A few nights ago, I watched a DVD I’d ordered, released in 2008 by a Greek production company, that profiled author Amos Oz. It’s a fascinating complement to Oz’s memoir, one that offers insight into both his creative process as well as his thoughts about the historical and even future importance of the kibbutz ideal.
Amos Oz at work: black pen or blue pen?
As a writer, I enjoyed the chance to hear the famous novelist talk about his working rituals. How he wakes early and goes for a brisk half-hour walk in the desert, near his home in Arad, around 5 or 5:30 am, before settling down at his basement desk to write, in longhand, until noon or one. Then, after lunch and a siesta, he explained, “I come back and destroy what I’ve done before.” To maintain the flow of his process, though, he tries to end each writing day in the middle of a sentence, which he can then complete and continue the next morning.
“I am a domestic writer,” said Oz, one who is interested in exploring the family—”the most mysterious institution in the world.” “I don’t begin a novel with an idea,” he continued. “I begin a novel with a character. I hear voices. … The first sentence is the most difficult. Where does the story begin?… It’s like beginning relationship with a total stranger.”
He keeps two pens on his desk. One is black; the other, blue. “One is to tell the government to go to hell,” he said, with a smile. The other—the blue, I have to assume—he reserves for his storytelling, with its ambiguities and ambivalence, without the rhetorical certainty of his political prose. Those two sides of the writer, he feels, need to be separated. Still, his novels may serve a social good, even if that’s not why they are explicitly written. “We learn about the internal life of the Other,” said Oz about the function of literature. “And [through reading] there is a certain chance that we might become better neighbours.”
Late in the documentary, he offered a humorous summary of his 32 years as a member of Kibbutz Hulda. How he had rebelled against his conservative father, at the age of 15, by running away to the kibbutz. How—speaking the elevated language of a boy raised in the city by polyglot Europhiles—he came across as a”funny bird” to the more rough-hewn kibbutzniks.
“I had a tough time integrating with the local society,” he recalled, “because they were tough farm boys and beautiful farm girls.”
How, as he began his career as a young writer in his 20s, he asked the kibbutz for a day, free from the work rotation, to focus on his creative output. How the membership had to debate this proposal in the general assembly and finally vote yes or no. (To their credit, the kibbutzniks granted Oz his day of writing—and then more time as his reputation and sales grew.) How, once he became a source of revenue as an author, the kibbutz authorities even offered him the help of two elderly members “to increase production”, as though his novels and stories were like factory widgets that could be manufactured with greater economies of scale. How, when he needed seclusion to finish a book, he would simply make a request to the kibbutz secretary and be granted money to pay for a quiet hotel room away from the community. And how, once he had to relocate from the kibbutz to Arad because of his youngest son’s severe asthma, he “lost that sense of a big family.”
It’s significant, I think, that the documentary ends with a long monologue from Oz, narrated over a silhouette of the author walking through the last light of a desert dusk, about the fall and rise of the kibbutz:
“The kibbutz movement is in a big crisis. Part of this is an external crisis resulting from the fact that socialism is not popular anywhere in the world. I believe for some people there will always be an attraction in a way of life that is like an extended family, where people share everything, where people carry the highest degree of mutual responsibility. In terms of human experience, for me, as an individual, as a writer, it’s like the best university I ever attended. I hope and believe that the kibbutz will have a revival… Maybe in another time. Maybe in a different country. We live now in a world where people work harder than they should work, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don’t really want, in order to impress people they don’t really like. This leads to a certain reaction, and this reaction will bring back some kind of voluntary collective experience.”
Last summer, I bought two paperback translations of works by Amos Oz from an independent bookstore/coffeeshop in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. One was Where the Jackals Howl, a thin volume of stories, which I devoured over the final few weeks of my trip. The second was larger and more recent: Oz’s 500-page memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness.
It’s not a book to idly skim through at the beach. Rather, it’s a masterly act of reconstructed memory, both haunting and humorous, a mental reckoning by the author of his family history and his own childhood in Jerusalem on either side of the War of 1948 and the turbulent birth of the State of Israel. The dark heart of the book, which Oz foreshadows and then deftly circles until the revelation of the final few sentences, is the crippling spell of depression that gripped his mother, that drew her away from husband and child, and that ultimately led to her suicide when he was 12.
Oz is known, of course, as both a world-famous author and a kibbutznik—or rather, ex-kibbutznik. He wasn’t kibbutz-born, wasn’t a “child of the dream”. Rather, he ran away to join Kibbutz Hulda, not far from the Latrun Monastery, after his mother’s death. It was in many ways a rejection of the right-wing scholarly nationalism of his father, uncle and grandfather. (He even went so far as to replace his surname “Klausner” with “Oz”: ”strength” in Hebrew.) He lived and worked and wrote and married and raised a family there for 30 years. He only left when his youngest son developed asthma, and doctors recommended a drier climate, so they relocated to the development town of Arad, near the Dead Sea.
