The good—no, great—news: my book has a publisher and a publication date. I’m thrilled to announced that ECW Press has acquired the world rights to my kibbutz book with a publication date of Fall 2016. The manuscript is with an editor and I am working with the publisher and production staff to hash out the cover design and final title-sub-title combo… … which is the bad-ish news: I’m stumped. I’ll be the first to admit that writing display copy was never my forte as a magazine editor. I was okay at it (“Land of the Lox” for a feature about indigenous fish-farming in BC!), but I also worked with other editors who were masters at the catchy title/subtitle combo. It’s not easy. My kibbutz book has proven that conundrum. It has evolved through several title variations:
The Shouting Fence: That was the title of a poem I wrote, as a 21-year-old writing student, in the voice of a Druze man. It was briefly the working title of the manuscript and remains as a chapter title about my visit to Majdal Shams. It’s catchy and dramatic—but misleading. It evokes the divisions in Israel but nothing of the utopian enterprise of the kibbutz. Nixed.
Look Back to Galilee: The name of this blog was the working title of this project for years. It comes form a phrase used by one of the founders of Kvutsa Degania, who urged his compatriots to return to the Kinnereth—and the Galilee—to found their commune. But as one kibbutz researcher in Haifa told me on a visit in 2009: “It sounds kind of Christian.” And while it evokes a sense of memoir, it isn’t especially catchy either.
Who Killed the Kibbutz? emerged late in the process as a front-runner when a grad student read a draft and suggested the manuscript needed more narrative drive and tension. What was the throughline? For a while, I thought it was the search for who or what had led to the decline of Israel’s utopian communities. (I’m still kind of fond of this title.)
Love & Rockets: And then a bolt from the blue. I can’t even remember how I came up with this title—perhaps mining all my memories from the late 80s reminded me of the band of the same name (and it’s cover version of “Ball of Confusion”—which seems apropos to the book’s themes). It echoes Erna Paris’s The Garden and the Gun, a wonderful travelogue about Israel that heavily influenced my own decision to write his book. It’s the title under which I finally sold the project—so I think it stays. (Famous last words…)
But I still need a sub-title. Why? Because nonfiction books have sub-titles! And as Jack David, ECW’s publisher, explained to me: book buying (and promotion) is less about browsing physical store shelves these days and more about discovering a book online via key word searches. And a sub-title is the best place for such key words. Utopia was always a key theme and therefore a key word in all my proposed sub-titles
I just reviewed my progression of titles and subtitles and found the following:
The Shouting Fence: Slouching Toward Utopia in a Divided Land (2009)
Look Back to Galilee: Stumbling Toward Utopia in a Divided Land (2011)
Who Killed the Kibbutz: Searching for Hope in a Divided Israel (2014)
Love & Rockets: Stumbling Toward Utopia in a Divided Israel (2015)
But the sub-title isn’t quite there—and could use the word “kibbutz” somewhere in its syntax. Another writer also tsk-tsk’ed the use of a gerund in the sub-title, too. So I’ve been on a brainstormy voyage to come up with the perfect partner for Love & Rockets. Here’s a list of ideas (some okay, others simply awful) that have poured out of my imagination:
The Broken Dream of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
The Broken Promise of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
The Promise of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
The Problem of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Stumbling Towards Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Slouching Towards Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Looking for Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
The Long Road to Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Cast Out of the Garden of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Cast Out of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Leaving Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
Losing Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
The “and” between “Israel” and “kibbutz”might be confusing, though, even though the book is about the utopian impulse in the kibbutz movement (which helped to found Israel) and in Israel in general (both inspired by and a reaction to the kibbutz). I previewed some options at our Grad @ Home party last Friday and got warm response to the “lost dream” theme in some of the sub-titles, so a few more variations….
The Lost Dream of Utopia in Israel’s Kibbutz
The Lost Dream of Utopia in the Kibbutz
The Lost Dream of Utopia of the Kibbutz
The Kibbutz’s Lost Dream of Utopia
The Kibbutz’s Lost Dream of Utopia in a Divided Israel
The Kibbutz’s Lost Dream of Utopia for a Divided Israel
The Kibbutz and the Lost Dream of Utopia in a Divided Israel
The Lost Dream of Utopia in the Legendary Kibbutz
The Lost Dream of Utopia on the Legendary Kibbutz
The Lost Dream of Utopia on Israel’s Legendary Kibbutz
The Lost Dream of Utopia in Israel’s Legendary Kibbutz
Israel, the Kibbutz, and the Lost Dream of Utopia
Who Killed the Kibbutz and its Dream of Utopia?
