The taxman cometh

Here's an interesting short news item about potential changes to Israel's tax system aimed at privatized kibbutzes. In short, the proposal will restrict "collective" tax rates to those few kibbutzim who have maintained their communal economies (what are known as kibbutz shitufi) and/or have no greater than a 25% differential between the best and worst paid members. For the majority of kibbutzim who have undergone "privatization" or decommunalization" (also called shinui or "The Change"), members will need to pay individual income taxes rather than the collective communal tax (sometimes negligible or zero) that has benefitted kibbutzes for decades.

Ha'aretz offers an even more detailed look at the potential consequences here.

Boris Johnson, kibbutz volunteer

While much attention over the past year has focused on the experiences (and location) of Bernie Sanders as a kibbutz volunteer, it turns out that another major politician did a tour of duty on a kibbutz: Boris Johnson, the blonde-bemopped former mayor of London and now post-Brexit U.K. foreign secretary.

An article in Ha'aretz allows his sister to describe their time together as volunteers on Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi. Boris wasn't exactly kibbutznik material but apparently he toughed out his initial work assignment in the kibbutz kitchen before tourijng the rest of the country and meeting Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek:

“He was not a kibbutznik. He was not a soldier. And he was so pale he couldn’t even go in the sun.”


He sounds (and even looks) much like I did as a hapless foreign kibbutz volunteer.

Cover story

Speaking of blurbs, I also got a look at the (almost) final front and back cover design for the book — and it's gorgeous. I was thrilled by the integration of my photo (overlooking the Hula Valley), the title and subtitle fonts, and the four wonderful blurbs from two academics and two fiction writers... all of whom I deeply admire for their own writing and thinking.

Thanks to ECW Press for the hard work — and lengthy consultations — to make this cover the best possible advertisement for the prose within.

N.B.: One final change made after I saw this draft was removing the barbed wire on the spine, which we felt didn't suit the (mostly) hopeful spirit of the manuscript.

Good news from Kirkus Reviews

And so it begins... the anxiety over book reviews!

With the official launch of Chasing Utopia still two months away, the book got its first early review from Kirkus, the influential trade magazine... and I was relieved (nay, thrilled) that the reviewer liked the book. 

Read the full review here. If nothing else, it gives me something to salve my ego when the inevitable lukewarm or antagonistic reviews start to come in... I've got no illusions that everyone will share Kirkus's opinion about a book on a topic as deeply divided as the history of Israel.

And I look forward to adding the final line from the review to my collection of blurbs: "An eye-opening look at an Eden of eco-villages gradually giving way to economic exigencies."

Sounds good to me.

Good Reads giveaway...

Anybody in Canada or the U.S. who wants to win an advanced copy of my book via GoodReads, should sign up below. Spread the word!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Chasing Utopia

by David Leach

Giveaway ends June 30, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Review: Safekeeping, by Jessamyn Hope

 Safekeeping, by Jessamyn Hope (Fig Tree Books, 2014)

I’ve always thought great literature charts the history of missed connections—and the human struggle to repair lost opportunities or absent relations. From Odysseus’s wandering return to Ithaca, to Anna Karenina’s doomed love affair, to the social and familial alienation of Leopold Bloom, the poignancy of literary art often comes from the longings and lamentations over what-might-have-been.

Missed connections form the heart of Safekeeping, a beautiful novel by Jessamyn Hope that spans the centuries but centres largely on a kibbutz near Mt. Carmel in the mid 1990s. I’d picked up the book, of course, when I learned of its kibbutz focus, especially the setting of a community on the verge of privatization. But I fell under the spell of Hope’s storytelling, characterization and unexpected shifts in narrative focus, even as I enjoyed how she wove the history of the kibbutz movement and the state of Israel into her novel’s backstory.

The missed connections—and the emotional turmoil they cause—are plentiful in Safekeeping, and most gravitate around a mysterious brooch, made by a Jewish goldsmith in the 14^th century, of great value and even greater personal significance. There are missed connections between a grandfather and grandson in New York City; a father and son in the same district; a kibbutz-founding mother and her privatization-minded son in Israel; two pairs of star-cross’d lovers—a Chernobyl-scarred immigrant and a Palestinian-Israeli, a thirty-year-old French Canadian who has grown up in a mental asylum and a teenage kibbutz musician disfigured in a terrorist attack; and the equally secretive affair between a Holocaust survivor and a kibbutz pioneer during the turbulent birth of a nation.

The brooch acts as an objective correlative to evoke this sense of missed connections even as it joins the disparate characters and historical timelines of the story, like E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes or the movie The Red Violin. But Hope never overplays the brooch’s symbolic significance, and many of the characters resist its allure in interesting ways while others let its raw worth corrupt their personalities.

