Growing up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood (Mandel Vilar Press, April 2020)
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Rachel Biale’s fresh and vivid stories of her kibbutz childhood, raised in the biblical landscape of the Jordan River by European-born parents and community who had barely fled the Nazis, are pulsating with love and unblinking insight into the early kibbutz life. I read these stories with amazement and deep personal recognition. Literature is still the best path to grasping the heart of Israel, and these stories touch on a pivotal moment in the young country’s history, geography, and social dreams.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, Israeli scholar and writer who grew up on a kibbutz and co-authored Jews and Words with her father, celebrated Israeli author Amos Oz.
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Imagine a little girl who has just finished third grade, “barely over four feet high and sixty pounds,” charged with the job of tending a herd of dairy cows, “each nearly twice my height and weighing around 1,500 pounds.”
The scene, as richly evoked by Rachel Biale in her enchanting and compelling memoir, “Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood” (Mandel Vilar Press), is emblematic of its place and time: the State of Israel in the 1950s, a country facing weighty challenges in its early years of sovereignty. That’s exactly why Biale’s book is not only a work of history and autobiography, but also a lens through which to view how profoundly Israel has changed since then.
Read the full review: https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/books/314213/early-view-of-jewish-homeland/
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https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2020/03/19/kibbutz-with-san-diego-connections-subject-of-new-memoir/
washingtonjewishweek.com/66478/rachel-biale-revisits-her-kibbutz-childhood/arts/
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/07/02/books-berkeleyca-summer-reading-bestsellers
Reviews with Interviews:
state/https://www.jewishboston.com/growing-up-on-a-kibbutz-in-the-emerging-jewish-state/
About the book
Growing up on a kibbutz in the 1950s and 60s, Rachel Biale describes her youth in a series of linked vignettes reminiscent of Amos Oz’s Between Friends. Most of the stories are set in the Children’s House, where a children’s society took place under the radar of adults and with an ethos of its own. In “Clean Sheets,” she describes the team of four-year-old’s who changed the sheets of a bed-wetter at dawn to spare him from embarrassment when the caregiver arrived. In other stories we catch glimpses of the lives of adult kibbutz members, including dark shadows of the Holocaust, of which the children gradually become aware.
These stories are set against the backdrop of another story—of how her parents got to the kibbutz. Biale tells this riveting story beginning with their flight from Prague in 1939 and five-year trek to reach Palestine (which included voyages on unseaworthy vessels and a British prison on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius). Juxtaposed with Biale’s spirited stories about her own youth, this memoir provides a powerful statement of what Israel meant to a generation that escaped the Holocaust and sought to create a new, utopian life in their new homeland.
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Rachel Biale has written a remarkable, haunting remembrance of worlds which are no more - the world of the youth of her parents, born into Holocaust-era Europe, and that of her own childhood within the strongly collectivist kibbutz of the Israel of the 1950s and 60s.
It is a book of secrets, unashamedly personal, of wry, at times terrible revelations, of freedom and darkness, of the kind of magical realism that comes from true stories of life under circumstances which seem, in our day, as scarcely possible as folklore. - - Bradley Burston, Haaretz columnist
Selected photos from the book
