Collective memory
Reflecting on the death and life of the Kibbutz Alison Pick
Ahistorical novelist is always on the hunt for the best time and place to set a book. When I sat down to write Strangers With the Same Dream, I wanted a setting that was dramatic, one that would bring out both the best and the worst in my characters. I wanted a time and place rife with tension that would foreshadow a conflict still tearing the world apart today. What could be better, from a novelist’s perspective, than Palestine in the 1920s?
I decided to set the book on an early kibbutz. Kibbutzim, a kind of Zionist intentional community, were a response to the anti-Semitism and pogroms that were claiming Russia and much of Eastern Europe, and a promise to future generations that they would have a place where they could live free from persecution. These agriculturally based communities relied on shared labour, and wanted to build a new kind of Jew through working the earth of their historical homeland. “Salvation is to be found in wholesome work in a beloved land,” said Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. “Work will provide our people with the bread of tomorrow, and moreover, with the honour of tomorrow, and the freedom of tomorrow.”
Freedom, for the Zionists, was of a very different kind than our modern version of ‘every man for himself.’ The kibbutz movement was built from the ashes of the Russian Revolution, and had a radical socialism at its heart, a belief in the equal potential of all people. Consensus was required for every decision; there were debates that lasted for hours on every topic from which crops to plant to whether lactating mothers should nurse their own children. When a decision was finally reached, the pioneers linked arms and danced the hora deep into the night. When the sun rose they returned to the fields, to the endless hours of backbreaking labour in support of their dream.
The kibbutz in Strangers With the Same Dream is fictional, but is based loosely on Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley, established by Russian Jews of the Third Aliyah. The novel’s characters arrive at the beginning, when the dream is fresh; the near starvation they experience in the novel is true to history, as is the dramatic flavour of all the events that take place in the book. There were betrayals both small and large; there were suicides. There were rumours of murder. When the volatile early years had passed, the kibbutz thrived, increasing rapidly in both population and influence. In 1921, it was a group of about 40 people; by the late 1940s, the kibbutz had a population of over 1000. But in the early 1950s, around the time of Stalin’s death, debate and difficulty returned— an ideological difference between the socialists and the communists that fractured the kibbutz ( and several others) in two. Today, Ein Harod ( Ihud) and Ein Harod ( Meuhad) may appear as one large community to an outsider, but one is now privatized and the distinction is very apparent to anyone who lives there.
A historical novelist should be obsessed with getting history right, and so I travelled to Israel three times when I was writing. I could not go back in time, of course, but I wanted to see the place where my characters lived and breathed, to soak up the landscape and talk to the descendants of the original pioneers. The archive where I did my research was housed in a dilapidated stone building, with handwritten records and other primary sources stored in old cardboard boxes. The entire history of the kibbutz could, at any moment, go up in flames.
The archivist herself, a wonderfully kind and grandmotherly woman, was eager to share her stories with me, as was my translator, whose mother-in-law had been an early pioneer. They told me about the harshness of the land, about malaria and ringworm and starvation. They introduced me to a man who had been one of the actual founders of the kibbutz (and who passed away between my second and third visits to the country). They told me about the early contact with the Palestinian landowners, fraught interactions that foreshadowed the Middle East conflict today.
As I was driven around the kibbutz – in a golf cart, no less – I couldn’t help but evaluate the kibbutz today through my characters’ eyes. On the surface, the dream has not fared well. Gone are the days of shared meals in the communal dining hall; there were maybe 20 people at the lunch I attended, many of them not members but visitors like me. Most of the kibbutzim are now privatized, which would have had the founders rolling over in their graves. There has been emotional fallout over the years too, as the children and grandchildren of these ideologues report what it was like to be raised in this giant social experiment. Recent memoirs have been published by the generation who grew up in the communal Baby Houses, exposing the long- term implications of having been separated from their biological parents. There exists in Israel today a whole branch of therapy based on the healing of these broken attachments.
But while many of my characters’ dreams were in tatters, in my travels to several kibbutzim, I found something still very much alive. The communal dining hall might be underused, but the communal laundry still exists. Children’s bicycles lay unlocked on the lawns and people took shifts in communal vegetable gardens. When the archivist took me to a neighbouring kibbutz, we travelled in one of several cars shared by all members. The small grocery store was closed on Shabbat for rest and family time.
The characters in Strangers With the Same Dream, and the historical people they are based on, hoped to create a new paradigm for living that would spread throughout all of Israel. By this criterion, they didn’t succeed. But the kibbutz today still offers a contrast to the stark individualism of North America. There is still a feeling in the air, the communal spirit of the past drifting over the hills and fields and informing the way the children of today interact. It is not the dream the original kibbutzniks hoped for, but in this day and age, it is something.