A Tale of Love and Darkness doesn’t detail much of Oz’s kibbutz years, but it does offer fascinating glimpses, from this literary giant’s perspective, of how these communities were viewed in Israel at mid-century. He describes using matchsticks and other tidbits to construct imaginary kibbutz settlements as a child. He offers a comic anecdote about how he wrote a rebuttal to a newspaper editorial by founding prime minister David Ben Gurion—and how his entire kibbutz was angered at first by his presumption, until Ben Gurion writes a reply to Oz’s rebuttal and later invites him for coffee. He writes about how his father, who tried to convince him against joining a kibbutz, visits for the first time and is so concerned about fitting in and not offending his hosts that he arrives, not in his usual suit and tie, but in the rough work garb of a pioneer. He also describes the contempt in which the kibbutzniks were held by his grandfather and his nationalistic friends:
“As for the kibbutzim, from here they looked like dangerous Bolshevik cells that were anarcho-nihilist to boot, permissive, spreading licentiousness and debasing everything the nation held sacred, parasites who fattened themselves at the public expense and spongers who robbed the nation’s land—not a little of what was later to be said against the kibbutzim by their enemies from among radical Middle Eastern Jews was already ‘known for a fact’, in those years, to visitors to my grandparents’ home in Jerusalem.”
Oz’s memoir was a huge literary event in Israel when it was released, and in 2004, to coincide with the publication of this English translation, David Remnick profiled Oz in The New Yorker. At one point, they visit Kibbutz Hulda together and Oz reflects on his early years there:
“Tel Aviv was not radical enough—only the kibbutz was radical enough,” he said. “The joke of it is that what I found at the kibbutz was the same Jewish shtetl, milking cows and talking about Kropotkin at the same time and disagreeing about Trotsky in a Talmudic way, picking apples and having a fierce disagreement about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was a bit of a nightmare. Every morning you would wake up and you were in the same place! I was a disaster as a laborer. I became the joke of the kibbutz.”
Oz’s memoir, like all his writing, is wrapped in this style of wry detachment and humourous retrospection. To Remnick, he describes his earliest years on Kibbutz Hulda as “a teen-age ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with better weather and a sensual permissiveness.” The author leads his guest around the quiet grounds of Kibbutz Hulda. Workers are in the fields. Many of the older buildings lie abandoned, as a generation of kibbutz children have not returned to their communal home. Yet, despite the decline of the movement, Oz still sees a remnant of the kibbutz philosophy, which he defended for so many years, still underpinning much of his nation:
“In a sense, the kibbutz left some of its genes in the entire Israeli civilization, even people who never lived on a kibbutz and rejected the kibbutz idea,” Oz said. “You look at the West Bank settlers—not my favorite people, as you can imagine. You will see kibbutz genes in their conduct and even their outward appearance. If you see the directness of Israelis, the almost latent anarchism, the skepticism, the lack of an in-built class hierarchy between the taxi-driver and the passenger—all of those are very much the kibbutz legacy, and it’s a good legacy. So, in a strange way, the kibbutz, like some bygone stars, still provides us with light long after it’s been extinguished.”
I’d heard about the dilemma of the Druze Arabs of Majdal Shams, first from Druze workers and Jewish friends on the kibbutz when I lived there in 1989, and then from residents, artists and activists of this town in the Golan Heights when I finally had a chance to visit last summer.
I even saw the infamous “shouting fence”—two fences actually, which create a no-man’s land between the Israeli-annexed Golan and neighbouring Syria. Friends, neighbours and family members who have been separated by this fence—some for 40 years—come together to call across to each other (some using megaphones) in a poignant symbol of this divided land
The fence was quiet when I visited. Apparently, cellphones and easier access to Syria via Jordan have cut down on its necessity. Still, the story of the Druze of the Golan should be listened to. Theirs is one of the more complex stories in a part of the world where nobody’s story is simple.
That’s what I was delighted to learn about and am keen to track down this recent Dutch documentary, Shout, which apparently traces the lives of two young friends from Majdal Shams, who cross over to study in Syria and then who must make the difficult decision of whether to stay there or return to their home on the far side of the fence, knowing that this decision is final and likely irrevocable. Here is the trailer:
Anyone who knows me also knows I’m a magaholic, and that there’s little I enjoy more than a great magazine. (In fact, I take great pleasure in merely good or even flashily mediocre magazines, and my subscription addiction borders on the pathological.)
