When my DVD copy of the documentary Kibbutz arrived in the mail late last year, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to put it into a player for a couple of weeks. When I did, I was disappointed that it had gotten damaged during its journey from Israel to the West Coast of B.C. The film’s producer quickly mailed a new copy. This time, I immediately popped it into my computer at work to make sure it functioned, so I’d be ready to view it when I had more free time. An hour later, I had watched the film in its entirety—and become so engrossed in the account of the slow, sad unravelling of Kibbutz Hulata that I nearly forgot to pick up my daughter at daycare!
Kibbutz, released in 2005, is one of the first examples of what I call “privatization cinema”—that’s why it gets to claim the simple name of its title. Interestingly, while other films chronicle the debate around and prelude to the vote to privatize on different kibbutzim, Racheli Schwartz‘s documentary tracks instead the stages of grieving and disillusionment that follow Hulata’s decision to reduce its communal commitment to its members. What makes Kibbutz so affecting is the personal intimacy and extended context that Schwartz brings to the material. In fact, it was originally subtitled “A Personal Diary.”
A member for 30 years, the filmmaker isn’t just a visitor offering a snapshot by an outsider of her kibbutz. Instead, her film follows various members (including her own family) over the course of five years—three older women, from the founding generation, become symbols of the kibbutz’s lost ideas and abandoned history, as they die off, one by one. Schwartz, who asks people questions from behind her lens, admits early on that “making the movie helped me to decide to stay.”
It can’t have been an easy decision. Her film opens memorably with the story of a laid-off citrus worker, a member of the kibbutz, who hanged himself from a tree overlooking the orchards where he once worked. These same orchards are later sawed down for being unprofitable. Schwartz captures remarkably revealing footage of a privatization consultant, hired by the kibbutz, going through a list of enterprises and expenses and telling kibbutz managers how many employees to lay off and which operations to shut down. “The kibbutz was the main way to make settlement possible,” the financial advisor tells Schwartz later. “At some point, it was finished.”
The filmmaker has an ear for such memorable quotes. “We are going through a process of breakdown,” says one member. “They stole the kibbutz from me,” announces another. One kibbutznik wonders if the fact that Hulata—located south of Shamir and named after the Hula Valley—was built on the absorption of underprivileged reason was partly why it has failed to thrive in the hyper-capitalist 21st-century. “Since the changes on the kibbutz,” he laments, “people only talk about money.”
Schwartz also has a keen eye for images that carry symbolic weight. When managers decide to first privatize and then shut down the communal dining room, her camera lingers on the skinny cats looking vainly for scraps and then fixes on the stopped clock in the empty hall. She reveals how the simple act of growing shrubs becomes for many members a defiant act of walling themselves away from their neighbours. She interviews an employee of the kibbutz laundry, his salary slashed because his labour is now deemed menial, who has turned to religion because he feels his kibbutz has turned its back on his own family, and yet he still saves the loose shekels he finds in his machines and gives them to families more needy than his own. (His own son, affected by the changes, also tries to commit suicide.) She observes a music teacher packing her car full of wind and string instruments and driving off, before narrating: “A kibbutz that has reached the point that it has to sell its musical instruments has lost its way.”
It’s a powerful, damning sentiment in a beautifully wrought documentary that offers a deeply personal yet rigorously researched perspective on the privatization debate. I don’t know if you can generalize from the experiences of Hulata to all kibbutzim, but those communities still considering the prospects of privatization would be wise to watch this movie and learn from the mistakes documented so powerfully in its images. For anyone curious about the film, check out the trailer below…
I just read two interesting, if very different articles, that touch on the hopes and fears of living on kibbutzim near the turmoil of the Gaza Strip. The first (called “Fear in a Little Bit of Heaven“) is by a South African journalist touring through Israel, who observes both the success of rural kibbutzim and the general sense of fear and insecurity that shadow the nation, especially when he visits Kibbutz Be’eri in the south. As he writes:
For a South African it is astonishing to see people giving up all private property, whether cars or houses, and everyone earning the same salary and donating all other income to the kibbutz, which then looks after their family…. In contrast with South Africa, Israelis boast that they have no rural poverty because of the kibbutzim and their focus on agricultural production. The people who live in the kibbutz we visited described their communal life as being “like a little heaven”.
