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.

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.

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?

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.

Insert [Sub-Title] Here

The good—no, great—news: my book has a publisher and a publication date. I'm thrilled to announced that ECW Press has acquired the world rights to my kibbutz book with a publication date of Fall 2016.

The manuscript is with an editor and I am working with the publisher and production staff to hash out the cover design and final title-sub-title combo... 

... which is the bad-ish news: I'm stumped.

I'll be the first to admit that writing display copy was never my forte as a magazine editor. I was okay at it ("Land of the Lox" for a feature about indigenous fish-farming in BC!), but I also worked with other editors who were masters at the catchy title/subtitle combo. It's not easy.

My kibbutz book has proven that conundrum. It has evolved through several title variations:

1. The Shouting Fence: That was the title of a poem I wrote, as a 21-year-old writing student, in the voice of a Druze man. It was briefly the working title of the manuscript and remains as a chapter title about my visit to Majdal Shams. It's catchy and dramatic—but misleading. It evokes the divisions in Israel but nothing of the utopian enterprise of the kibbutz. Nixed.
2. Look Back to Galilee: The name of this blog was the working title of this project for years. It comes form a phrase used by one of the founders of Kvutsa Degania, who urged his compatriots to return to the Kinnereth—and the Galilee—to found their commune. But as one kibbutz researcher in Haifa told me on a visit in 2009: "It sounds kind of Christian." And while it evokes a sense of memoir, it isn't especially catchy either.
3. Who Killed the Kibbutz? emerged late in the process as a front-runner when a grad student read a draft and suggested the manuscript needed more narrative drive and tension. What was the throughline? For a while, I thought it was the search for who or what had led to the decline of Israel's utopian communities. (I'm still kind of fond of this title.)
4. Love & Rockets: And then a bolt from the blue. I can't even remember how I came up with this title—perhaps mining all my memories from the late 80s reminded me of the band of the same name (and it's cover version of "Ball of Confusion"—which seems apropos to the book's themes). It echoes Erna Paris's The Garden and the Gun, a wonderful travelogue about Israel that heavily influenced my own decision to write his book. It's the title under which I finally sold the project—so I think it stays. (Famous last words...)

But I still need a sub-title. Why? Because nonfiction books have sub-titles! And as Jack David, ECW's publisher, explained to me: book buying (and promotion) is less about browsing physical store shelves these days and more about discovering a book online via key word searches. And a sub-title is the best place for such key words. Utopia was always a key theme and therefore a key word in all my proposed sub-titles

I just reviewed my progression of titles and subtitles and found the following:

• The Shouting Fence: Slouching Toward Utopia in a Divided Land (2009)
• Look Back to Galilee: Stumbling Toward Utopia in a Divided Land (2011)
• Who Killed the Kibbutz: Searching for Hope in a Divided Israel (2014)
• Love & Rockets: Stumbling Toward Utopia in a Divided Israel (2015)

But the sub-title isn't quite there—and could use the word "kibbutz" somewhere in its syntax. Another writer also tsk-tsk'ed the use of a gerund in the sub-title, too. So I've been on a brainstormy voyage to come up with the perfect partner for Love & Rockets. Here's a list of ideas (some okay, others simply awful) that have poured out of my imagination:

• The Broken Dream of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz  
• The Broken Promise of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
• The Promise of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
• The Problem of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
• Stumbling Towards Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz  
• Slouching Towards Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz  
• Looking for Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz  
• The Long Road to Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz  
• Cast Out of the Garden of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
• Cast Out of Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
• Leaving Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz
• Losing Utopia in Israel and the Kibbutz

The "and" between "Israel" and "kibbutz"might be confusing, though, even though the book is about the utopian impulse in the kibbutz movement (which helped to found Israel) and in Israel in general (both inspired by and a reaction to the kibbutz). I previewed some options at our Grad @ Home party last Friday and got warm response to the "lost dream" theme in some of the sub-titles, so a few more variations....

• The Lost Dream of Utopia in Israel's Kibbutz
• The Lost Dream of Utopia in the Kibbutz
• The Lost Dream of Utopia of the Kibbutz
• The Kibbutz's Lost Dream of Utopia
• The Kibbutz's Lost Dream of Utopia in a Divided Israel
• The Kibbutz's Lost Dream of Utopia for a Divided Israel
• The Kibbutz and the Lost Dream of Utopia in a Divided Israel
• The Lost Dream of Utopia in the Legendary Kibbutz
• The Lost Dream of Utopia on the Legendary Kibbutz
• The Lost Dream of Utopia on Israel's Legendary Kibbutz
• The Lost Dream of Utopia in Israel's Legendary Kibbutz
• Israel, the Kibbutz, and the Lost Dream of Utopia
• Who Killed the Kibbutz and its Dream of Utopia?

...at which point I just want to slam down my laptop and run screaming from the room. Nothing yet feels quite right.

Any suggestions? Any favourites? Anything that can save me from the madness of subtitle writing?

Update: I'll offer a reward—and give a copy of the book when it comes out to anyone who can dream up the perfect sub-title!

On which kibbutz did Israel feel the Bern?

