Pitfalls for pioneering families in the Jewish utopia
Strangers With the Same Dream
Tinder Press, £18.99
Reviewed by Jennifer Lipman
SURPRISINGLY, PERHAPS, the kibbutz has rarely been mined for literary purposes, at least not outside of Israel. Other than Lynne Reid Banks, in One More River, I’m struggling to think of a prominent western novelist who has made profitable fictional use of this ripest of settings.
In Strangers with the Same Dream, Alison Pick’s second novel (her Man Booker-longlisted debut, Far to Go, told of a Jewish family during the Holocaust), she looks at the earliest years of kibbutz life and does so with great skill. The novel follows three individu- als — Ida, just off the boat from the Pale; selfish, ideological leader David, and his long-suffering wife Hannah, who is nursing a long-dormant heartbreak — with the same story told and retold from each of the trio’s perspectives.
An irresponsible moment for Ida involving David and Hannah’s young daughter becomes the catalyst for several significant developments, the poignancy of which becomes clear as the story nears its conclusion. Meanwhile, a ghostly narrator hovers above, a harbinger of impending catastrophe.
Pick smashes any romantic notion that the kibbutz movement was a utopian success story, highlighting instead the impact on relationships, the discord that existed from the outset, and the sheer physical and mental hardships of making the land bloom. David, in particular, is an often repellent, if riveting, character, a crusader who repeatedly fails to live up to the high standards he espouses. But Pick, to her credit does not try to pack in too much — this is no comprehensive history of the Israeli-Palestinian question — and she quite reasonably assumes that readers will be familiar with the bare bones of the movement and the reasons for aliyah in those pioneering days. Unlike many novels that touch on this region, Strangers allows its characters to play
Alison Pick: great skill their parts unencumbered by superfluous description.
Yet Pick does not ignore bigger issues; namely that the kibbutzim were not built on uninhabited land. Running through is a plot-line involving the settlers’ Arab neighbours, who have been betrayed by their own landowners and who some chalutzim regard as mere complications. Pick illustrates the claim each group has on the land and demonstrates, in characters’ different friendships and confrontations, why things in this area have never come even close to being black-and-white.
I did wish the novel could have contained a fourth perspective; that of Fatimah, an Arab woman befriended by Ida. Likewise, while her protagonists are richly drawn once in their homeland, their back-stories are sketchy. I wanted more about the lives they left behind.
In telling the story from multiple standpoints, Alison Pick underlines that there is no singular truth, neither about the kibbutz movement, nor about anything relating to Israel. Her book is in a sense an appeal for empathy — as well as a tremendously moving, thought-provoking read.
Pick smashes romantic, utopian notions
Jennifer Lipman is a freelance journalist