Books: A collective price

Yael Neeman’s memoir of kibbutz life tells a story of a hard choices.

By RIVKAH LAMBERT ADLER
kibbutz Yehiam (photo credit: DAVID KING/FLICKR)
kibbutz Yehiam
(photo credit: DAVID KING/FLICKR)
The most striking literary device Yael Neeman uses in her memoir We Were The Future is the narrative we. Although this is her story, Neeman communicates the exact way she was socialized – to think in terms of the group over the individual.
Most of her childhood memories are defined by the we, not the I.
“The group was always and everywhere – 24 hours a day, from waking until sleeping, from the babies’ house to the end of twelfth grade,” she wrote.
The memoir follows the upbringing of Neeman and her peer group from birth until age 21, in the 1960s and ’70s. Her very first sentences introduce Neeman’s narrative “we.”
“We were always telling ourselves our story. Compulsively. Out loud. All the time. Sometimes we got tired even before we began, but we still told it for hours.”
Through her eyes, the reader understands that the price kibbutz members paid to exist as a collective was a very high one. In order to fit in, one was required to make tremendous compromises in one’s family life and let go of any distinctiveness.
Neeman describes kibbutz life as “one of the most extraordinary experiments ever carried out, freely and independently chosen, to build a different world that required a different concept of family and a different concept of home.” The exact implications of that different concept of home and family can be shocking to the reader, even one who is familiar with early kibbutz life.
Everything on the kibbutz was systematized.
Newborns went from the hospital directly to the babies’ houses. Mothers of infants would come together to nurse their babies at the same time of day, to ensure that no child got more breast milk than another.
Fifteen minutes were allowed for parents to tuck their children into bed each night in the children’s house. But parents with more than one child had to juggle, because bedtime was the same time in each children’s house. In addition, there were kibbutz meetings many nights, which forced parents to choose between their children and their communal responsibilities.
The communal responsibilities won.
Children’s lives were almost completely separate from those of their parents. The kibbutz allowed family visitation each day from 5:30 in the afternoon until 7:20.
It’s not surprising that Neeman reports: “We knew nothing about the grown-ups’ lives, neither about their waking hours nor about their sleep. They inhabited a different planet from ours.”
The kibbutz owned an apartment on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv, and each year Neeman went on a family vacation with her biological family. But one week a year was not enough to rebuild the bonds that daily life tore apart. She and her siblings didn’t mind at all when their parents went out together during their annual vacation.
“We liked staying alone, without our parents. We didn’t know what you do with grown-ups.”
Communal childcare was another way the cost of kibbutz life was borne by the women, even those who were not mothers.
“Our system was not good to women,” Neeman states plainly. “On the contrary...the children’s houses were supposed to free the woman from childcare, but, in fact, they imprisoned them in that work – except that they did it with other women’s children.”
Although Neeman writes from the perspective of a kibbutz child, one wonders what anguish the system must have caused some kibbutz parents who turned their children over to the system of their own free will. How much must a mother have had to believe in the kibbutz to give her child over to the care of others from birth? Perhaps the most poignant, heartbreaking line in the entire memoir is this one: “The longing of some of the kibbutz children for the family they never had was the longing for an idea we had no inkling of, like, for instance, the longing of the Jews in the Diaspora for Jerusalem.”
No normal family life. No past. And most certainly, no God.
“And not only did God not exist in Hashomer Hatzair [the secular movement that sponsored Kibbutz Yehiam and many other kibbutzim], but he was forbidden; he was an irrational, pagan obstacle to the remarkable abilities and productivity of the sublime human being. God was a vestige of the dark Middle Ages, held in even greater contempt than Hungarian or tender words and lullabies.”
Later, Neeman tells how “We had no synagogues. We were proud that we worked on Yom Kippur and ate wild boar that we roasted on campfires. No circumcision ceremonies were held on our kibbutz.
No rabbi set foot on it to perform weddings. The dead were buried in coffins, the Kaddish prayer was not said over them, and any mention of the Bible was forbidden.”
We Were The Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz is told in sparse prose that belies a deeper message. Of course, the memoir is about growing up on a kibbutz. But it’s also about the heartache of devoting one’s life to a belief, to a value, that did not stand the test of time. It’s about the pain of giving everything to a cause that cost too much.
As Neeman describes in one of the final chapters, the children of the kibbutz ultimately had to make a choice. She describes kibbutz life as a “socialist experiment” that each child of the kibbutz needed to freely decide to join.
Or not.
According to Neeman, “Nearly half the kibbutzim children left.” And in that way, We Were the Future serves as a painful case study of what came first, when parents and children choose vastly different paths in life.


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