Okay, I'll admit I haven't paid much attention to the looooong silly season of U.S. presidential nominations south of the border, beyond the Donald Trump memes floating across the Internet. I've been more engrossed by our own national elections here in Canada, especially the prospect of pro-Israel left-wing leader Tom Mulcair forming our country's first NDP federal government.

However, I couldn't ignore the growing momentum of the David vs. Goliath campaign of Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and lone U.S. socialist (as he's often billed), and the whole #FeelTheBern viral campaign to wrest the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton. What intrigues me most, of course, in the many profiles of Sanders—including articles and bios that pre-date his presidential bid—are the casual mentions that the progressive Jewish politician volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel back in 1964. But the articles never, ever name the kibbutz.

Only Sanders knows which kibbutz taught him socialism can work

I was intrigued. So were others. The Hunt for Red Bernie's Mystery Kibbutz was soon on. And yet so far, no luck. We've all struck out. Bernie Sanders and his press folks have declined to answer inquiries about which kibbutz he stayed on, perhaps because Sanders has already suffered from ridiculous accusations that he is a dual Israeli-American citizen.

So let's piece together the clues so far  to which of Israel's 270 or so kibbutzim Sanders might have worked.

Jas Chana's "Straight Outta Brooklyn" for Tablet Magazine is an excellent primer to the life and times of Bernie Sanders. Chana outlines how, after graduating with a poli sci degree from University of Chicago and working for the Head Start program in New York City, Sanders and his brother Larry decided to travel to Israel for a bit of adventure. Here are key details from Chana's story

Both brothers decided to spend their time in Israel living and working on kibbutzim. Bernie arrived in Israel first and was there for six months total; Larry showed up four months after Bernie’s arrival and didn’t leave until 1967. In that time, Larry met his first wife and lived on two kibbutzim: Matsuva in the north and Yotvata in the south. Unfortunately, no one I spoke to for the purpose of this article had any idea or recollection of the name of Bernie’s kibbutz. However, Professor Richard Sugarman, a religious-studies professor at the University of Vermont, one of Sanders’ closest friends, and the man who encouraged him to run for mayor of Burlington in 1980, told me it was one of the “oldest kibbutzim.” 

Chana's interviews with both Professor Sugarman and Larry Sanders give the profile the most detail in any story I've read about how the kibbutz experience might have shaped (or at least confirmed) Bernie Sanders' beliefs in mutual aid and social justice. During his stay, Sanders was apparently curious about kibbutzniks economic plans, how socialism could work, how communal life gave parents more free time, and even just watching fellow Jews as farmers.... he had grown up in Brooklyn, after all. Sanders felt the kibbutz was "a utopian form of existence" (according to Sugarman) and proved that socialism could be put into practice (according to his brother).

But on which kibbutz—and from which federation—did he learn these lessons?

Naomi Zeveloff traipsed through Israel to find out—and the title of her article for Forward makes clear her lack of success. "The name of Sanders’s kibbutz might seem like a minor detail, but it’s important," she writes. "Among other things, it could build on our understanding of his formative years."

Her interview with Sanders' brother gives a teasing clue, when Larry tells her that he thought Bernie had stayed on "a kibbutz near the Mediterranean where there were a large number of Argentine volunteers in the 1960s." Through various sources, she zeroes in on three kibbutzim: Zikim and Sa'ad (near Gaza), and Ga'ash in central Israel. She spoke to several kibbutz representatives I'd also met during my travels (Dudu Amitai at Givat Haviva and former MK Avshalom Vilan). Unfortunately, because Sanders arrived in 1964, before the big influx of volunteers that followed the Six Day War of 1967 and the subsequent bureaucracy to track these new arrivals—Zeveloff could find no record of Bernie's visit. She also had no luck contacting members at the three kibbutzim she identified. A dead end. So she has  out a call for clues—both in Israel and through The Forward.

In Israel, Ha'aretz  put its own reporter on the case, but the title of Judy Maltz's article also reveals her frustrated quest: "Mission Impossible? Finding Bernie Sanders' Kibbutz". She wondered, as she set off, if she could track down an old-timer from the kibbutz where Sanders stayed who "might recall his hot romance with the gorgeous young kibbutznik who refused to return to the United States with him". (Shades of Not Quite Paradise....) 

She hits all the right offices: the Kibbutz Movement, the archives of Yad Tabenkin and Yad Ya'ari. Nothing. Emails and messages to Sanders and his media advisers come up empty, too. Even Professor Huck Gutman, a longtime friend and co-author of Sanders' political memoir, doesn't know. "The only person I know who knew Bernie then was Larry," he replies.

So Maltz spoke with Bernie's brother, too, and he repeated the somewhat vague clue he gave Zeveloff: 

“I am pretty sure it wasn’t the Negev. It had a number of South American members. I remember Bernard being impressed by one of the kibbutznik’s explanation of how they would transform Argentina. Without any reason to believe I am right, I would guess near the Mediterranean coast.”

So Maltz rounded up a dozen kibbutzim that fit these clues and emailed their names to Larry. But no bells ring, although Bernie's UK-based brother also admits: "I don't the name is stuck anywhere in my brain." Dead end.

