Published: 28 December 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
We ditch the newspaper for a volume of collected anecdotes and vignettes from the early days of Mashabei Sade. One story tells how in the 1950s the young women washed themselves with bore water from the wells, but the water’s salinity caused their hair to stiffen upright as if they’d been electrocuted. Although this was several decades before the punk era, the women made the best of things and embraced their hairstyles as a new fashion.
Nava chuckles, brushing her hand over her own hair, short and spiky in the way of many middle-aged women who have reinvented themselves. She moved her family to the kibbutz from Tel Aviv in 2003, wanting more from life than just work, home, repeat. She and her husband have since separated, but he still lives on the kibbutz and they remain friends.
When she first arrived, Mashabei Sade adhered without deviation to the communal model. Many things shocked her. For instance— the deal with dining room food, which remained free no matter how much people loaded onto their trays. She began noticing people were also taking home doggy bags. She started doing the same, figuring when in Rome.
“So almost every day after lunch I brought home some schnitzel, thinking ‘oh, I might as well take it— for later,’” she tells me.
“And then one day, I open my freezer”— in a dramatic recreation, she rushes to her freezer, flinging open the door— “and I see 10 packets of schnitzel!”
That’s what happens when a communal dining room functions as an all-you-can-eat buffet, Nava explains. When commodities are stripped of value, waste is a certainty.
In the intervening years Mashabei Sade followed the lead of other kibbutzim and made people pay for food— hence the tallying of cheese slices in the dining room— the kibbutz cars, and laundry services.
“But,” Nava raises her finger with a gesture of authority, “we still haven’t privatised salaries and that’s the biggest problem.”
She’s talking about wage equality: the doctor getting the same monthly allowance as the kitchen hand. What really grates on her is that the families who contribute disproportionately to kibbutz profits get the same salary as the slackers, the people whose ingenuity is restricted to devising excuses for why they cannot work.
“You know,” Nava arches an eyebrow, “one day it’s their head, next day it’s their back.”
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="25141"]
So I guess what really grates on Nava is.. well, socialism.
She wants a communal life where families celebrate festivals together. She clings to some notion of the dining room as the beating heart of the kibbutz. And she’s wary of crash-and-burn reforms that in other some other kibbutzim left an insufficient safety net for the aged.
But the current orthodoxy, Nava insists, is a recipe for resentment and long-term decline. Although in recent years they’ve lured back some 20 young families— in which one parent was raised on the kibbutz— from life in the city, most of the kibbutz members are 50 or older.
Change comes slowly to Mashabei Sade, that’s just the way it is, Nava says. Look at the “children’s houses” — the radical innovation that saw children living communally from the time they were babies, allowed to visit their parents for no more than three hours a day. It took the kibbutz until 1986 to finally abolish them.
“Shocking,” Nava snorts. “Even animals raise their children.”
As I leave, Kathy the cat is still curled on the bean bag, smug and entitled. I get a flashback to the previous night — Nala's nose against the window, her pitiful simpering— and feel a prick of outrage on her behalf. Even in this most equitable of societies, a trace of injustice.
On our day off from classes we visit Ben Gurion’s grave. He extolled labour and self-sacrifice; retiring after his prime ministership in 1963 to Kibbutz Sde Boker, a short trip from Mashabei Sade, where he boasted of shunning any special privileges, in the manner of the 80-something man in the dining room. His resting place overlooks a stark desert valley patrolled from the air by a loose squadron of ravens.
Perhaps it’s unfair to measure the nation’s spiritual pulse by the distance between Ben Gurion, and current leader Bibi, but the contrast is too sharp to ignore. Neighbour to James Packer in the sea-side enclave of Caesarea, Bibi is under a cloud for multiple accusations of corruption and bribery, including accepting roughly $US300,000 ($380,000) worth of jewellery, cigars and champagne over 10 years from a Hollywood mogul.
His wife, Sara, is on trial for defrauding the government of nearly $US100,000 ($135,000) for catered meals from some of the country’s best-known chefs, while the prime minister's residence already employed a full-time cook.
Two kindly women, Mashabei Sade veterans, unlock the doors to the museum, housed in a timber hut built in the kibbutz’s pioneering era. One woman, spectacled, wears a plum, turtle-necked jumper, the other is dressed in the navy uniform of Sagiv, the factory’s logo on her jumper.