…at which point I just want to slam down my laptop and run screaming from the room. Nothing yet feels quite right.
Any suggestions? Any favourites? Anything that can save me from the madness of subtitle writing?
Update: I’ll offer a reward—and give a copy of the book when it comes out to anyone who can dream up the perfect sub-title!
The search for Bernie Sanders’ former kibbutz has apparently heated up in Israel. Ha’aretz reported that the Kibbutz Movement has taken to social media (Facebook to be exact) to generate leads on where the current Democratic presidential candidate might have volunteered in the 1960s. Non-Hebrew speakers can click on Google translate to get some comic suggestions. The crowd might not always have wisdom, but it always has fun. Alas, my own lead came up dry. An elderly kibbutz researcher I know from Kibbutz Mefalsim (which has many South Americans) recalled an American volunteer on his home kibbutz named “Bernard” (which Sanders went by as a young man). A search through the Mefalsim archives turned up no evidence of Bernie, however. Still, I want to stake my claim to the Sanders’ Search Reward right now by saying I’m 99% he stayed on Kibbutz Mefalsim! Of course, the bigger question remains: Why won’t Bernie ‘fess up to the kibbutz where we briefly stayed? What went on there that he wants to hide? Yes, it was the 1960s. We don’t need to stretch our imaginations. Perhaps it was in Israel that he learned to play the bongoes like this…
As soon as I shared my last blog post on Facebook, a writer friend who had also lived on a kibbutz pointed out a glaring flaw in my Venn diagramming. The clues from Bernie Sanders’ brother and his professor friend can, in fact, all be true: Sanders’ kibbutz wasn’t necessarily founded by Argentinian immigrants; it just needs a significant enough influx of South Americans before 1964 to have made an impression on the young volunteer from Brooklyn. So a revised Venn Diagram does have the potential for an intersecting middle: We should be looking for a kibbutz (likely in Western Galilee) founded between 1910 and, let’s say, 1936 that also accepted large numbers of Argentinean Jews—probably in the wake of World War Two or the founding of the state. Any suggestions? So far, going through the list of kibbutzim on Wikipedia, I haven’t found anything that fits that bill. Few of the listings enumerate where immigrants came from after the founding garin or group. I did start a list of kibbutzim founded by Argentinean or South American groups before 1964:
Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t paid much attention to the looooong silly season of U.S. presidential nominations south of the border, beyond the Donald Trump memes floating across the Internet. I’ve been more engrossed by our own national elections here in Canada, especially the prospect of pro-Israel left-wing leader Tom Mulcair forming our country’s first NDP federal government. However, I couldn’t ignore the growing momentum of the David vs. Goliath campaign of Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and lone U.S. socialist (as he’s often billed), and the whole #FeelTheBern viral campaign to wrest the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton. What intrigues me most, of course, in the many profiles of Sanders—including articles and bios that pre-date his presidential bid—are the casual mentions that the progressive Jewish politician volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel back in 1964. But the articles never, ever name the kibbutz.
Only Sanders knows which kibbutz taught him socialism can work
I was intrigued. So were others. The Hunt for Red Bernie’s Mystery Kibbutz was soon on. And yet so far, no luck. We’ve all struck out. Bernie Sanders and his press folks have declined to answer inquiries about which kibbutz he stayed on, perhaps because Sanders has already suffered from ridiculous accusations that he is a dual Israeli-American citizen. So let’s piece together the clues so far to which of Israel’s 270 or so kibbutzim Sanders might have worked. Jas Chana‘s “Straight Outta Brooklyn” for Tablet Magazine is an excellent primer to the life and times of Bernie Sanders. Chana outlines how, after graduating with a poli sci degree from University of Chicago and working for the Head Start program in New York City, Sanders and his brother Larry decided to travel to Israel for a bit of adventure. Here are key details from Chana’s story
Both brothers decided to spend their time in Israel living and working on kibbutzim. Bernie arrived in Israel first and was there for six months total; Larry showed up four months after Bernie’s arrival and didn’t leave until 1967. In that time, Larry met his first wife and lived on two kibbutzim: Matsuva in the north and Yotvata in the south. Unfortunately, no one I spoke to for the purpose of this article had any idea or recollection of the name of Bernie’s kibbutz. However, Professor Richard Sugarman, a religious-studies professor at the University of Vermont, one of Sanders’ closest friends, and the man who encouraged him to run for mayor of Burlington in 1980, told me it was one of the “oldest kibbutzim.”
