A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [79]
— Yes, we had one evil person on Eldar that I know of and today I wouldn’t let him near my baby with a ten foot pole but we were young and trusting. Most of the best people I’ve known in my life are from Eldar, whether they left or stayed.
I think that covers it. I just came across some anecdotes I wrote down at the time, I think for a magazine. Dori is one year old. Last week, the mother of a baby in her group took him to visit an aunt in the city. Dori continually patted his bed, sought out his favourite toy, and seemed to look for him in every corner. Upon his return, she literally jumped for joy. She hugged the little boy and tried to say, “I’m so glad you’re home.”
I also wrote down your first four words: this, thank-you, abba [daddy], eema [mummy].
Have to run, our friends are at the door, we’re going out to eat and see a performance.
Eema
64. In the diary I kept when I was twelve, I recall Hannah’s stay at Eldar:
There were seven of us—four boys and three girls—before Hannah came and she wasn’t with us very long anyway so I suppose that Shoshana, who looked after us, remembers us as seven. If she remembers us at all, which I really doubt.
I wonder now whether Hannah was really sad to leave us or whether she was overjoyed. Probably the latter; we gave her a most miserable time. Her parents were from Poland and when they came to Israel her father, a dentist, was sent to our Kibbutz for a short while to be our dentist.
Hannah was a very tall and very thin girl, with long yellow hair that was cut short after she came and small blue eyes.
When she first drew a picture was when we started admiring her. On a large sheet of paper, she drew a thin green line at the bottom and the same in blue at the top. Then she drew a few tiny flowers, hardly visible, and one little tree, and filled the rest of the space with light blue. It was very bare, but we all looked up to it. I remember it distinctly because for the whole week when it was hanging up I stared at it, trying in vain to copy her.
But it was no use. My flowers came out big and sloppy and my tree smudged. So after a while I gave up.
But it still remained the thing we looked up to—that is until she mentioned God. Then everything was lost—like a very high building a child makes out of blocks and you put the last block on top—and flop! the whole thing comes crashing down.
I don’t remember how it started—maybe someone said my picture is ruined or I didn’t sleep well and she answered God has punished you. Then maybe the person burst out laughing and left her wondering what she had said that was so funny. But soon she learned that she was facing a whole lot of children—a whole kibbutz for that matter—that would laugh at her when she mentioned God. And when we teased her she always cried God will punish you—God will punish you.
She left soon after that.
65.
Above, the only photo of that event. Varda and Naftali were already under a cloud, having informed the kibbutz of their decision to leave for good. Only their closest friends bade them goodbye.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the many people who allowed me to weave real-life fragments into the fictional loop:
Excerpts from Our First Year are from The Launching: Sasa’s First Year (1951), in theory written collectively but mostly, it seems, the work of one member. Some names and a few dates have been changed. Many thanks to Keren Hayesod–United Israel Appeal for allowing me to resurrect this archival document.
Excerpts from Between the Motion and the Act are from an autobiographical novel written by my late father, Nahum Ravel. The novel was translated into Hebrew and published under the title Second Thoughts; it was the sequel to an earlier work, Falls the Shadow, which my father wrote during his leave from Kibbutz Sasa (1959–1961). Falls the Shadow was handsomely produced by Vantage Editions.
The Baby Diary passages