Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood

by Rachel Biale

Overview

This beautifully written memoir is composed of linked stories about growing up on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1950s and 60s, when children spent most of their time, from birth on, in a Children’s House. This memoir starts with a Prologue drawn from the diaries of Rachel Biale’s mother and the letters her parents exchanged while her father served in the British army. With excerpts from these documents, she describes how the long trials and tribulations that encompassed her parents dangerous escape from Eastern Europe to Israel – fleeing from the Nazis from Prague in 1939, five years of dangerous sea voyages, and long internments in British refugee camps. Throughout these ordeals, her parents socialist and Zionist values sustained them and eventually brought them to their kibbutz. The middle and main section of the memoir is devoted to Rachel's growing up as a kibbutz child. While Rachel's parents soon realized that no community can live up to its utopian ideals, Rachel's youth on kibbutz was a robust and buoyant one. Rachel pens 24 beautifully written and engaging stories about her kibbutz childhood -- from earliest memories at age three as part of a children's society, to her army service at age twenty. The stories focus on the world of children, but also offer a window into the lives of the adult kibbutz members, including Holocaust survivors. The book ends with a Postscript—as Rachel revisits her kibbutz and updates the stories of her childhood companions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942134640
Publisher:	Mandel Vilar Press
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Rachel Biale grew up on Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel. She earned an M.A. in Jewish history at UCLA and an M.S.W. at Yeshiva University. She lives in Berkley, California, where she is a practicing psychotherapist. She is the author of Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance Today

Table of Contents

Preface Prologue: From Prague to Palestine: How My Parents Came to Israel Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood 1. Coveting 2. Rice Pudding 3. Clean Sheets 4. Kindergarten Antics 5. Sugar Cubes 6. The Red Shoes 7. Aleph Bet 8. Tiny Feet 9. The Hungarians 10. From Now On, Call Me Danny 11. Her Mother 12. Night Walk 13. Snakes and Kisses 14. Shabbat and Sacrilege 15. Eighth Grade Baby 16. Jerusalem 17. America! 18. Going Home 19. What God Wants You to Do 20. Under the Bed, Below Sea Level 21. A Real Character 22. Never Turn Around 23. Desert Treasures 24. Turning Forward, Turning Back Epilogue Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Many books about the kibbutz explain its logic as a collective. Rachel Biale’s lovely and deliberately modest book reveals one girl's story, where communal solidarity consoles the adults—Holocaust refugees—and cultivates her growth within and sometimes against the collective's struggle for its own existence. — Bernard Avishai, author of several books about Israel, including The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic

Bernard Avishai

Many books about the kibbutz explain its logic as a collective. Rachel Biale’s lovely and deliberately modest book reveals one girl's story, where communal solidarity consoles the adults—Holocaust refugees—and cultivates her growth within and sometimes against the collective's struggle for its own existence. — Bernard Avishai, author of several books about Israel, including The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic

Donna Rosenthal

Bob Dylan, Boris Johnson, Annie Leibovitz, Helen Mirren and Jerry Seinfeld? All volunteered on Israel's unique creation - the kibbutz. This memoir is a poignant mix of secrets and survival, love and loss. — Donna Rosenthal, journalist, kibbutz volunteer, author of The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land

Preface

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 (cowshed 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 instructions on how to open and close gates in the proper order and a long stick. 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 lbs. 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 unsupervised (at age four!) from 8 pm to 10 pm every evening and from 4 am to 6 am 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? Some kind of enchantment of utopian dreams and beliefs leavened with subtle and not-so-subtle communal ideological coercion, made it possible for our parents to raise us this way. That very mix, plus our own magical thinking in early childhood, 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 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 at 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 perilous journey from Europe to pre-state Israel. After escaping from Nazi-occupied Prague, arriving at the shores of Palestine as illegal immigrants, 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 of the land of their dreams, you can better appreciate my stories. They start with early childhood, grow 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, not necessarily true-to-life, but hopefully will convey the truths of my life.

Editorial Reviews

"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 Israel, and these stories touch on a pivotal moment in the young country’s history, geography, and social dreams."—Fania Oz-Salzberger, daughter of the late Amos Oz

Fania Oz-Salzberger

"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 Israel, and these stories touch on a pivotal moment in the young country’s history, geography, and social dreams."—Fania Oz-Salzberger, daughter of the late Amos Oz

From the Publisher