Here is a curious news article about a talk given by an economics prof in the States. He had lived on a kibbutz, but became disillusioned with socialism and later even progressive politics—and became a libertarian who promotes individual rights and minimal government. He claims his changing beliefs are based on “empirical evidence”, but they might also be “blamed” on the progression from liberalism to conservatism—from dreams of utopia to skepticism about radical change—that often seems part of the aging process. Despite my hopes for a cooperative future of peace and sharing, I sometimes hear my Inner Cranky Old Man coming through when I talk these days, too.
The Hula Valley extends into the northernmost reaches of Israel, what’s often called the “finger of Galilee”, and borders Lebanon and the Golan Heights. It’s a stunningly beautiful landscape of rolling hills, swamps drained and tilled into lush fields and orchards, and the earliest (and best conserved) flow of the Jordan River, all shadowed by the snowy peak of Mt. Hermon. It was the picturesque backdrop to my life and work for nearly eight months on Kibbutz Shamir. The fiery, lingering sunrises and sunsets are still burned into my memory—and, for that matter, the photo at the top of my blog.
It’s also home to the kibbutzniks of Kfar Giladi, one of the first communal settlements in the area, founded in 1916. Nine decades later, Giladi voted to privatize in 2003. Since then, the landscape—on the opposite side of the valley from Shamir—has remained the same, but the life of its members has changed. Keeping the Kibbutz, a new (and as yet unreleased) documentary from two young American filmmakers, charts those changes and some of the disappointments felt by kibbutzniks left behind by privatization. Co-director Ben Crosbie was born on the kibbutz but moved to the U.S. at age three and visited occasionally growing up. In 2007, he returned to Giladi with his co-director, Tessa Moran, and let their cameras roll as kibbutzniks talked candidly about their feelings and the increasingly market-driven, individualistic management of their once-communal home.
The film (Crosbie and Moran generously sent a preview copy to me) begins with a quick introduction to the history of Giladi and the early ideals of the kibbutz movement: the philosophy of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; the communal child-rearing; the socializing in the dining hall; the collective harvests in the cotton fields. Flashforward to the present: the children have long since moved into their parents’ home, the dining hall is half-empty, day labourers are hired to do field work (and cotton is no longer grown), and everyone gets a different wage—just like the rest of the world.
Many of the kibbutz films I’ve watched seem to follow the famous stages of grieving: Degania (anger and bargaining); Kibbutz(depression). In Keeping the Kibbutz, we get to see kibbutzniks who have reached that fifth and final stage—who have accepted, however reluctantly, the changes that have overtaken their community but still look back with fondness and nostalgia at the unique communal society from which they all emerged.
The film does a sumptuous job of evoking that nostalgia without lapsing into sentimentality, thanks in large part to the humour and honesty that the handful of main interview subjects bring to their experiences. Throughout, the filmmakers juxtapose archival footage and photos with similar contemporary images of farm and fisheries workers, children and parents, to show that for all the changes, there is a continuity of life and community on Giladi.
During the filming, two of the older residents get told that their wages are being cut or their services are no longer needed on the kibbutz, and we see their pangs of self-doubt (or bemused resistance on the part of puckish Frankie, a former lager lout from South Africa who came to Israel to dry out and ended up marrying a kibbutznik) that accompany the loss of the identity they had formed working for their community. Giving retirement-aged members meaningful work was always a key part of the original kibbutz ideal. In fact, the optical factory where I worked at Shamir—and that has since become a multi-million-dollar international enterprise—was originally created as a make-work project for oldsters.
“I’m like excess baggage,” says Frankie when he reads the “Dear John” letter from kibbutz management. “Only you can take care of yourself and your needs,” one of the managers later tells him. He just shrugs and says, “I hate the word ‘money’.”
Uzi, another member, gets laid off from his repair job on the kibbutz—even though he is never given a chance to explain the reason the repair shop never shows a profit in its accounts is because, for decades, the kibbutz wasn’t supposed to make money and therefore fudged its accounting in various ways. “I like to do things for people,” he admits. “This is my god. I don’t need religion.”
In a later scene, Uzi takes one of the filmmakers for a glider ride high above the Hula Valley and viewers get a panoramic sense of why the kibbutz members are so deeply attached to this landscape, so reluctant to leave, even as their community changes from its original ideals. The film is filled with beautiful images of the kibbutz and its hilly environs, evocatively backed by a gorgeous piano and guitar score by composer Preston Hart.
“I love the kibbutz,” says Uzi’s wife, Kathy, who arrived as a volunteer in 1968 and married into Giladi. “It breaks my heart that it has to change. I’m sad that my children grew up in a special society that doesn’t exists anymore.”
But she says these words with a smile on her lips, and not a bitter one. She seems to have accepted the changes, adapted to them even (she “buys” and then runs the kibbutz store), and the film ends with a scene of a backyard barbecue in the last light of dusk, with friends and laughter and a sense of community that has altered perhaps but hasn’t fully disappeared. The old socialist principles have been shed, but the members are still “keeping the kibbutz”.
Check out this trailer for the documentary and watch out for the film at festivals in the coming year…
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…