Chana’s interviews with both Professor Sugarman and Larry Sanders give the profile the most detail in any story I’ve read about how the kibbutz experience might have shaped (or at least confirmed) Bernie Sanders’ beliefs in mutual aid and social justice. During his stay, Sanders was apparently curious about kibbutzniks economic plans, how socialism could work, how communal life gave parents more free time, and even just watching fellow Jews as farmers…. he had grown up in Brooklyn, after all. Sanders felt the kibbutz was “a utopian form of existence” (according to Sugarman) and proved that socialism could be put into practice (according to his brother). But on which kibbutz—and from which federation—did he learn these lessons? Naomi Zeveloff traipsed through Israel to find out—and the title of her article for Forward makes clear her lack of success. “The name of Sanders’s kibbutz might seem like a minor detail, but it’s important,” she writes. “Among other things, it could build on our understanding of his formative years.”
Her interview with Sanders’ brother gives a teasing clue, when Larry tells her that he thought Bernie had stayed on “a kibbutz near the Mediterranean where there were a large number of Argentine volunteers in the 1960s.” Through various sources, she zeroes in on three kibbutzim: Zikim and Sa’ad (near Gaza), and Ga’ash in central Israel. She spoke to several kibbutz representatives I’d also met during my travels (Dudu Amitai at Givat Haviva and former MK Avshalom Vilan). Unfortunately, because Sanders arrived in 1964, before the big influx of volunteers that followed the Six Day War of 1967 and the subsequent bureaucracy to track these new arrivals—Zeveloff could find no record of Bernie’s visit. She also had no luck contacting members at the three kibbutzim she identified. A dead end. So she has out a call for clues—both in Israel and through The Forward.
In Israel, Ha’aretz put its own reporter on the case, but the title of Judy Maltz’s article also reveals her frustrated quest: “Mission Impossible? Finding Bernie Sanders’ Kibbutz”. She wondered, as she set off, if she could track down an old-timer from the kibbutz where Sanders stayed who “might recall his hot romance with the gorgeous young kibbutznik who refused to return to the United States with him”. (Shades of Not Quite Paradise….)
She hits all the right offices: the Kibbutz Movement, the archives of Yad Tabenkin and Yad Ya’ari. Nothing. Emails and messages to Sanders and his media advisers come up empty, too. Even Professor Huck Gutman, a longtime friend and co-author of Sanders’ political memoir, doesn’t know. “The only person I know who knew Bernie then was Larry,” he replies.
So Maltz spoke with Bernie’s brother, too, and he repeated the somewhat vague clue he gave Zeveloff:
“I am pretty sure it wasn’t the Negev. It had a number of South American members. I remember Bernard being impressed by one of the kibbutznik’s explanation of how they would transform Argentina. Without any reason to believe I am right, I would guess near the Mediterranean coast.”
So Maltz rounded up a dozen kibbutzim that fit these clues and emailed their names to Larry. But no bells ring, although Bernie’s UK-based brother also admits: “I don’t the name is stuck anywhere in my brain.” Dead end. So, let’s examine the sparse clues and see if we can “profile” the potential locations for Berne Sanders’ formative socialist—and Zionist— experiences:
Not the Negev
Near the Mediterranean Coast
members from Argentina
one of the oldest kibbutzim
Another potential clue: Larry Sanders’ stay in Israel overlapped with his brother’s by two months but it sounds like they never actually spent time together in Israel—or visited each other’s kibbutzes.
Larry stayed on Matsuva near the Lebanese border (and the Mediterranean) and Yotvata just north of the Red Sea, so I’m tempted to rule out any kibbutzes in close proximity to either of these regions, as I think Larry would remember if his brother had stayed on a kibbutz near his own.
Using Larry Sanders’ others clues, we can triangulate a few possibilities, as Zeveloff did, of Argentinean kibbutzes near the coast… although I’m surprised that Mefalsim didn’t make her cut. It was founded in 1949 by Argentinian immigrants, not far from the coast… or from the Gaza Strip. That would make a curious coincidence, as Mefalsim is also just minutes north on Highway 232 from Kibbutz Be’eri, where Michele Bachmann—the other presidential candidate to do time on a kibbutz—volunteered in 1974. Mefalsim is technically in the northern Negev, so perhaps it should be disqualified for that reason—although it’s further north than Sa’ad, which did make Zekeloff’s short list. Still, I’ve got a note to a contact there to see if I can find out more.