But at the Kibbutz Be’eri, just 7km from the Gaza Strip in the south of Israel, the illusion of an idyllic rural lifestyle was shattered. Residents told us that the settlement had been hit by rockets from the Gaza Strip, fired by their Palestinian neighbours. The fear of an attack was a daily constant. “But we should live not to allow fear to control us,” said Vivien Silver, part of the kibbutz leadership.
The second article is part of a fascinating series of family profiles that I’ve been following in Haaretz. (Each ends with family members rating their happiness level out of 10.) I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but many of these stories have looked at the lives of kibbutz residents. This week’s article introduces readers to a widowed single mother struggling with health problems and the constant anxiety of potential mortar or rocket attacks while living with her daughter in Kibbutz Nir Am, also near Gaza.
Her life story, with its twists and turns, as well as her now constant debate about whether to stay or leave the kibbutz, make for fascinating, if troubling, reading. Being a single parent must be tough enough without the fear of rockets falling from the sky:
“Once, when I was taking Yam to kindergarten, a mortar shell flew over us, and another time I flopped myself on top of her.” She considered leaving the kibbutz, but always stayed – to spite everyone, she explains, because they all expected her to be weak. Most of the residents use tranquilizers. “The tension is unbearable. You stay because of the honor, because of the place, because of the school.” If the security situation becomes very bad, she does not rule out the possibility of moving to the center of the country.
I look forward to more of the profiles from “Family Affair”. These journalistic snapshots offer a window into the lives and hopes and fears of real Israelis (and kibbutzniks) in a way that the general conclusions of academic papers or the faux-authenticity of reality TV can never do.
I often describe myself to my writing students as a “magaholic“: as a former editor, frequent contributor and devoted subscriber (I’m pushing 20 subscriptions), I love the combination of information, opinion, imagery and personal storytelling that a good magazine can provide. (My wife calls my various piles of half-read publications strewn around our house as “Camp Davids”.) That’s why I was delighted when a contact at Kibbutz Lotan emailed me a link to a story from the Winter 2009 issue of Reform Judaism, taglined as the “world’s largest circulated Jewish magazine”.
I love the earth tones of this cover and the desert spin on the iconic “American Gothic” rural couple. The cover makes me want to pick up and read the magazine. Instead, I had to satisfy myself electronically—as you can, with a link to a good story and Q&A about the ecological initiatives at Kibbutz Lotan or a downloadable PDF of the cover and full article.
Here is an interesting counterpoint about Kibbutz Hanaton—the Conservative (or “Masorti“) religious kibbutz described as “divided” in an earlier article. This story depicts how a community that had dwindled to 11 members has managed to revive itself (as a privatized kibbutz) and attract Israeli families who are neither fully secular nor rigidly orthodox in their spiritual beliefs—and perhaps act as a small beacon of compromise across the chasm of religion in Israel. Every kibbutz, like every story, has at least two sides…
I somehow missed this intriguing (albeit depressing) news item about a Japanese woman who came to Israel as a kibbutz volunteer on Samar (the legendary “hippy-anarchist” kibbutz north of Eilat), married a kibbutznik, and a few years later admitted to authorities that she and her husband were divorcing, after she had lived off and on in Israel for a decade. She was promptly ordered to be deported and forced to leave Israel this March.
All this, despite the fact that the kibbutz had elected her as a member by an unprecedented majority because members thought the dance instructor was such a vital member of their community. The kibbutz has protested the government’s decision and plans to keep her membership open for as long as it takes her to be allowed to return—which might be some time, if ever.
“I have no status in Israel now,” she said. “My situation is the same as Palestinians who need invitaions from Israelis and permission to come to Israel. And yes, the way the country is being run is a certain reflection of its people, this is true. But I have become connected to the Israeli way of life, to how people open their hearts straight away. I loved my life in Israel and I want to return to my home.”
