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My father, large and hard-working, took wholeheartedly to the life of a farmer. My first words as a child were "Daddy" and "work". My mother, however, searching and restless, chafed against the kibbutz system for years. She wanted independence, privacy. She yearned for the world. "I feel my dead parents hovering over me," she told me years later. "They say: Live! Live!" But she could not persuade my father to leave the kibbutz and she was not about to break up her family, her only anchor in the world. So she bided her time. Only years later, kids grown up, did she give my father an ultimatum. They left for the city in 1987.
By then, all three of their children had also left the kibbutz, as well as many of their friends. The visionary movement was cracking. The predictions upon which the kibbutz was based have proven faulty. The young Marxists believed that their ideas would sweep Israel and the west. In addition, the pioneers believed, naively, that their group would be able to sustain a highly principled life, resisting outside influences and the internal ills that have bedevilled human societies since the dawn of time: greed, envy, selfishness, boredom and the inevitable fraying over time of every tightly wound construction, be it a human or a social body.
They failed to anticipate their revolution's "second day" – in which the self-defining project of their youthful rebellion would become a mundane, constricting "home town" to their children, propelling the children to seek their own identities and adventures elsewhere. They also failed to anticipate the messiness of sexual desire, and how it can, in a closed, family-like system, produce uniquely poisonous variants of hurt and betrayal.
The kibbutz labour system was also flawed. When everyone is assured equal rewards regardless of individual contribution and effort, why stretch yourself? Moreover, to prevent status differences among members, the kibbutzim shunned specialisation. Leadership jobs were assigned to members on a rotating basis, often disregarding talent, training and inclination. The resulting endemic inefficiency in time led the movement into dire financial straits.