A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [66]
Notes
1. Optional in Kindergarten; if the Group was small, free play under supervision of the Minder continued until Transitional First Grade.
2. An idea of Utopian communal living, first envisioned by socialist European Jews who settled in Ottoman Palestine in the early 1900s.
3. From Our First Year, a collective diary of Eldar’s first year, written in English; no author.
4. The literal meaning of “wig” in Hebrew is “foreign (false) hair” (pe’ah nokhrit); the word for “foreign” is also used for “non-Jew.” In Modern Hebrew, “non-Jew” is the more common meaning, and the only one Dori has encountered.
5. In 1961, each window served a single Room. Front terraces and curved railings were added in the 1970s; as the kibbutz prospered, walls between individual Rooms were torn down and units were expanded into larger apartments. Below: early stages of construction, 1950.
6. From Between the Motion and the Act, an autobiographical novel by Naftali Satie (formerly Stavitsky), written in Montreal during a leave from Eldar. “It was supposed to be a four-month leave and I thought at first I could write the book in six months, but I was working full-time and there were the kids and so on, so in the end I needed a year and a half. I was very happy with Vantage Editions. They did an excellent job—they produced a high-quality book, and they sent out review copies and did promotion just like any other publisher. I had a choice: paperback, which falls apart very quickly, or hardback, which lasts forever. I chose hardback. I had to stay in Canada an extra three months after Varda and the kids went back, to earn the $1,200. Paperback would have taken two months—not much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. At the end of December, Varda went back to the kibbutz and I sublet our place on Davaar Street and moved in with my parents. I took a job as a shipper—it involved a lot of lifting and wrecked my back, but it paid well.”
—Interview with Naftali Satie
7. Heb. metapelet (f). Unique kibbutz usage; no equivalent in English; refers to the childcare worker in charge of a Group. The word came to mean, in the 1970s, counselling psychologist/psychiatrist—see B’Tipul, the award-winning Israeli TV drama adapted by HBO in the USA as In Treatment. In general usage, the root verb means “looking after” and, as in English, has a wide range of connotations, from benevolent to sinister. I’ve always associated the word metapelet with refuse drifting on drainage water—orange peels, for example; or with something bloated abandoned in an alleyway; I can’t say the word, can hardly bear to hear it spoken or even see it printed, especially in English transliteration, on a page.
8.
In kibbutz usage, “Group” (kvutzah) refers to a group of boys and girls, close in age, who live together in a Children’s House. Above, Dori’s Group in the Baby House; Dori to the far right. Below, a few months later.
9. Modern Hebrew for “hoe”; borrowed from Arabic.
10. Small crouton-like puffs produced by Osem and, as far as I know, unique to Israel; made of flour, oil, and spices. Highly addictive.
11. Hebrew is an inflected language, and five of the six words that entertain Dori and Lulu rhyme: sinorim nir’im matzh.ikim al anashim agulim.
12. Interview with the curator, from John R. Snarey, “Becoming a kibbutz founder: An ethnographic study of the first all-American kibbutz in Israel,” Jewish Social Studies 46:2 (1984:Spring) © Indiana University Press.
13. Possibly this was Shoshana’s chance to nibble choice items. She carried meals from the Kitchen to the Children’s House on a milkmaid’s yoke, three metal containers hanging from either side. We remember the secretiveness and concentration of her turned back at the counter, as she unloaded and distributed the food. In a diary written shortly after my twelfth birthday, I found the following entry: Shoshana used to go down and come back with food. You had to go down a few steps and walk a great deal from our quarters