Growing Up Below Sea Level - A Kibbutz Childhood

An informative memoir of kibbutz life that reveal a piece of Israel's early story that should not be forgotten.

List of contents

Preface
Prologue: From Prague to Palestine: How My Parents Came to Israel
Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood
1. Coveting
2. Rice Pudding
3. Clean Sheets
4. Kindergarten Antics
5. Sugar Cubes
6. The Red Shoes
7. Aleph Bet
8. Tiny Feet
9. The Hungarians
10. From Now On, Call Me Danny
11. Her Mother
12. Night Walk
13. Snakes and Kisses
14. Shabbat and Sacrilege
15. Eighth Grade Baby
16. Jerusalem
17. America!
18. Going Home
19. What God Wants You to Do
20. Under the Bed, Below Sea Level
21. A Real Character
22. Never Turn Around
23. Desert Treasures
24. Turning Forward, Turning Back
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

About the author

Rachel Biale grew up on Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel. She earned an M.A. in Jewish history at UCLA and an M.S.W. at Yeshiva University. She lives in Berkley, California, where she is a practicing psychotherapist. She is the author of Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance Today

Summary

An informative memoir of kibbutz life that reveal a piece of Israel's early story that should not be forgotten.

Foreword

Preface

The summer following third grade, our class reached the coveted status of “real workers.” We were assigned to work in different branches of the kibbutz, not just in the Children’s Farm, where we’d worked every weekday afternoon since first grade. I got one of the most prized spots: working with the dairy cows. Mostly I shadowed the grownups spreading hay in the feed trough, shoveling cow patties, and washing udders with a high-pressure hose before the cows were harnessed to the milking machines. But one day something changed. Perhaps someone didn’t show up for the afternoon shift, or the raftan (cowshed worker) decided I was responsible beyond my years. Whatever it was, he told me to go out in the afternoon and bring the cows from the grazing pasture back to the milking parlor.
I walked out to the clover field, armed with instructions on how to open and close gates in the proper order and a long stick. I was assured the cows would, almost on the their own, navigate the road home.
“Moo,” the cow at the front of the herd bellowed.
“Nu!” I yelled right back, “yallah, go home!”
I added a nudge, poking her behind lightly with my stick. She started trudging forward. I led the way.
Part of me can still feel the glee as I marched at the head of the herd, opening one gate, then running to the back to close the previous one after the last cow had passed it, then to the front again. Another part easily conjures up the knots in my stomach: barely over four feet high and sixty pounds, I was followed by over a hundred cows, each nearly twice my height and weighing around 1,500 lbs.
I delivered them to the cowshed safely; not one had strayed off course. Now expansive pride replaced the cramps of anxiety. Soon fatigue spread through every layer of tissue. It felt wonderful – a tiredness of great accomplishment and of “real work.” In my heart I still cherish that feeling today, but my head shakes, as if of its own accord: What were they thinking?
The same split animates my memories of how, as very young children, we took care of each other on our own in the children’s house with no adults in sight. But, as a mother and recent grandmother, I am flabbergasted. How could our parents leave us unsupervised (at age four!) from 8 pm to 10 pm every evening and from 4 am to 6 am every dawn? How did they tolerate knowing so little about what actually went on in our lives in the children’s house? How did young mothers agree to part from their newborns the day they came home from the hospital?
Some kind of enchantment of utopian dreams and beliefs leavened with subtle and not-so-subtle communal ideological coercion, made it possible for our parents to raise us this way. That very mix, plus our own magical thinking in early childhood, made it joyous and rousing, at least for most of us.
Boosting our own ideological fervor was the admiring gaze of a whole country. Up until the late sixties, Israel held the kibbutz movement as the pinnacle of its achievements. We were the best of the best, in our own eyes and in our countrymen’s. We may have been geographically 238 meters below sea level, but in spirit and values we believed we were at the mountaintop. We, kibbutzniks, had not just seen, but we had built and inhabited, the Promised Land.
This book is about my childhood on a kibbutz in the 1950s and 60s and about my parents’ ideals that brought them there in the 1940s. It begins with their perilous journey from Europe to pre-state Israel. After escaping from Nazi-occupied Prague, arriving at the shores of Palestine as illegal immigrants, exile and imprisonment in Mauritius (a remote island in the Indian Ocean), they finally reunited in 1946 and joined Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin.
Once you learn how my parents built their home in of the land of their dreams, you can better appreciate my stories. They start with early childhood, grow into my school age and teen years and eventually lead to when, as a young adult, I left this warm nest. The stories are all based on real events. Details and conversations are mostly my creations, some recounted with embellishments, others imagined. All the “big facts” are accurate. All the small details are authentic to the time and my subjective experiences, not necessarily true-to-life, but hopefully will convey the truths of my life.

Product details

• Authors: Rachel Biale, Biale Rachel
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: ages 16 to 90
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.04.2020
• EAN: 9781942134633
• ISBN: 978-1-942134-63-3
• No. of pages: 256
• Illustrations: 24 photographs
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Palästina, Israel, Geschichte des Nahen und Mittleren Ostens, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical, Biografien: historisch, politisch, militärisch, HISTORY / Holocaust, Biography / Autobiography, HISTORY / Middle East / Israel & Palestine