I also get a serious readerly woody for great newspapers, a love first kindled while fighting for sections around our family’s ink-stained, paper-cluttered dining room table in Ottawa.
Finally, as this blog makes clear, I’ve got a long-standing fascination with Israel and Israeli culture and politics.
So just imagine how many degrees of heaven I was in, when I opened the latest issue of The New Yorker to discover an in-depth feature (by editor-in-chief David Remnick no less!) about the influential left-wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (whose English edition I read on a regular basis online and which I devour whenever I’m in Israel).
It’s a fascinating profile of a complex publication — that rare paper where the publisher actually pushes his editorial staff to be more radical, more provocative, and risk alienating readers more than they often want to. The title says it all: “Haaretz prides itself on being the conscience of Israel. Does it have a future?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about cars the past few days. How they control—and often threaten—our lives. These reflections have been rekindled, in large part, because a colleague and friend was badly injured in car accident a week ago. I don’t know the details of the incident and am relieved to hear she is recovering, but it will be a long, slow, healing process, and her life has been significantly altered by this violent event.
A week before that, walking my dog home from the video store at night, I was nearly bowled over by a driver in an SUV who didn’t see me as she accelerated left into the pedestrian crossing … because she had turned her head in the opposite direction to talk to her passenger! She braked a foot away from me (and would have crushed poor Bo if she hadn’t) after I thrust out my hand and started shouting. (My shouting—laced with words I won’t reprint here—continued as I leaned toward her windshield and shared my opinion of her driving skills.) Since then, I’ve been even more hyper-vigilant of careless drivers on my walk to and from daycare, often with my son dawdling behind me on his bike, with vehicles whizzing past on the road beside the sidewalk.
I haven’t owned a car in a decade. However, I’m not sure when my antagonistic relationship with the internal-combustion engine began. I never had that “car gene” that other North American boys seem to be born with. But I didn’t hate them either—certainly not growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa, where you often needed to be driven around to get anywhere, where getting your license remains one of the last rites of passage into adulthood. (Trust me: getting to vote doesn’t count for an 18-year-old.)
It was only on the kibbutz, I suppose, that I first experienced the pleasures of a largely car-free community. While we were taken by bus on volunteer trips and in the back of old Toyota trucks to work the fields, I rarely rode in a car while living in Israel. I didn’t miss it. And I learned to appreciate a community design in which motorized vehicles (aside from the occasional golf cart) were second-class citizens, shunted to the margins of the encircling ring road, and pedestrians ruled the laneways. You could walk everywhere, at any time, and not worry about doing a shoulder check or dodging hasty drivers.
There were, quite simply, few cars in this community. They were all collectively owned and generally reserved for important kibbutz business, not for cruising around or short-hop shopping trips or dragging the kids from school to soccer to play dates—all those activities occurred instead within the barbed-wire enclosure of the kibbutz, in walking or cycling distance. And in that way, you bumped into friends and neighbours and other community members, as you wandered the grounds of the kibbutz and went about your business.
Some of that has changed in the 21st-century privatized kibbutz. People have bought their own cars, so they’re not reliant on using the communally owned vehicles. They have joined the swarm of traffic that chokes the urban streets and nation-crossing highways of this densely populated country. And yet many of these communities have retained a fleet of collective cars and trucks, with high-tech booking systems, that would be the envy of embryonic “car share” operations (like the Victoria Car Share Co-op, which I belong to) in North America. Not owning a car is still not a problem. Being “car-free” is certainly not viewed as the social aberration that it is here in Canada. (I worry that people must think I don’t drive because I lost my license to a DUI or something.)
Aerial view of Kibbutz Urim
The “needs” of automobiles have started to affect how kibbutzim are redesigned in small ways. I noticed more internal roads and parking lots in the centre of Kibbutz Shamir than I remember from 20 years ago. On Kibbutz Urim, near the Gaza Strip, cars remain on the periphery, except now, because the kibbutz runs a licensed daycare for both members and outsiders, authorities are demanding that the community conform to safety regulations and widen the narrow internal lanes so that emergency vehicles can more easily access the daycare. Many of the new neighbourhoods being erected, and then marketed to non-members as suburban getaways, feature North American-style single-family dwellings, with long driveways so you can park your car mere steps from your front door. (In North America, the notion that you might have to take more than 10 paces from your Ford to your foyer borders on insanity.)
