Memoir of Yemeni laborers in early Israeli kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon

eyes over all the boys in their late teens and early 20s. I was sure that after something like this there had to be some sign of who had done it. But they looked the same as before, eating and talking as if nothing had happened. The Yemenis also needed jobs. This led to a challenge for Mishmar Hasharon. The core of the kibbutz ethos was that we would live from our own labor. Yet Ben-Gurion insisted we and other kibbutzim provide work for the Yemenis and other new arrivals from the Arab states. We began hiring Yemeni workers when I was about ten, the age when we kids started working for an hour or so each day in the fields. We worked alongside several dozen Yemeni women who lived a few miles north in a maabarah, a transit settlement which later evolved into a village called Elyakhin. Each morning, the Yemenis arrived in a bus, and they left at the end of their day’s work. I don’t know whether I expected to feel a Gordonian sense of joy at the redemptive value of physical labor when I began working in the fields. Our first assignment was to plant long rows of flower bulbs — gladioli — spaced at intervals of four inches or so. But as I joined the other children and the Yemeni women, what I felt was more mundane. Heat. Fatigue. Boredom. To make the time pass, I thought of it as a competition. Each of us began together, planting the bulbs in furrows stretching to the end of the field. The point was obviously to do it right. But I found it interesting to see who finished first, and how much longer it took the rest of us. The same worker always led the way. She was a Yemeni in her early thirties. Her name was Baddura. Short and stocky, with dark curly hair, she was nearly always smiling, whether we were planting bulbs, sowing seeds or picking oranges and grapefruit and lemons, potatoes or peppers and tomatoes. When I remarked to her how much better and faster she was than the rest of us, she laughed. Still years away from growing into my adult body, I looked more like a eight- or a nine-year-old. She took me under her wing. The next day, we were picking tomatoes. “Do the row next to mine,” she said. Watching the almost balletic grace with which she moved made it easier. I decided it was like mastering a new piece on the piano. The secret was to achieve a kind of unthinking fluidity, by focusing on the passage one or two ahead of the one you were playing. Physically, Baddura was far stronger than me. Before long, however, I was finishing my sowing or reaping a good ten yards ahead of the other kids, and not too far behind her. Though the Yemenis worked in our fields, they were not members of the kibbutz. They were paid a day-rate. Though they were by far the most 32 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011503