English Audio Request

Years later it also came out that a girl a few years ahead of me had been molested repeatedly by one of the members, the father of another girl. The community had no consciousness of evil back then, at least not internally. Evil was capitalism, the corrupt outside world, and the Jordanian soldiers across the border two miles to the east. No one envisioned a menace within. Trust was the system's currency. Kibbutz buildings had no locks on the doors. If anyone suspected something, they probably chose to look away. When a dream is prized, we often look away from any reality that threatens to undermine it.
There was no particular motivation for schooling because the kibbutz guaranteed each member a job, housing, food. In the early days, the kibbutz school system shunned tests and grades altogether. There was suspicion in the kibbutz about intellectuals, and about separating people by degrees of excellence. When I decided to quit high school, my parents hardly noticed.
For today's parents, such a hands-off approach must seem callous. But my parents, like many Jews of their generation, came to the task of making a family hobbled in ways quite unfathomable today. My mother was born in Belgrade in 1937. Sometime in 1941, with the German assault on Belgrade intensifying, her family escaped to a small village in the hills, where they found shelter with a Gentile business acquaintance of her father. One day word got around that the Nazis were coming. My mother later recalled that her mother brushed her hair before her father took her aside and spoke to her; what he said she could not recall. There was a stirring in the air of a kind she could not comprehend. Someone took her to another house and hid her under a bed. When she returned, her parents and baby sister were gone. She was baptised and her name was changed. She was told never to mention her parents' names again. She was five years old. After the war she was discovered and flown to Israel by a Zionist organisation. She had nothing and nobody. The kibbutz took her in.
My father's family crossed the border from Poland to Russia on foot just ahead of the Nazi advance on Poland. My father and his mother survived six years in a Siberian refugee camp until his father returned from the war. The family made its way to Israel, where my grandparents, poor and displaced, decided to send my father to the kibbutz because they had no money to feed him.
My parents met at the kibbutz when they were 19; my father shot some pigeons and made my mother a meal. That was his opening ploy. Naturally she fell for it. They got married at 21. I was born a year later. Like many of their generation, my parents did not speak about their past, in part because it was unspeakable. They were not much for talking in general; they were for surviving. The kibbutz offered stability, identity, community, a world view – all the things they had lost.