The main narrative follows Adam, a young recovering alcoholic haunted by many mistakes, through his months as a volunteer on a kibbutz in the Galilee on a mission, to return the brooch to a once-intended-recipient, whose importance even he doesn’t fully understand. Some of the most powerful scenes, however, are short interruptions or epilogues to the story of Adam and his grandfather. In one, Hope vividly evokes the horrors and desperation of a Black Plague pogrom—and the act that sets the novel’s drama in motion.

History otherwise works in the background to the characters’ lives: the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, the Oslo Accords and bus bombings of the 1990s, the divided reaction to the Jewish State around the world, the rise and decline of the kibbutz movement as a society of equals. There’s a depth of research, but Hope never forces it upon her readers or her characters. Toward the book’s end, the vote about privatization on the novel’s kibbutz feels, in fact, anti-climactic. More important are the last actions of her cast of characters—and whether they can breach those missed connections that have left them alone, deeply damaged or both. Some do. Some don’t. We are often left to imagine how key figures manage the trajectory of their lives, rather than having it all spelled out for us by the book’s final pages.

And the conclusion is a masterful exercise in surprise and indirection—a novelistic risk that pays off—that left me thinking and rethinking about all the characters and their decisions that had populated my imagination for the past two weeks.

Come for the kibbutz content. Stay for the storytelling. Safekeeping is a book that you will want to pass along to friends and relations, like a small heirloom too beautiful to keep to yourself.

The final design...

And one more change. The journey from inspiration to publication for this book has been long and winding. I'd count it at six years of researching and writing — and 27 years of thinking about my experiences as a young, naive kibbutz volunteer.

The path to a final title, subtitle and cover has been equally circuitous, if a bit more accelerated. The marketing folks at ECW Press came back with one more recommended change — this time to the title... I was nervous when I heard the publisher wanted to switch the title again. (I'd changed it three times on my own.) But then I saw the new version, matched to the sunset image from the Hula Valley, and it all just felt right. And then we added "Future" into the sub-title and everything clicked.


Now, I've got a pair of Advanced Readers' Copies to make the book seem even more real — I can lift it up and flip through its pages and begin to worry about reviews! 
mostly, I'm thrilled that this story — and the stories of the many people I met in Israel and the West Bank — will finally get shared with curious readers.

So what do you think?

Bernie's kibbutz revealed!

Reporters at Ha'aretz dipped into the newspaper archives and discovered the smoking-gun to the "Where did Bernie volunteer?" mystery: in an interview with reporter Yossi Melman from 1990, the Bernie Sanders said he spent several months in 1963 on Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha' amakim in Western Galilee. Media are already sweeping the kibbutz, near Haifa, to learn more, although few people seem to have any memory of the young American who worked there before the big post-1967 wave of volunteers.

Anybody want to translate the original Ha'aretz story? Or more importantly, tell us if Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha' amakim has privatized since America's Best Known Socialist once worked there?

And we've got a winner!

... or at least a winning sub-title for my book. Technically, I think it was my editor who helped slash through the kudzu of potential taglines and help me arrive at the words that will appear under Love & Rockets. Drum roll, please!

Chasing Utopia in a Divided Israel

I think "Chasing" works better than the "Stumbling Towards" (too cute, too unclear) and conveys the sense that utopia — that dream of a better society — is always something we are in search of, the greener grass on the other side, the mirage on the horizon. It also (I hope!) suggests that the book is both about the kibbutz movement's search for utopia and my own quest to discover what became of that dream, 100 years after the first pioneers created Degania.

So, the Chase is on. Next up: going through the editor's notes. ANother thorough fact-check. And hopefully some cover options to mull over.

Helen Mirren, kibbutz volunteer

British acting legend Helen Mirren was recently honoured in Los Angeles at the Israel Film Festival and spoke about her experiences in the country—including a stint as a volunteer on Kibbutz Ha'on six months after the Six Day War, when the first wave of foreign visitors arrived to kibbutzes across Israel to fill in for members called up for Army service to defend the country. She recalls sleeping on the beach in Eilat—a pleasure that I shared, too, although two decades later.

"That visit to Israel was one of the important building blocks, in my life," she told the audience. "The courage and the commitment of those early people working on the kibbutz that I was luck enough to meet briefly. These building blocks that make personal lives and that make countries."


Kibbutz Ha'on, however, is no longer a kibbutz. In 2007, the indebted community returned its land to the state and became a semi-cooperative moshav instead.