on Yehiam asked us not to crack sunflower seeds in the house, if possible. They asked politely. Didn’t demand. They said that in Hungary, sunflower seeds were bird food. It didn’t seem refined to them. But we had already gone way past refinement; we were in the heart of untamed culture. As if all our actions were made of sunflower seed shells.
Our institution was so barren and beige. Colorless and plantless. From everywhere on the sidewalks we could see the buildings we lived in; we could see anyone standing at the windows. There were no corners. The kitchen was made of stainless steel, the dishes were plastic. We sat in rows around large tables. The noise was as stifling and present as air, as the lack of air. We ate quickly, and if we didn’t have kitchen duty on a particular evening (setting up or serving or cleaning up), we ran out of there after five minutes. Sometimes to the Regional Council building, outside of our boundaries, of the institution boundaries, to see flowers. Sometimes we took nocturnal walks to the beach in Nahariya or to Ahzivland.
We no longer worked in our rooms, didn’t wash the floor with rivers of water. Just the opposite. Our rooms were a mess; not a single piece of clothing remained in the closets. There were many seasons when we wore only slippers, not shoes, and ate bread that we toasted on the kerosene heaters in our rooms.
At some point, one of the metaplot said, “That’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” what we were doing was dangerous, and she poured twenty pails of water onto the floor in my brother Yair’s room—he was five years older than me—and left him and his three roommates to clear it out. “Now you have no choice but to clean up the room,” she shouted, “and then you’ll learn.”
My brother and his three roommates went from there to agromechanica, the metalwork and carpentry workshop, and for twelve straight hours, built a system of bridges they installed over the rivers of water. It bridged their room at the end of the corridor to the classroom itself, rose high above the concrete square between the dormitory building and the classroom building and above the spacious lawn. We all went in the evenings to see the breathtaking structure that was illuminated by colored lights that had been planned and installed by a different crew from the same age group who were at the top of their class in math and physics. When all the water had evaporated a week later, they disassembled the bridges. The wood was used for a bonfire.
“Youth is a privilege that goes hand in hand with obligations,” was written in large wooden letters in the institution dining room. We didn’t know what the privilege or the obligations were.
Suddenly, we didn’t know each other anymore. Things would come at us, catching us unprepared. Boys and girls no longer showered together; from the seventh grade, there were two communal showers in every group, one for boys and one for girls.
The smell of our sweat in those days was pungent and our pubic hair was thick and black. Our bodies were changing so quickly that we didn’t recognize them. The boys knew us better, saw us more than we saw ourselves. When we undressed at night and dressed in the morning, we would say to the boys, “Turn around.” They would turn around politely, 360 degrees, or turn to the wall, to the system of mirrors hidden under the bed.
A ceramic tile fell suddenly from the ceiling of the girls’ shower, exposing everything: the b
oys took it off and put hinges on it, creating a door through which they could climb above the girls’ ceiling, the only ceiling that was made of concrete. They drilled a hole in it and set up a little corner for coffee, and opened and closed the door with the help of two magnets.
A few evenings a week, we were counselors, we sang in a choir, participated in a drama club or went to the beach, and there were also many evenings when we didn’t want to do anything. We stayed in our rooms, toasted bread on our heaters. Our moods rose and fell sharply, with no warning. As if they were happening outside of us and we were living inside them, and not vice versa.
A new entity—perhaps emptiness, perhaps anxiety—joined us, got stuck to us the way a callus gets stuck in a sock, as threatening as the bite of a poisonous centipede. We were no longer afraid of jackals and terrorists. We were suddenly afraid that life had no meaning. That’s what we were beginning to fear. And that fear seemed to become our fifth roommate, a roommate who slept without a bed. The space it took up was different, but it was definitely there. And nothing connected to Hashomer Hatzair could make us feel better.
The dining room in the Educational Institution.
They sent us to talk to Tamar. She was from the enlightened city group that had joined Kibbutz Shomrat. They had degrees in history, psychology and literary theory from Tel Aviv University, and four of them had come to teach us literature, history and psychology. They were a great deal younger than most of our teachers, who had old-style educations from the capitals of Europe.
They were twenty-something, and liked standing and talking with us on the sidewalk. Sometimes they seemed to want to stay at the institution after three o’clock, to keep on talking, maybe even to help us prepare a cultural evening or write an article for our newsletter, maybe even to sleep over.
Tamar wasn’t a teacher, but a kind of educational counselor who had her own room in a building at the far end of the institution that also housed the library and reading room. Her job was to listen and refer the problems, to decide whether we had to be sent to a private city psychologist in the upscale Carmel area of Haifa, or to a kibbutz clinic in Oranim.
We were given an “appointment with Tamar,” each one of us separately. We sat with her twenty or thirty minutes, however long we managed to last without speaking. We never said a word to her; we stared at the walls, our eyes caught by the poster hanging there, a picture of Freud. When we focused hard on it, a naked woman suddenly emerged from his beard, a kind of allegory of the sexual unconscious covered by the beard that hid his face, jumping out and flooding our thoughts.
We had a lot of time to analyze for ourselves the allegory of the conscious and subconscious in the poster as we sat there, expected to talk and unable to. Our eyes wandered over anything that was outside of us and outside of Tamar. We grabbed onto every neutral surface unconnected to either one of the sides. Sometimes we felt that we were about to speak, that right now, at this very moment, the words, like ants, were climbing up out of our throat. We knew that she was on our side and that if we spoke, she would understand us, but not a single word emerged.