So, let's examine the sparse clues and see if we can "profile" the potential locations for Berne Sanders' formative socialist—and Zionist— experiences:

• Not the Negev
• Near the Mediterranean Coast
• members from Argentina
• one of the oldest kibbutzim

Another potential clue: Larry Sanders' stay in Israel overlapped with his brother's by two months but it sounds like they never actually spent time together in Israel—or visited each other's kibbutzes.

Larry stayed on Matsuva near the Lebanese border (and the Mediterranean) and Yotvata just north of the Red Sea, so I'm tempted to rule out any kibbutzes in close proximity to either of these regions, as I think Larry would remember if his brother had stayed on a kibbutz near his own.

Using Larry Sanders' others clues, we can triangulate a few possibilities, as Zeveloff did, of Argentinean kibbutzes near the coast... although I'm surprised that Mefalsim didn't make her cut. It was founded in 1949 by Argentinian immigrants, not far from the coast... or from the Gaza Strip. That would make a curious coincidence, as Mefalsim is also just minutes north on Highway 232 from Kibbutz Be'eri, where Michele Bachmann—the other presidential candidate to do time on a kibbutz—volunteered in 1974. Mefalsim is technically in the northern Negev, so perhaps it should be disqualified for that reason—although it's further north than Sa'ad, which did make Zekeloff's short list. Still, I've got a note to a contact there to see if I can find out more.

The bigger problem?

Larry Sanders' clues (Argentinean kibbutz near coast and not Negev) don't square with the single mysterious detail from Professor Sugarman (one of the oldest kibbutzes). The kibbutz movement began in 1909, with Degania. By 1939, there were 73 kibbutzim, most of them concentrated away from the Mediterranean in the Jezreel Valley, the Hula Valley, the Beit Shean Valley or around Lake Kinnereth (aka the Sea of Galilee). More problematic: I don't know any kibbutzim founded by South Americans before the Second World War; most were started with the immigration from South America after Israel's independence in 1949.

Here's the rub: If we assume both Larry Sanders' clues to be true and Professor Sugarman's hint, too, we end up (as far as I can tell) with a Venn Diagram with no overlapping middle. So who's right and who's wrong?

Argentinean kibbutzes by the sea / oldest kibbutzim

Larry Sanders admits his memory is fuzzy, but the detail about Argentinian kibbutzniks seems so precise, he can't have fudged that. The two kibbutzes Larry lived on were founded by Germans and young native-born Israelis, so he hasn't transposed his own kibbutz kibbutz experiences for Bernie's.
And yet Professor Sanders is an acclaimed Yale-trained scholar of Jewish philosophy—i.e., not one to casually toss off half-remembered "facts" about an old friend's time in Israel. 

Dead end. Or at least a puzzling crossroads.

And so the quest to find Bernie Sanders' kibbutz only grows more mysterious. 

Dear fellow questers: Shall we put a wager on it? The first to find where American socialism's last great hope once learned the ropes of communal life gets an extra week off from dining-room duty...

Ready, set, go!

The Big Picture about Jerusalem

Yesterday, I took my eight-year-old son and his friend to an IMAX showing of the documentary Jerusalem. I doubt it was their favourite IMAX: Vikings or Lemurs were likely more to their taste for armoured battles and funny critters. But I left the expansive theatre unexpectedly moved by the words (narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch) and eight-storey images of the National Geographic profile (written, directed and co-produced by Canadian Daniel Ferguson) of the Old City of Jerusalem, its ancient history and contemporary life, the sacred home to three major religions and geographical nexus between the civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe. 

I’ve visited the city at least 10 times over the last 25 years, perpetually drawn through the stone gates and into the Escher-like labyrinth of the walled city. But I had never seen Jerusalem from the hovering and zooming aerial perspectives of the IMAX team, nor explored its subterranean depths—the ancient water springs that allowed its first peoples to settle on these rocky heights—or, in the unintentionally loaded phrase of one Israeli archaeologist in the film, the city’s “layers of occupation.” 

Likewise, the digital recreations of the landscape before settlement, the complete structure of the Second Temple, or the Temple Mount before the Dome of the Rock was erected allowed the architectural and religious history of the city—impossible to disentangle—to unfold in mere minutes. And the film brings to vivid life on the very big screen the pulsing music and song of the modern city, the chants of the faithful, the rituals of the holy days—Ramadan, Passover, Easter—that fill the narrow streets with celebrants who pour down from the hills and into the ancient city. Enough even to touch my own agnostic heart.

Unlike many IMAX features, Jerusalem doesn’t force too much of a saccharine narrative onto its cinematic showpieces. The threads of the three faiths—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—are joined through the lives and voices of three real teenage girls who live in or near the city. The city’s long history of conflict is acknowledged but not dwelled upon, and the three girls’ hopes for peace in their city remains shadowed by their acknowledgement that the three faiths remain isolated from each other in their geographical, spiritual and political quarters. The movie’s concluding image—a fine touch I won’t spoil—emphasizes the tenuous, ambivalent theme of reconciliation in a historically burdened and deeply divided city.

