A cooperative vision

A new novel contrasting the ideals of the 1980s kibbutz with the materialism of the big city is all the more relevant against the backdrop of this year’s social protests.

By DAVID GEFFEN
Kibbutz member 521 (photo credit: www.goisrael.com)
Kibbutz member 521
(photo credit: www.goisrael.com)
Fred Skolnik, a native of Israel for a half a century, is best known for the outstanding work he did as the editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica’s second edition, which appeared a few years ago. Now Skolnik has devoted himself completely to fiction, and his latest offering is an expansive novel covering the period from the First Lebanon War in 1982 until the emergence of the first intifada in 1987.
The Other Side focuses on two families, one city-based and the other on a kibbutz.
The kibbutz family, Itzik and Leah Shachar and their two sons, symbolize an older, more idealistic Israel. They and the other kibbutz members are always recalling the Israel that was, and are upset by the increasing materialism and hedonism in that period. The other family, Eitan and Penina Goldstein and their son, Amnon, believe in the legitimacy of getting rich, since one must have earned it.
They can be described as wealthy, hypocritical, disdainful of knowledge, corrupt – exactly the opposite of the Shachars.
This novel, in its grand style, tells their story against the background of the Jewish state in that five-year period.
IT MUST be underlined that Skolnik’s encyclopedic knowledge provides him with the ability to write a novel of this nature. We feel the tragedy of the Lebanon war, and we understand how the conflagration changed the characters’ lives. The intifada becomes a vivid period rather than just a word.
The author sketches the kibbutz life in that era with skill. I had learned fragments about that “enterprise” through of our son, who spent part of his Nahal service with the Religious Scouts on a kibbutz in the North. For those who want to feel the kibbutz in its mode of high-level change, this book delivers.
At the same time, the novel dramatizes the Israeli from the big city who wants to pile up as much money as he can. Though we have always known there are such people, we are now permitted to focus on their schemes and on their foibles, their lust for life and lust for love. They are our fellow Israelis, not yet tycoons, but hoping they will be, in American parlance, “rich as Rockefeller.” Are they ever satisfied? The extent of their avariciousness in this nation of morals and mortals is almost hard to believe. What Skolnik has done is make them ring true.
This is particularly relevant in our era of social protests. In one passage, he describes the Shachars’ son’s ruminations in 1987: “Yoav sometimes wondered if it was not worth surrendering to the age and benefitting with [partner] Tamar from one of the ‘solutions’ offered to young couples, as it was put in the jargon of the Ministry of Housing, lining up to get ‘points’ for cheap mortgages and cheap apartments.”
Yoav notes in these thoughts that “someone had to control the money and someone had to control the people who wanted it.”
Skolnik’s ultimate intention, indeed, seems to be to enable the reader to experience the characters and their world as genuinely as possible. As one of his characters says, “In the end we’re all mysteries, even when we tell our secrets. I’m not so shrewd after all. I never even understood my own characters. That’s the way it should be I suppose.... Our best novels have been invented by their readers. Not the critics, of course. They always get things wrong. A book should be lived, not interpreted. The real reader assimilates the book like a performer with a musical score, bending it to his life. He adds his life to it and sees possibilities that are hidden from the author.”
That, he concludes, “is the great moment in art, when the book is laid aside and the reader begins to dream.”