We didn’t know what to say. Our thoughts had no substantive form; they were only pieces of something that had no name and no contours, fragments of the same mute but present partner that lived in our rooms, the same anxiety that climbed up our legs, under the causality that explained everything in Hashomer Hatzair. What is the meaning of life, we wanted to ask and couldn’t. Not because it was forbidden—it was permitted—but because we didn’t know how to talk and we weren’t sure that it was even a question. Our thoughts crumbled, had no topic, no subject and no predicate.
No one spoke a word to Tamar. And then came the stage at which she tried to make us talk. She had all sorts of ideas that she brought from the big city. Once, for example, she said: “Speak to the chair.”
That set us back immediately. We even stopped contemplating the idea that we were on the verge of speaking.
“You speak to the chair,” we told her, or we snapped at her, or maybe we just thought those things and walked right out of there.
We stayed silent. The cases that, based on the system, were classified as very serious, went on to the next stop, which was called “The Center for Child and Family Therapy” in the Oranim Seminary, or in short, “the Center.”
Eyal was sent to the Center because after we got on the yellow Regional Council bus on our way to work on Yehiam, he stayed on the kibbutz with the volunteers and didn’t want to go back down to the institution because it was ugly, because everyone was the same age and looked the same. He wanted a different plot and different characters. But that was not a possibility. That was forbidden, like running away from the children’s houses to the parents’ houses at night.
And there was something else: his teacher suspected that he had an “inclination” towards homosexuality. They said “inclination,” if they spoke of it at all, as if only the perspective was slightly skewed and they had to fix the slant and the angle, to readjust and realign what had slipped to the side.
The social worker at the Center tried to defeat the problem: she told Eyal that he could fantasize about men but it was important that his sexual experiences be with women.
Eyal, who danced differently from everyone else—so beautiful and free.
Three years later, when he told us he was gay and that’s why he liked to stay on Yehiam with the volunteers, he said that the Center was important to his story. Because it was there, in his conversations with the social worker, that he saw how great the gap between the two of them was, and trying to bridge it, which he couldn’t, would mean giving up on love, giving up on himself. He also said, “When I left those sessions where she tried to fix me, I was full of homosexual lust. All the words she spoke so clinically and with alarm disguised as the openness of ‘in this room, you can talk about anything,’ words and expressions like ‘homosexual’ and ‘fantasies about men,’ seemed to float up out of my thoughts and grow into colored soap bubbles and candy. My imagination rose up like a giant wave and I left there torn apart with longing for the future, for things I still hadn’t experienced. I went straight from those sessions to Memorial Park in Haifa to try everything among the bushes. I felt how the love I yearned for was getting closer from week to week and I called for it constantly, like saying a prayer, every night when I cried to the music of Leonard Cohen.”
Eyal was expelled and sent to another Hashomer Hatzair institution. Further away. From there, so they hoped, it would be more difficult for him to get to Yehiam and the volunteers. And if he didn’t get to Yehiam and the volunteers, maybe he would straighten out, they hoped.
Every summer vacation we worked on Yehiam and lived on the edge of the kibbutz, each group in its own building. For two months, we went back to being Terebinth and Narcissus and Anemone. Eyal was part of the Anemone group, a year behind us, and he told us, the Narcissus girls, that he was a homo. He told us while we were arguing about whether or not Leonard Cohen was a homo. We weren’t sure if we had realized that Eyal was a homo before he told us, if we had felt it when he danced differently from everyone else, so beautiful and free. We weren’t sure that had anything to do with it or not.
We explained things to ourselves. What we explained to each other, we didn’t understand. There were always those same misunderstandings that we passed on from one to the other like in the games of broken telephone we used to play in the Children’s Society, when we would whisper in the ear of the girl to our right the sentence that had just been whispered to us by the girl on our left, and at the end of the circle—when the sentence was spoken out loud and compared to the one that had been whispered at the beginning of the round—it turned out that it had been distorted into a different version of the original.
Eyal was clear and simple; he told us his sentence, said he was a homo. But we weren’t sure that we understood. Not because he was a homo, but because of love. We weren’t sure who it was we loved. Whether Netta really loved Micah. She sa
id she didn’t know how a person knew.
13
We worked, played musical instruments, performed, danced, wrote for the newsletter, wandered incessantly, but nevertheless, the days in the Institution were endless and unbounded. They began early in the morning, ended late at night, and included almost no schoolwork.
Our studies were wedged inconveniently during the day, didn’t flow naturally from within as the system had hoped.
Margalit was our metapelet. She came every morning on the Workers Association bus from Kibbutz Shomrat, walked down the exposed concrete sidewalks to our building, Seagull, and into our rooms.
Usually, the metaplot didn’t wait even a second before coming to wake us in the morning. Just the opposite, they used all the momentum they’d accumulated on the way, and always did it loudly. But Margalit spoke quietly, almost in a whisper, and her steps were as weightless as a cat’s. First she floated down the length of the corridor, peering into our bedrooms, checking that we were alive, that we’d all returned in one piece from our nocturnal wanderings inside and outside the Institution, and only then did she begin to wake us, going from room to room.
Margalit was one of the veteran Hungarians of Kibbutz Shomrat; for her, “life” and “health” came before “getting up quickly for work.” She spent six straight years with us, from our first day in the seventh grade until our last day in the twelfth, and knew exactly who got up and who didn’t, and for which classes. Because just as there were different learning levels in our classes—Level One, Level Two—there were different depths to the levels: There were those who got up on time for the first class and generally got up early; those who got up sometimes, according to a certain pattern (known only to them and perhaps also to the metapelet); those who got up sometimes, arbitrarily; and those who never got up.