It’s a movie worth seeing, for anyone interested in the Golden City, especially as Jerusalem descends into new levels violence, with Palestinian protests over increased Jewish building in East Jerusalem, and vehicular attacks and stabbings in and around the city. Any hope for peace or even just stability in Israel and Palestine needs to address the paradox of Jerusalem and the obstacles of its various orthodoxies. Each side in the conflict must learn to transcend its narrow interests and internecine suspicions and see the big picture. It’s hard to imagine a bigger picture of Jerusalem right now than the one projected on IMAX screens around the world.

Kibbutz divorce from Labor?

For years, kibbutzes in Israel reliabley delivered the votes of their members to the left-leaning Labor Party (and its predecessors) in exchange for a guaranteed seat in the Knesset and (back in the days when Labor actually formed governments) a hand on the levers of the power. That decades-old wedding may be headed for divorce court.

News out of Israel suggests that the Kibbutz Movement is pissed off by a proposal, by new Labor head and former journalist Sheli Yachimovich, to combine the guaranteed seats for each the Kibbutz Movement and the Moshav Federation into a single seat that would represent the whole spectrum of Israel's communal settlements. That doesn't sit well with kibbutzniks, who always saw themselves as more ideologically committed as pioneers than the wishy-washy cooperative farmers on the moshavs—even if most kibbutzes have since "privatized" and operate far more like moshavs (or even gated country suburbs).

The article can't resist a poke at the puzzling distinction between a kibbutz and a moshav—a huge difference to kibbutzniks but a bewildering hair-splitting to everyone outside their fences: 

"An old joke best explains the distinction between a kibbutz and a moshav: if a kibbutznik had enough, he’ll probably move to a moshav (easier communal rules); but if a moshavnik had enough – he sure as heck is not moving to a kibbutz (even more stringent communal rules)."

Of course, the Labor Party bickering, amid polls that show right-wing Benyamin Netanyahu likely to form another coalition in the next election, only underscores the growing disfunction of the Israeli Left and the profound loss of influence (even among traditional allies) of the once powerful Kibbutz Movement.

RIP: A man of peace

It was great shock that I read, via Twitter, of the death (at age 60) of Abdessalam Najjar, one of the founders and leaders of Wahal-al-Salam/Neve Shalom—the village of Palestinians and Jews located near the Latrun Monastery. I'd interviewed him, in 2010, and found him a remarkable man: super-smart, funny, wise, an engaging storyteller, and a committed man of peace. I spoke to him for more than an hour, and knew throughout talk that I had to try to squeeze as many of his words as possible into my book (should I ever finish writing it). 

Born in Nazareth, Abdessalam—perhaps more than anyone I met on my different trips—exemplified the utopian spirit of the original kibbutzniks. He had taken the path less travelled and chosen to live, in peace if not always harmony, with the people who he'd been taught were his enemy. He had helped to create in the "Oasis of Peace" a model that proved that Arabs and Jews could sit together and talk about their different situations, their competing narratives and grievances, could live together, could go to school together. That the walls of hate (and concrete, too) that had been erected too hastily could be pulled down, brick by brick.

I included a short transcript from our interview earlier on my blog. But Abdessalam had so much more to say—to me, to the world. It is a profound loss to his homeland and for the hope for peace over violence in Israel and Palestine.

News from Oz

[Yes, it's finally time to emerge from my teaching shell and update my blog!]

A new book by Israeli author Amos Oz is cause to celebrate for any lover of world literature. But for a kibbutz-o-phile obsessed with the inside story of communal life, a fresh collection of Oz’s wry, ironically observed stories of life set on a rural commune can seem heaven-sent. And then you realize it’s still only in Hebrew. Which you don't read.

  
Oh well, at least the weekend magazine of the newspaper Ha’aretz has published a long interview with the the 73-year-old ex-kibbutznik and elder-statesman of Israeli letters about his life, his politics, his literary influences and his new anthology of stories, Between Friends, set on apocryphal Kibbutz Yikhat. (Why it is so hard to find this level of literary discussion, let alone 5,000 words devoted to a writer, in a Canadian publication is another story…)

In the article, Oz talks about the utopian dreams of the kibbutz founders:

The first ideal of the kibbutz was sharp: to transform human nature instantaneously. Effectively, they [the founders] set out as a youthful camp, in the innocent belief that they would remain 18 and 20 forever. A camp of young people who were liberated from their parents, from all the prohibitions and inhibitions of the Jewish village and Jewish religion − a camp in which everything is permitted, suffused with perpetual ecstasy, and where life is always at a peak. You work, argue, love and dance until your strength runs out. It was childish, of course. In time, it became dulled. And then what came to the fore were the constants of human nature. The vulnerability, the selfishness, the ambition, the materialism and the greed. It was a forlorn dream, imagining that it would be possible to triumph over all those forces, be reborn and create a new human being without the shortcomings of the old one

He discusses why he left Kibbutz Hulda (because of his son’s health), and how his new collection allowed him to reflect on what he left behind, good and bad:

There were a few things I didn’t like about kibbutz life. But I feel the absence of those things that I did like. And in this book I wanted to go back and look at them. Especially at the loneliness in a society where there is ‏(supposedly‏) no place for loneliness. In a few of the stories a situation is portrayed of “almost touching”: People very nearly touch, but something blocks it. Like in the painting by Michelangelo where finger almost touches finger.

