The kibbutz, once the pride of a nascent Israel, is widely seen as a failed experiment in communal living. Yael Neeman’s bitter-sweet memoir of growing up in a rocky, northern Galilee outpost relives the national project from the perspective of the children’s house and teen dormitories.
In We Were The Future, we glimpse what Kibbutz Yehiam felt like to a child, born in its heyday, who could only partially have understood the system. Episodes taken from kibbutz documents give award-winning novelist Neeman a counterweight to her imagistic and poignant evocation of innocence.
Young Yael yearns to be loved and understand the world around her. But the adult looking back sees why the socialist-zionist dream could not be fulfilled.
Kibbutz kids were left to their own devices under a political structure creaking with ideology. Daily contact with parents totalled 100 minutes before they were later exiled to secondary school, an adolescent-only bubble. Far from equipping them to build the movement’s future, it all seemed to them pretty pointless.
This was a segregated world: Field and factory work was for men, while women cooked and cared for children (other women’s children). Cities were foreign, religion taboo. A weighty need to move away from the past meant a silence prevailed.
“Our parents didn’t know anything about our lives and we didn’t know anything about theirs,” Neeman writes. Grown-ups were baffling — if not downright neglectful. Affection, compliments and applause were “bourgeois”, so banned.
Kids interpreted things their own way. Weekly movie night was always delayed for wordless arguments between adult survivors wanting the window open and others wanting it shut. “Somehow we all accepted the explanation… offered by one kid to another: Anyone who was in the camps or holed up in a cramped hiding-place needed to open; anyone who was in an open area or set upon by dogs had to close. We would wait.”
At 12, they advanced to the kibbutz’s off-site “Educational Institution”, where learning was supposed to happen naturally. Instead, anxiety and apathy took hold, as teens endlessly pondered the meaning of life and, if given a task, did the opposite. “We were ignoramuses”.
The story goes only a bit further than the end of school in the 1970s and I wondered how Neeman overcame its lacunae. Kibbutz education may be dead, but deliberately limited curricula are not extinct. This Yehiam example stands not just for all kibbutzim, but raises questions about social engineering imposed on the children of the ultra-religious, too.
Hester Abrams is Project Leader for the Willesden Cemetery House of Life and a former Jewish Book Week director
