Personal memoir of kibbutz childhood with no actionable allegations

aroma always wafting from the stone ovens in the bakery at the heart of the kibbutz, where we could see the bare-chested young men producing loaf after loaf of bread, not just for Mishmar Hasharon but villages and towns for miles around us. Until our teenage years, we lived in narrow, oblong homes, four of us to a room, unfurnished except for our beds, under which we placed our pair of shoes or sandals. At one end of the corridor was a set of shelves where we collected a clean set of underwear, pants and socks each week. At the other end were the toilets — at that point, the only indoor toilets on the kibbutz, with real toilet- seats, rather than just holes in the ground. All of us showered together until the age of twelve. I can’t think of a single one of us who went on to marry someone from our own age-group in the kibbutz. It would have seemed almost incestuous. Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim have long since abandoned the practice of collective child-rearing. Some in my generation look back on the way we were raised not only with regret, but pain: a sense of parental absence, abandonment or neglect. My own memories, and those of most of the children I grew up with, are more positive. The irony is that we probably spent more waking time with our parents than town or city children whose mothers and fathers worked nine-to-five jobs. The difference came at bedtime, or during the night. If you woke up unsettled, or ill, the only immediate prospect of comfort was from the metapeled, or another of the kibbutz grown-ups who might be on overnight duty. Still, my childhood memories are overwhelmingly of feeling happy, safe, protected. I do remember waking up once, late on a stormy winter night when I was nine, in the grips of a terrible fever. I’d begun to hallucinate. I got to my feet and, without the thought of looking anywhere else for help, made my wobbly way through the rain to my parents’ room and fell into their bed. They hugged me. They dabbed my forehead with water. The next morning, my father wrapped me in a blanket and took me back to the children’s home. To the extent that I was aware my childhood was different, I was given to understand it was special, that we were the beating heart of a Jewish state about to be born. I once asked my mother why other children got to live in their own apartments in places like Tel Aviv. “They are ironim,” she said. City-dwellers. Her tone made it clear they were to be viewed as a slightly lesser species. 18 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011489