Rachel Biale

Excerpt from Growing Up Below Sea level

Preface

The summer following third grade, our class reached the coveted status of “real workers.” We were assigned to work in different branches of the kibbutz, not just in the children’s farm, where we’d worked every weekday afternoon since first grade. I got one of the most prized spots: working with the dairy cows. Mostly I shadowed the grownups, spreading hay in the feed trough, shoveling cow patties, and washing udders with a high-pressure hose before the cows were harnessed to the milking machines. But one day something changed. Perhaps someone didn’t show up for the afternoon shift, or the raftan (dairy worker) decided I was responsible beyond my years. Whatever it was, he told me to go out in the afternoon and bring the cows from the grazing pasture back to the milking parlor.

I walked out to the clover field, armed with a long stick and instructions on how to open and close gates in the proper order. I was assured the cows would, almost on the their own, navigate the road home.

“Moo,” the cow at the front of the herd bellowed.

“Nu!” I yelled right back, “Yallah, go home!”

I added a nudge, poking her behind lightly with my stick. She started trudging forward. I led the way.

Part of me can still feel the glee as I marched at the head of the herd, opening one gate, then running to the back to close the previous one after the last cow had passed it, then to the front again. Another part easily conjures up the knots in my stomach: barely over four feet high and sixty pounds, I was followed by over a hundred cows, each nearly twice my height and weighing around 1,500 pounds.

I delivered them to the cowshed safely; not one had strayed off course. Now expansive pride replaced the cramps of anxiety. Soon fatigue spread through every layer of tissue. It felt wonderful—a tiredness of great accomplishment and of “real work.” In my heart I still cherish that feeling today, but my head shakes, as if of its own accord: What were they thinking?

The same split animates my memories of how, as very young children, we took care of each other on our own in the children’s house with no adults in sight. But, as a mother and recent grandmother, I am flabbergasted. How could our parents leave us (at age four!) unsupervised from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. every evening and from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. every dawn? How did they tolerate knowing so little about what actually went on in our lives in the children’s house? How did young mothers agree to part from their newborns the day they came home from the hospital?

Utopian dreams, leavened with not-so-subtle ideological coercion, made it possible for our parents to raise us this way. Their escape from Europe played a part as well. The founders of the kibbutz (in 1938) had left Germany before the war, while most of the members fled Czechoslovakia after the Nazi occupation. They were the lucky few who escaped the Holocaust. They did not speak of it much, nor define themselves as “survivors,” because they had not been in the camps. But my parents—and many of their comrades—did survive a perilous journey from Prague to Palestine and then deportation and imprisonment. Their idealism was, undoubtedly, propelled by the quest for survival. This mix of idealism and necessity made it possible for our parents to create a world with a unique, collective childhood. Our own magical thinking as very young early children made it joyous and rousing, at least for most of us.

Boosting our own ideological fervor was the admiring gaze of a whole country. Up until the late sixties, Israel held up the kibbutz movement as the pinnacle of its achievements. We were the best of the best, in our own eyes and in our countrymen’s. We may have been geographically 238 meters below sea level, but in spirit and values we believed we were on the mountaintop. We, kibbutzniks, had not just seen, but we had built and inhabited, the Promised Land.

* * *

This book is about my childhood on a kibbutz in the 1950s and ’60s and about my parents’ ideals that brought them there in the 1940s. It begins with their extraordinary journey from Europe to pre-state Israel. After escaping from Nazi-occupied Prague, barely surviving a boat trip on the Mediterranean, arriving at the shores of Palestine as illegal immigrants, and enduring exile and imprisonment in Mauritius (a remote island in the Indian Ocean), they finally reunited in 1946 and joined Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin.

Once you learn how my parents built their home in the land of their dreams, you can better appreciate my stories. They start with my early childhood, extend into my school age and teen years, and eventually lead to when, as a young adult, I left this warm nest. The stories are all based on real events. Details and conversations are mostly my creations, some recounted with embellishments others imagined. All the “big facts” are accurate. All the small details are authentic to the time and my subjective experiences; they are not necessarily true to life, but they express the truths of my life.