The bigger problem?
Larry Sanders’ clues (Argentinean kibbutz near coast and not Negev) don’t square with the single mysterious detail from Professor Sugarman (one of the oldest kibbutzes). The kibbutz movement began in 1909, with Degania. By 1939, there were 73 kibbutzim, most of them concentrated away from the Mediterranean in the Jezreel Valley, the Hula Valley, the Beit Shean Valley or around Lake Kinnereth (aka the Sea of Galilee). More problematic: I don’t know any kibbutzim founded by South Americans before the Second World War; most were started with the immigration from South America after Israel’s independence in 1949.
Here’s the rub: If we assume both Larry Sanders’ clues to be true and Professor Sugarman’s hint, too, we end up (as far as I can tell) with a Venn Diagram with no overlapping middle. So who’s right and who’s wrong?
Argentinean kibbutzes by the sea / oldest kibbutzim
Larry Sanders admits his memory is fuzzy, but the detail about Argentinian kibbutzniks seems so precise, he can’t have fudged that. The two kibbutzes Larry lived on were founded by Germans and young native-born Israelis, so he hasn’t transposed his own kibbutz kibbutz experiences for Bernie’s. And yet Professor Sanders is an acclaimed Yale-trained scholar of Jewish philosophy—i.e., not one to casually toss off half-remembered “facts” about an old friend’s time in Israel. Dead end. Or at least a puzzling crossroads. And so the quest to find Bernie Sanders’ kibbutz only grows more mysterious. Dear fellow questers: Shall we put a wager on it? The first to find where American socialism’s last great hope once learned the ropes of communal life gets an extra week off from dining-room duty…
Yesterday, I took my eight-year-old son and his friend to an IMAX showing of the documentary Jerusalem. I doubt it was their favourite IMAX: Vikings or Lemurs were likely more to their taste for armoured battles and funny critters. But I left the expansive theatre unexpectedly moved by the words (narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch) and eight-storey images of the National Geographic profile (written, directed and co-produced by Canadian Daniel Ferguson) of the Old City of Jerusalem, its ancient history and contemporary life, the sacred home to three major religions and geographical nexus between the civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe.
I’ve visited the city at least 10 times over the last 25 years, perpetually drawn through the stone gates and into the Escher-like labyrinth of the walled city. But I had never seen Jerusalem from the hovering and zooming aerial perspectives of the IMAX team, nor explored its subterranean depths—the ancient water springs that allowed its first peoples to settle on these rocky heights—or, in the unintentionally loaded phrase of one Israeli archaeologist in the film, the city’s “layers of occupation.”
Likewise, the digital recreations of the landscape before settlement, the complete structure of the Second Temple, or the Temple Mount before the Dome of the Rock was erected allowed the architectural and religious history of the city—impossible to disentangle—to unfold in mere minutes. And the film brings to vivid life on the very big screen the pulsing music and song of the modern city, the chants of the faithful, the rituals of the holy days—Ramadan, Passover, Easter—that fill the narrow streets with celebrants who pour down from the hills and into the ancient city. Enough even to touch my own agnostic heart.
Unlike many IMAX features, Jerusalem doesn’t force too much of a saccharine narrative onto its cinematic showpieces. The threads of the three faiths—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—are joined through the lives and voices of three real teenage girls who live in or near the city. The city’s long history of conflict is acknowledged but not dwelled upon, and the three girls’ hopes for peace in their city remains shadowed by their acknowledgement that the three faiths remain isolated from each other in their geographical, spiritual and political quarters. The movie’s concluding image—a fine touch I won’t spoil—emphasizes the tenuous, ambivalent theme of reconciliation in a historically burdened and deeply divided city.
It’s a movie worth seeing, for anyone interested in the Golden City, especially as Jerusalem descends into new levels violence, with Palestinian protests over increased Jewish building in East Jerusalem, and vehicular attacks and stabbings in and around the city. Any hope for peace or even just stability in Israel and Palestine needs to address the paradox of Jerusalem and the obstacles of its various orthodoxies. Each side in the conflict must learn to transcend its narrow interests and internecine suspicions and see the big picture. It’s hard to imagine a bigger picture of Jerusalem right now than the one projected on IMAX screens around the world.