I am very curious about loneliness and grace, or a moment of grace amid loneliness, because that is a description of the human condition. The stories are set on a kibbutz, but they tell about universal situations, about the most basic forces in human existence. About loneliness. About love. About loss. About death. About desire. About forgoing and about longing. In fact, about the simple and profound matters which no person is unfamiliar with.

He explains how curiosity can make us more “moral”—that, in effect, literature’s ethical function isn’t necessarily to teach us lessons but to let us see the world through another’s eyes:

I think a person who is curious is slightly more moral than one who is not curious, because sometimes he enters into the skin of another. I think a curious person is even a better lover than one who is not curious. Even my political approach to the Palestinian question, for example, sprang from curiosity. I am not a Middle East expert or a historian or a strategist. I simply asked myself, at a very young age, what it would be like if I were one of them.

He admits he still has no regrets about living (and leaving) on a kibbutz. Writers will be especially interested to hear Oz discuss how communal life offered the ideal milieu to develop his literary ear and eye:

I do not regret it for a second. I regret a few of the experiences my children underwent on kibbutz. There were some hard bits, but I left Hulda without anger. For me, the kibbutz was an ultimate university of human nature. I spent 30 years with 300 people in intimate proximity. I saw everything − them and their lives − and knew their secrets. If I’d spent 30 years in Tel Aviv, or New York, I would not have had the slightest chance of becoming so intimately acquainted with 300 souls. The price was that they knew more about me than I would have wanted them to know. But that’s a fair price. In terms of my writing, I learned much of what I know about human nature on kibbutz.

And I love his metaphor for how he has come, if not exactly to praise the kibbutz, then definitely not (like so many critics in recent years) to slay this once-legendary institution:

Unlike others, I am no longer slaughtering sacred cows. There was a time when I did. Not today. Besides which, in every cowshed there is one sick old cow left, surrounded by a herd of exultant, gung-ho slaughterers. I am almost always on the side of the cow. It’s not that I don’t know what a foul smell that cow gives off. And it’s not that I worship it. But between the cow and the slaughterers who gather around − I prefer the cow. I am talking about Zionism, the kibbutz and the labor movement.

The Great Not-so-white North

After a more or less smooth trip (as smooth as getting up at 3 am for a taxi, two planes, a train and a rental car can be), I made it to Israel and have slept off most of my jet lag. I paused briefly, to rest  and get my bearings at Nes Ammim—a "kibbutz" of German Christians in between Nahariya and Akko. I return there tomorrow for three more days to learn  about their history, their evolution, and the interfaith dialogue workshops they run, as part of their dream of healing the rifts between Germans and Israelis, Christians and Jews.

On Friday afternoon, I drove north to the Hula Valley and my old kibbutz at Shamir. I'm staying with friends and visiting old acquaintances and, later this morning, interview Uzi Tzur, the first-born ben kibbutz (i.e., child of the kibbutz), who has played a huge role in both the defense of Shamir (he shot the terrorists who tried to infiltrate the kibbutz in 1974) and the success of Shamir Optical as a multinational enterprise.

I made it in time foe one more shabbat dinner on Shamir, always one of my favourite nights (the weekend, at last!) when I was a volunteer. The dining hall is privatized (open for lunch and Tuesday and Friday dinners now), and was maybe two-thirds full—not quite the clamouring packed hall from years past, but still alive with conversations between old friends and family members. You pay for your meal now, at the cash register till, and there is no longer free (albeit cheap and watery) white wine to be poured into jugs by the litre from industrial beverage dispensers. 

I'd seen evidence of religious leanings on other kibbutzim, but Shamir seems still to be resolutely secular: no prayers, no candles, no shabbat songs, none of the Jewish rituals I'd witnessed at erev shabbat on Kibbutz Lotan in the Arava or the Ravenna Kibbutz in Seattle. If anything was sacred here, it was the family—Shamir seems in the midst of a baby boom—and Friday night, the communal dinner was honouring the extended family, related by blood or proximity, so central to kibbutz life.

Yesterday, after a restful sleep-in, my friends Kari and Danny took me for a shabbat day trip. We tried to go to the Agamon-Hula Park, but the parking lot was crammed with bird-watchers and other tourists for the annual Hula Bird Festival—the valley's blue sky is alive with migrating cranes and hawks and other Rift Valley migrants—so we headed up north, nearly to the Lebanese border, and walked the forest trails (much quieter) of Tel Dan instead. We had lunch beside one of the streams that feeds the Jordan River. 

The Hula remains as beautiful as I remember, this crook of farm fields and marsh land, peppered with kibbutzes and moshavs, in between the Golan Heights and the Napthali Mountains. It has been a pleasant reminder of my time here 22 years ago, during the same autumn season when I first arrived as a volunteer, the days still sunny and yet the nights cooling quickly, the rainy season and the cold winds off the snowy top of Mt. Hermon on the horizon. Harvest over, a new year marking off its days. 

Nobody seems optimistic about the immediate future of Israel, with the looming showdown with Iran and the uncertain changes in neighbouring countries, with a right-wing government firmly entrenched in power and completely at odds with the traditional values of the kibbutz. But it's hard not to find a certain peace, here in the hills of northern Galilee, amid the tree-shaded lanes and bird-song and cries of children in the playground, here on Kibbutz Shamir.

