The Last Rain (33 page)

—Rafael Avidor, Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan

63
. I tried to send you this letter yesterday but I was having trouble with the computer. I think it’s working now. I’ll do my best to answer your questions, if I can.

— I asked my friends in Canada to send me magazines with pictures so the kids in my class could make collages and posters. We did art, theatre, games—for every topic I taught, I invented a game.

— We made up our own rules regarding babies. Edna was fantastic. We once had a so-called expert from the Federation visit us. I remember Edna was so nervous she broke two bottles. The expert rearranged all the clothes and furniture in the Infants’ House and told us we spoil our babies. She felt we picked them up too much and held them too much, and she suggested that Edna should go and observe the European kibbutzim for a month. She also said Spock exaggerated the importance of milk in children’s diet. After she left we put all the clothes back in place, picked up the babies, and prepared the milk bottles. Edna was so exhausted she fell asleep in her chair.

— All the outside children had a situation. One came from the Holocaust as a baby with his mother, then the father left. Another boy, the father died and the mother was sick, he was very sweet.

— We had one gay man and one lesbian. Both were very open about it and it wasn’t an issue. But they left because they couldn’t find partners at Eldar.

— Yes, Tzvi Lipkin had a PhD in nuclear physics. The government took him out of Eldar in 1952, they needed him. I think he was one of the only people in Israel with that background. We see him often when we visit Israel, he’s a wonderful person, his wife too. Witty, kind, soft-spoken. I think your politics are the same.

— 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 were written in touching, second-language Hebrew by my mother, Aviva Ravel, when I was born. I have reproduced the entries in the order in which they appear and without any omissions or redaction; only the names have been changed.

Excerpts from
Thy Neck with Chains of Gold
are from a play written by my mother in 1967
.
The suicide at the end of the play does not appear in the copy held by the Toronto Research Library, but was included in a 1969 performance in Montreal.

Comments on the article about the kibbutz boys were found on the internet.

John Snarey and Indiana University Press kindly allowed me to quote from Snarey’s study of Kibbutz Sasa.

Articles attributed to the trade union newspaper
Davar
(now defunct) are authentic, as is the letter to the editor; translations are mine. Terrorists were commonly referred to at that time as “infiltrators.” In the letter to the editor, only the title of the novel in question has been changed. I am grateful to the Lavon Institute of the New Histadrut for permission to reproduce these texts.

Naftali’s unpublished war memoir was written by my father.

Professor Yuval Dror has generously allowed me to quote from his informative book,
The History of Kibbutz Education
.

Many thanks to Givat Haviva Jewish-Arab Centre for Peace for sending me Kibbutz Sasa’s first Hagadda and allowing me to quote from it.

I am grateful to Maariv Newspapers for permission to reproduce Dimitri Berman’s recollections of his trip to Petra.

I came across excerpts from Takh
_.
i’s diary in
One Palestine, United
, Tom Segev’s wonderful book about British-mandated Palestine (1923–1948)
.
The diary was published in its entirety by Am Oved and edited by Yehuda Erez. I have fused and rearranged some of the entries.

The Israeli writer Rakefet Zohar graciously responded to my queries about the kibbutz
si
ḥ
a
, and allowed me to include her letter in my notes. I hope her important novel about teenagers on a kibbutz will be translated into English.

Stuart Davis’s
Landscape with Garage Lights
(1931–1932) was copied by my father, upon my request, over a period of many days. As he had no tracing paper, he used a ruler to determine proportions. I was six at the time, and I watched his progress with awe and delight. I assumed the drawing was irretrievably lost until my mother, searching for her
Baby Diary
so that I could include it in this novel, came across the yellowed sheet of paper and mailed it to me. I am grateful to VAGA, New York, NY, and the Estate of Stuart Davis for permission to reproduce the derived image.

Warm thanks to Semitic scholar Mark Marshall for his translation of the archival Jish report card.

The ballistic protection industry article is based on information found at
www.plasansasa.com/news/news/kibbutz-saving-american-soldiers-lives
.

For unparalleled editing and true friendship, I am indebted to Joan Deitch and Ken Sparling. I am grateful to Shimon Levy, who translated a short, early version of this novel into Hebrew. John Detre has been helpful, as ever, in ways too numerous to mention. I’d like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for its generous support. To the superb Penguin team I give my inadequate thanks: Nicole Winstanley, Nick Garrison, Karen Alliston, Rachel Brown, David Ross, Lisa Rundle, Justin Stoller, and the devoted crew behind the scenes. David Davidar’s commitment to my work was a gift from the good angels. Above all and as always, my daughter Larissa continues to inspire me daily and hourly.

No one here is leaving

So we had better start loving

(
FOOLS OF PROPHECY
)

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

I. Utopia

II. The World Below

III. The Last Rain

Notes

Acknowledgement