Still, most people still get around their kibbutz homes by foot, bike, scooter or the proliferation of electric golf-carts (no longer just used by pensioners or the infirm). In this way, the kibbutz remains an ideal to me of a human-scale “eco-topia”—a place where you can live without the buzz and threat of cars, where all the amenities have been designed with the walker not the driver in mind, where the only collisions that occur are the serendipitous intersections of friends and neighbours amid the network of pedestrian pathways, where children can roam free and explore, in nature, away from the menace of the infernal combustion engine. Where the car is no longer king of the road.
There is plenty to catch up with in news of the kibbutz. Most recently, Ha’aretz printed an interesting article about the evolving volunteer programs on kibbutzim—how more volunteers are now coming from places like India or Latin America, and how these new volunteers fit within the 21st-century economics of privatized kibbutzim now more likely to use cheap imported labour (usually Thai workers) for agricultural field work that was once the domain of itinerant volunteers from North America, Australia and Europe.
As the director of the kibbutz movement’s volunteer department explains the pros and cons of inviting volunteers into a community: “Kibbutzim want to feel young again, and the universality of the volunteers, their vivacity. Volunteers require a bigger investment of energy; you have to see to their conditions, to trips, vacations – not every kibbutz [is willing to] do this. Some say, ‘It doesn’t suit us to run a kindergarten.'”
The Guardian in the U.K. published a short memoir, by novelist Noam Shpancer, about growing up on a kibbutz in the communal children’s house. He lauds the freedom to explore that he experienced as a child:
Entertainment was mostly of the found, not manufactured, sort. Our playgrounds were junkyards. We played with defunct tractors, old boxes, used clothing and discarded tools. We roamed the yard, mostly barefoot. We built tree houses. We took turns on the lone communal bicycle. In winter we collected mushrooms in the forest and brought them to the communal dining room to be cooked.
He also describes the stultifying effects of the relentless pressure to conform, to be one with the peer group:
Individuality and competition were looked down upon. Children who were unusual, eccentric or sought to distinguish themselves, were shunned. We were socialised to be strong and sunny, simple and similar. Emotional expression was demeaned as weak and self-involved. We learned to numb ourselves. I haven’t cried since I was 10. I’d like to but I can’t.
He writes about how the kibbutz system gave his parents, his father especially, the stability and purpose (beyond mere survival) that they had lost in their escape from Nazi Germany. He also describes how these pioneers failed to prepare for the “second day” of the revolution—“in which the self-defining project of their youthful rebellion would become a mundane, constricting ‘home town’ to their children, propelling the children to seek their own identities and adventures elsewhere.”
Ultimately, nearly an entire generation of kibbutz children (like Shpancer) sought their own identities and adventures beyond the wire of their home kibbutz. Only now are some of them returning to a much-changed movement that has abandoned the strict enforcement of collective child-rearing and other communal ideals. For someone who experienced it first-hand, Shpancer doesn’t think such changes are a bad thing.
The plight of Sudanese refugees who escaped to Israel over the Egyptian border is a complicated issue. A recent Jerusalem Post article describes efforts (including some kibbutz-based programs) to retrain and help refugees resettle back in southern Sudan. One former refugee hopes to found not one but a series of Sudanese kibbutzim, inspired by his experiences in Israel:
Emanuel Logooro, who returned to Southern Sudan nearly a year ago after four years at Kibbutz Eilot, said he was in the process of starting up a kibbutz back home. “I want to contribute to my country, and a kibbutz would be a great contribution,” he said while visiting Israel. “My family said I could have some of their land – Sudan is a very, very big country, and they gave me enough land to start seven kibbutzim. I got a bank loan to start building the facilities, and now I’m hoping to find about 40 families to join,” said Logooro, who came to Israel with his wife and is now back home with her and their three children.
Finally, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company performed this week in Vancouver. I wish KCDC had made it to Victoria. In 2009, I was lucky enough to tour the company’s facilities on Kibbutz Ga’aton and catch a sneak peek at a few rehearsals. There is no better symbol of the change at this now-privatized kibbutz than that, when I was there two summers ago, the dining room—once the social hub of the community—was about to be renovated into another rehearsal/performance space for the internationally acclaimed dance troupe. Artistic director explained to a reporter from Vancouver’s Georgia Straight that while his troupe isn’t political per se, it’s hard to separate geopolitical realities from a cultural group coming from Israel:
So while Be’er doesn’t necessarily want his work seen as a literal commentary on the Israel that surrounds him, he does relish the thought of bringing his country’s perspective—and talent—to the rest of the world. “It’s important that we arrive from Israel and it’s not just the Israel you see in the news with crisis and bombing—that there is another side to it,” he says with heartfelt conviction. “There’s a lot of creativity and activity here, and I believe we can create communication—we can create a bridge.”