On the Road Again

I'm excited (and nervous) to be in transit again, for a two-week research trip in Israel. I'm hoping that my interviews there will cap off all the material I need to complete my book. (Actually, what I need is the discipline—and perhaps a manacle around my ankle—to simply buckle down and finish a first draft.)

The next 14 days promise to be a flurry of travel and meetings and interviews and observations. Some highlights from my itinerary:

• Nes Ammim: A German-run interfaith "kibbutz" that coordinates dialogue workshops and peace-building initiatives. I'm hoping to drop in on a session with Arab and Jewish theatre students from Haifa.
• Kishorit: a former kibbutz that has been transformed into a rehabilitation centre and home for adults with physical and mental disabilities, where they can find meaningful work (including producing a TV show) and community.
• Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company: I had brief visit to the studios and rehearsal spaces on Kibbutz Ga'aton 2.5 years ago, but on this visit I will spend time talking to artistic director Rami Be'er and then seeing this internationally renowned troupe perform in Tel Aviv.
• Ran Tal, the director of the "collage" documentary" Children of the Sun, which weds archival footage of kibbutz children, from the 1930s onwards, with interviews with early kibbutzniks (including Tal's mother) about the positives and negatives of growing up (and raising their own children) in these isolated and idealistic communal outposts.
• System Ali, a hip-hop collective, with members who are Arab and Jewish, native-born Israelis and Russian immigrants, that sprung from the Sadaka Reut commune that I visited in the summer of 2010.
• Eliaz Cohen, a poet from Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, one of the most historic settlements, who writes verse informed by his deep spiritual roots and his communal home.
• And more...

First, though, I've got a 10.5-hour flight to Tel Aviv (with an exit-row seat!), negotiate the 20 Questions of Israeli Customs, grab an hour-and-a-half train ride to Nahariya, rent a car there, and make the short drive (thankfully) to Nes Ammim. The next morning I hit the ground running with interviews and then a drive up north to Kibbutz Shamir. No time for jet lag.

Kibbutzing Your 'Hood

I've been a lazy blogger of late, but not because I've been ignoring my kibbutz project. Anything but. The last month or so has been a hectic swirl of activity. I've been pounding my keyboard to finish a draft of the book by the end of the year. (Increasingly unlikely, although I'm pushing 140,000 words now.) I've been preparing for another research trip to Israel, which I'm very excited about. (I leave in less than a week; details to come.) And I've been writing and rewriting and practising a talk, linked to my research, for the upcoming TEDxVictoria conference this Saturday, November 19.

The 15-minute talk is called "Kibbutzing Your 'Hood". Without giving too much away, I will try to distill the wisdom of kibbutz design—the "architecture of hope" upon which these communities were built—and apply it to our own cities and neighbourhoods in North America. Some of the ideas I hope to bring together and share: the link between kibitzing and kibbutzing; the secret family history that joins Israel's famous socialist communes and the suburbs of North America; the unexpected social effects of unfenced open spaces; the importance of "third places"; how to calculate your neighbourhood's "K.Q."; and how the tools of micro-media can help communities turn positive gossip into enduring myths that will sustain them into the future. 


Or something like that.


That's the teaser. Come on down (I think tickets are still available), if you live in Victoria, to what should be a fascinating roster of speakers and performers and discussions. I'm thrilled to be part of this event—and to sneak a little kibbutz philosophy into the audience's imagination.


As part of the TEDx mandate, online videos of each talk will be posted. I'll add a link to my session as soon as it's up.

Book: Mourning a Father Lost, by Avraham Balaban

The kibbutz might have remained just a footnote in the history of Israel or 20th-century socialism if it weren’t for one major twist: the decision to raise the “children of the dream” communally, separated from their parents except for evening visits, eating and sleeping and learning together, amongst peers of the same age, in “children’s societies” that were designed as a microcosm of the larger kibbutz.

Communal child-raising was something of an accident in the early kibbutz, an ideological improvisation borne out of necessity—the need to free mothers to keep working—rather than ingrained philosophy. It quickly became part of the entrenched belief of the kibbutz leaders’ socialist vision, however: an opportunity to deal with the “problem of the family”; to make women equal to men in the field of work; and to cultivate in the minds of the young a belief that the collective, rather than the individual or the family unit, always came first.

The disappearance of this communal child-rearing began in the late 60s and accelerated through the 70s and 80s, until the last kibbutz (Bar’am) allowed its children to sleep in their parents’ apartments during the First Gulf War (in part, because of the threat from Saddam Hussein’s Scuds). For traditionalists, the decision to turn the children’s societies into mere daycares (highly respected ones, even today) was the beginning of the end of the kibbutz movement—a succumbing to the temptations of individualism and “familism”. For critics of the system, the return to the family (democratically decided by each kibbutz) only proved that socialist ideology can’t trump human nature, that it might take a village to raise a child, but that doesn’t mean the child should be removed from his or her parents’ care.