Clean Sheets

     “Wake up! Wake up!”

My blanket yanked off my face, I opened my eyes. In the fresh light of dawn I saw Roni and Dalia pressed up against my bed.

            “Why? What?”

            “It happened again,” Roni whispered.

            “It happened again?” I repeated as I came around to full awareness.

            “You know, to Sammi,” Dalia said.

We never said the actual words. I got up and quickly smoothed down my blanket.

            “Let’s go,” I said.

We turned toward the far corner of the room where Sammi was perched on the edge of his bed, hunched under his blanket. He was pulling in the ends of the blanket under his chin so tightly you saw only his eyes and half his nose. We were certainly efficient for four-year-olds. We had had plenty of practice. This happened at least once a week. Sammi was the last one in our class of eleven—five girls and six boys—who still had this problem. No one ever talked about it. Not the three of us who shared his room, nor the kids from other rooms who occasionally woke up early and saw us in action. Not the grown-ups either, neither the metapelet nor anyone’s parents. Did they even know? Did Sammi’s parents know? Was there a conspiracy of silence or mere ignorance?

            I rushed to the anteroom leading to the showers, where clean laundry was kept in two rows of triple cubbies. The lower row was for bottom sheets, slipcovers for blankets, and pajamas. I grabbed one of each. The second tier had one compartment for underwear, one for shirts and one for pants. I didn’t need those now. I carried my bundle back to the room.

I knew Roni and Dalia had already stripped Sammi’s bed by the smell in the doorway. Slightly pungent, with a chemical quality I did not know the name for yet. Though it wasn’t terribly strong, I experienced it as overpowering, not in my nose, but in my heart. Shame—on Sammi’s behalf—as if it were an entity standing on its own, right there in the middle room.

I put my bundle on the floor and, without a word, took the blanket from Sammi’s hands. Roni held on to the edges of the blanket while Dalia and I tugged on the opposite corners of the slipcover. It was a hard job under normal circumstances, but with the large damp spot in the middle, it took all our strength. It was as if the wet patch didn’t want to part from the cozy warmth of the blanket.      

Meanwhile Sammi stood to the side, shivering in his wet pajamas. I handed him the clean pair.

  “Quick,” I said, “and put the wet pajamas on top of the wet sheets,” I said as I turned back to help Roni and Dalia drag the recalcitrant blanket out. Finally the blanket released the cover, and Dalia and I set to maneuvering it into the fresh one. Roni rolled the wet bedding and pajamas into a tight wad.

     “Push it to the very bottom of the dirty laundry bin,” I said as he dragged the wet roll along the floor by its only dry corner, heading towards the shower room.

     “I know!” he said.

     “And make sure there is enough laundry on top of it so you can’t smell it.” I couldn’t help acting as if I were in charge.

     “I know that, too,” Roni said. “I’ve done it enough times.” He rounded the doorpost with the laundry.

     “We better hurry,” I said to Dalia as we lay down the clean bottom sheet over the thin mattress, smoothing it across the middle.

     “Yes,” she said. “We better finish before the others wake up.”

     “Or the metapelet comes,” I added.

Roni came back and helped us with the final tugs on the slipcover, until the blanket was all the way in and we managed to do the buttons that closed its open mouth. Sammi lay down on his bed and we covered him up. He was still shivering, so I tucked the blanket around him.

“Pretend you are asleep,” Roni instructed everyone, as we slipped into our own beds and pulled the covers up to our chins. A moment later we all heard the footsteps of the metapelet approaching the front door.

* * *

Years later, when Sammi was drafted, joining a highly selective combat unit, I saw him after the first week of basic training.

“How is it going? How are you holding up?” I asked.

“Good. It’s not as hard as I was led to believe. The discipline, the endless push-ups, you know.”

“Great!”

“The first night, though . . .” he stopped and his face got red.

“What?”

Sammi hesitated and stared at his feet, shaking his head. Then he took a big gulp of air, “It came back. The first night on the base. I could have used you . . . and the others from our kindergarten room.”