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="25142"]
We browse the displayed photographs of bronzed workers on tractors, and then sit—the four of us, and Jennifer from Hebrew class— on swivel chairs round a computer monitor as the spectacled woman cues three DVD documentaries exploring discrete themes in the kibbutz’s history. As the subtitled films run, the spectacled woman takes a seat behind us, next to the factory worker. The pair chat, a pleasant background hum.
In a documentary on the kibbutz’s travails with equality, an elderly member recalls that as an adolescent in the 1950s he stuck a poster of Joseph Stalin above his bed.
“He was our hero,” says the old kibbutznik of the Soviet dictator.
My partner and I do a sharp intake of breath, tsk-tsk in disapproval. “You know—” we swivel round to the spectacled woman, pointing at the old man on the screen, “he was a partisan at the age of 11.”
We immediately stop tsk-tsking.
The doco also revisits what the kibbutz elders refer to, only partly in jest, as Mashabei Sade’s “great bicycle crisis of the 1950s”. A young boy received a bicycle as a gift from friends outside the kibbutz. In that era of hardship, none of the other kibbutz children had bicycles.
Other kibbutzniks naturally deemed the bicycle communal property, to be shared between the children— surely one child cannot exclusively own such a luxury item? But the boy’s family, and their supporters, resisted the expropriation; the bicycle was gifted to their son. Period. If the bicycle edict went ahead, they would leave the kibbutz.
The mood turned rancorous: the community divided into opposing camps, bitter exchanges, emergency meetings held late into the night. The fate of Mashabei Sade hung in the balance. Finally, the hardliners blinked, the boy got to keep his bike and the great communist experiment in the desert rolled on.
At least until its next existential challenge— the rebellion against the children’s houses. The film flips through black-and-white stills of the children’s dormitories, row after row of beds. Each night the carer on duty sat at a switchboard— a cry from a child in one of the dormitories illuminated a bulb on the control panel.
Some elders share fond memories of their own childhoods in the houses; some parents recall how communal child-rearing freed them for the crucial work of establishing the kibbutz. But by the mid ‘80s, new parents weren’t buying the ideology any longer. Like the boy with his bicycle 30 years earlier, they were asserting ownership—of their children. And they too were threatening to abandon the kibbutz unless the children’s houses were scrapped. The kibbutz members were forced to a vote.
The children’s houses turned out secure and resilient children over the decades, one woman explains in the doco. But her own daughter wants to do things differently and she respects that decision. So she voted to abolish the children’s houses because, “I didn’t want my daughter to leave the kibbutz.” The woman seems familiar, and a moment later I know why.
“That’s me talking - 30 years ago,” the spectacled woman pipes up.
“Look,” she opens her arms in a plea for understanding, “back in the early days, I didn’t have running water in my hut, we didn’t have hot water ... but in the children’s huts, they had everything. We gave them everything.”
Communal child-rearing was a way of putting scarce resources where they were needed most, she says. As an explanation, it’s both prosaic and paternalistic, and I’m surprised at how it both comforts and disappoints me. What did I expect to hear from this socialist matriarch? Screeds about liberating women from the tyranny of motherhood? A vigorous defence of social engineering?
“The children had everything,” the woman says again, launching into other stories. I could listen till the desert chill descends, but we pile out of the museum. We thank the women for their time. As we head back to our quarters, they are deep in conversation, hands dancing.
I relent. Of course, I do - I tell myself that, after all, I’m a Jewish mother, and Nala has taken to nibbling and sucking on my girls’ clothes, as if rooting for the nipple. I try my best to suppress the niggling unease that I’m letting the side down, succumbing to avarice and longing and the ancient tug of proprietorship. Maybe to something more noble too.
“Please mum,” the nine-year old demands, one last time.
In the cupboard below the kitchen sink I find a tupperware bowl. I fill it with milk and walk outside. The bowl is yet to reach the ground before Nala dives in.
A late afternoon hush has fallen on the kibbutz pastoral. No sounds of people talking, laughing, arguing. No fighter jets.
Just Nala’s soft lapping and deep, grateful purr.
Photo: Children at meal time in early days of Mashabei Sade
PART 1: Cats in the kibbutz cradle