Of course, in its first flourishing, this experiment in communal child development drew, like moths to the flame, curious sociologists and psychologists from around the world to study different kibbutz communities and the generations being raised in this manner. Most famous amongst them was Bruno Bettelheim, author of the 1969 study Children of the Dream (based on his observations at Kibbutz Yohanam). “I found their system not entirely successful,” he concluded, “but certainly not a failure.” Other observers weren’t so kind, and claimed that communal living creating a generation with a “Metapelet Complex”—named after the all-powerful “nanny” or care provider who took on the role of the parents—in which kibbutz-raised adults came to expect that the kibbutz, or the movement, or society in general would look after them. Skeptics of this theory pointed out that, per capita, the kibbutz system produced an inordinate number of independent-minded high-achievers: politicians and artists, military commanders and academics. 

From an anecdotal perspective, perhaps the most damning indictment of communal childhood on the kibbutz comes from Avraham Balaban’s memoir, first published in 2000 (curiously, by the leading kibbutz movement) and then translated into English in 2004, titled Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered. Its original Hebrew title was simply Shivah, after the week-long Jewish rite of mourning, and the series of remembrances is ingeniously structured around the seven days that Balaban (now a poet and professor of Hebrew literature at the University of Florida) spends on his former kibbutz (Hulda, where author Amos Oz also once lived), with his mother, his siblings and various visitors after the death of his father. The shivah becomes a metaphor through which he mourns not just his father (with whom he had a distant relationship), but his own childhood (and especially the gap put between him and his mother) lost to the collective ideology imposed on him and his peers by the founding generation. It’s a shivah, as well, for the kibbutz movement, which he can see is in decline—although he feels little sorrow at its fading.

The book is also an engrossing work of literature, creative nonfiction in the finest sense, and a reflection on the nature of memory and the collective narratives that shape our lives. “What does memory remember?” he writes. “The friction of body against body, of flesh against the door, a crushed entry into words.” His return to his abandoned home triggers mental journeys back into the past, moments and episodes from his childhood (the teasing of one of his peers, the loneliness of his own teen years), long-suppressed fears (the jackals howling outside the fence, a recurring nightmare of the kibbutz overrun by Arab attackers), and percolating anger and resentment at being subjected to this grand experiment in re-education, of being a ”child of a dream, child of a laboratory”.

His old kindergarten teacher visits, to extend her condolences, as do friends from his kibbutz days. Their conversations, often without quotation marks, bleed into Balaban’s own narrative voice (much as Amos Os does in his own memoir of growing up), identities blur in the poetry of his prose, as if he were channelling the spirit of these other characters, rather than transcribing their words. Batsheva, a classmate, says at one point—in a damning echo of the author’s own opinions about kibbutz life:  “What amazes me, when I think about our childhood, is the members’ conviction that we were a clean slate on which they could write whatever they saw fit. So they wrote on us: be brave and not afraid of the dark and the jackals, and be the very opposite of everything we hated about our parents and ourselves. We won’t actually be your parents, but please love us as a child loves his parents. And above all, be loyal to the kibbutz and the movement. And they were naive enough, or stupid enough, to believe that this is what would happen.”

Balaban doesn’t pull any punches in his memoir—about his disappointments with his father, or his upbringing, or even with himself. “The children are sheltered by the finest theories, surrounded by nurses and educators, but the nurses soon discover that a mother’s love no more resembles her feeling for her friend’s children than blood resembles sweat. The children develop survival strategies, like street kids, toughening their skin to the best of their abilities. When they grow up they will evince the selfishness of people who never got enough protection and security. The motto of the kibbutz movement—’What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine’—likewise contributed to this: in time, all that remains of it is the habit, and later the wish, that what is yours is mine. Like children who grow up too soon, they would age in time but never reach maturity” (8-9).

He aims his sharpest barbs at the leaders of the movement that tried to transform the first generation of kibbutz-born children through their collective theories: “The movement’s gurus also did the damage. The old family is obsolete, the educationalists proclaimed. We shall create a new family, the education committee told her [my mother]. Away from mother’s apron strings we shall bring up natural, healthy children, echoed the general meeting. And she believed everything she was told, as a Hassid believes his rabbi” (11). A later discovery of a memo, in which the lead educator on Kibbutz Hulda makes the case for reducing the time allotted for kids to visit parents down to one hour (it’s for both their good!), sends Balaban into a froth of disgust. “‘A child cannot long for what it never had, it cannot miss what it has never known,’ the lecturers at the ideological seminars and the training courses for children’s nurses persuaded one another” (13).

His rebuke of his dead father is especially blunt: “That enthusiasm had led him to believe that he was in the social vanguard, when in fact he was a small component in a doomed experiment. He imagined that he was in the storm, when in fact he was a leaf that it blew away. Rest in peace, you hard, selfish, and naive man.” And yet, at the book’s end, the author breaks down emotionally because he has missed the chance to reconcile himself with, and properly mourn, this absent parent.

A visit to the kibbutz, 10 years before the shivah, to give a lecture to its aging members, prompts more general reflections about the institution’s failure to create the New Man, the homo kibbutznik, the socialist subspecies of natural altruism: “They were humanity’s finest dream in this century, the most consistent attempt to forget humanity’s inglorious origins. Every morning for decades they rose early to adapt themselves to the dream that had brought them here. And again I saw that forty, fifty years in one house did not create a wonderful comradeship, but hostile silent elbows. This way of life, designed for saints and angels, detracted from their humanity … I sat with them with an aching heart: how they were misled, misguided from the outset.” Tough words.

As a parent, there have been times of sleepless and harried frustration when I might have seen the wisdom of the collective project—how a “children’s society” of nightly babysitting might free a young couple to fulfill more fully their work lives and social lives and community lives and creative lives. (And, yes, even their sex lives.) But I also read several chapters of this tough yet sensitive book, this hauntingly candid memoir, while holding my sleeping three-year-old daughter in the crook of my arm. I couldn’t imagine giving up those precious moments of intimacy with my two children, waking up in the middle of the night to find that they had climbed into our bed, being greeted by their warm bodies and laughter (and even tears) every morning—and certainly not giving up those moments for some abstract ideology imposed by my peers. I can understand how Balaban must feel like something vital had been stolen from him by the kibbutz.

“Between us and the kibbutz, they chose the kibbutz,”he writes of his parents’ generation. “I cried for my nurse, and other children cried for my mother, who was their nurse.” In his loneliness, the teenaged Balaban finds himself drawn to literature—to the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, to the philosophies of Freud and Schopenhauer, to the latter’s belief that “to be happy one must be entirely free, self-sufficient.”

During the shivah, he tells his sister: “No one got enough love in the children’s house.” For that reason alone, Balaban refuses to forget, or forgive, the theft of his family life as a boy, stolen and replaced by the dream of brave new children’s society that, its leaders hoped, would one day transform the world. But never did.

Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered, by Avraham Balaban. Translated by Yael Lotan. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2004.

Growing Up Canuck: or Bibi and the Bieb

“How many Canadians does it take to change a light-bulb?” I was once asked by a German volunteer, while living on the kibbutz.

I shrugged my ignorance.

“Two,” he explained. “One to screw in the light-bulb, and the other to point and say, ‘Hey, did you know he’s a Canadian?’”

Even today, 22 years later, I cringe at the memory. The German jokester had hit the mark: Canadians pride ourselves on a lack of pride, a sense of humility in contrast to the chest-beating patriotism of our noisy neighbours to the south. But it’s a thin facade, a defense mechanism that hides a more general anxiety about who we really are as a people, as a country. As the recent Winter Olympics proved, or the maple-leaf stitched into backpack of nearly every young Canuck abroad, we still cling to the fragments of a evanescent national identity.

And as my German friend knew, that nervous tic often manifests itself, when amongst foreign travellers, in the odd parlour game known as “Did You Know They’re Canadian?” On the kibbutz, my next-door neighbour—one of several other token Canucks—played it often. When the subject of our country came up, he would cite the North of 49 heritage of various B-list North American celebrities and pop stars (this was the pre-Celine-Dion era) that his European interlocutors only had a vague recollection of: “Did you know that William Shatner is Canadian? And Michael J. Fox, too. And Bryan Adams and Wayne Gretzky.”

Such trivia rarely impressed the citizens of more established nations, cultures that had bestowed upon the world the likes of Shakespeare and Van Gogh, Beethoven and Chopin, Flaubert and Michaelangelo. When I first met Kurt, a longtime volunteer and a social worker from Vienna, I promptly exposed my superficial knowledge of his country: “Austria—just like Arnold Schwartzenegger!” His smile dropped. “He’s not Austrian,” came the reply. “He’s American.” He clearly didn’t indulge in the “Did You Know They’re Austrian” version of the game.

That joke came back to me again this week in the wake of Israel’s “Bieber-Gate”. The news: Justin Bieber, now the world’s most-famous Canadian (whether anyone over the age of 16 is willing to admit it), has been visiting Israel for a concert. The event, in itself, is a point of controversy. Every major artist booked to perform in Israel gets targeted by the Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which encourages performers not to play, as a protest of the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some like Elvis Costello back out; some, like his Canadian wife Diana Krall, still come. And others, like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, are forced into a compromise—in his case, playing on the “neutral grounds” of Neve-Shalom and later touring (and condemning) the “separation fence” constructed between Israel proper and the West Bank.

Needless to say, bubble-gum pop Christian teeny-bop crooner (and recent memoirist) J-Bieb isn’t the most political musician out there. But he still got drawn into the quagmire of Mid-East debate when he was invited to meet with Israeli P.M. Benyamin Netanyahu (known in Israel as "Bibi"), and then (according to some reports) balked when the P.M.’s office arranged for young Justin to meet with Israeli kids who lived in towns under assault by rockets and mortars  from Gaza. Amid the P.R. fallout, various versions of events emerged: Bieber (or more likely his many handlers) didn’t want his tour politicized; the meeting was never a done deal; he was just over-extended from paparazzi harassment; he had already invited kids from rocket-targeted Sderot to his show; etc..

Amid the recent violence and unrest in Israel, Bieber-Gate was a relatively brief and harmless media tempest. Nobody has been injured, not even by the ravenous hordes of young Bieb groupies trailing his tour as though he were the Messiah. But it was a reminder that, in Israel, everything is political. 

And as several online commenters pointed out, amid the typical tit-for-tat flame wars about the political stalemate in Israel/Palestine: “Did you know Justin Bieber is Canadian?”

That’s a light-bulb I’d prefer we’d keep dimmed.