When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

cow stalls, walking along a dirt road to the fields they were planting, which turned to a mudslide during the rainy season, the endless meals of lentils and the intestinal and digestive disorders they developed as a consequence, of the cold and damp…on and on and on he talked but repeatedly he came back to the intense, deep happiness those original founders felt, to be there in the Zionist homeland while on their radio all they heard from Europe was bad news.
    And still they stuck to their socialist principles as they built a permanent community. They took their clothes from a common storeroom, which drew heavily on British Army surplus garments. No one owned a clock or a wristwatch. Marriages took place when the girl was ready to give birth and the ceremony only lasted five minutes. A few times the bride was in labor, or too heavily pregnant to stand even for that long, so a substitute represented her. Marriage, he said, was not the highlight of a woman’s life, but having children was, for with each infant the kibbutz acquired another member.
    They read agricultural journals to determine which crops were suited to their land, which still remained an enigma to them. They built a water tower and administration offices and two-story housing units and communal washrooms and tried to figure out a way of bringing power from a nearby hydroelectric plant.
    One night, after there were riots in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a group of Arabs from a neighboring village attacked them. Someone was killed by a sniper. The Arabs were getting organized so the kibbutz put up a perimeter fence and watchtower and now every member had to do guard duty. Out of these home-guard defense units came the Haganah, David Ben-Gurion’s righteous underground against the cruelty of British immigration policy. They felt they were fighting a war on three fronts: against the British, against the Arabs and against their original enemy, the mysterious, inhospitable soil that thwarted their attempts to grow things in it.
    This was existence for them. Hardship. Endurance. In danger of one’s life at every turn. Remote from the cities and remoter still from the centers of European civilization, from art and culture and refinement and fashion and hairdressing. Only a ruthless simplicity and an elemental engagement with survival, on top of which they built their hopes for the future: for themselves, but also for the Jewish race the world over, the age-old image of which was being dismantled on the spot, destroyed so that something entirely new could be created. The new Jew, but more than that—the newhuman being. A renewed human race out of the ashes of a catastrophically close-run thing with total extinction.
    And now Meier was asking
me
if I wanted to share in their vision of a radiant tomorrow, when Palestine would show the world what a Jewish land could be, where the class system had been abolished and there were no kings or tsars or feudal barons. If I wanted to enlist in the enterprise of the new humanity they were building from the ground up, the Jew that Meier was himself, untainted by the contamination of Europe and its neuroses and abandoning the dark superstitions of religion, borrowing what he needed from the model of Soviet society, but leaving behind the central authority of its power structures, for here they were creating true people’s socialism in action.
    Who, in my situation, would not be seduced by the romance of what he had told me? Who could not fall in love with that age-old dream of equality and the collective life? Not me. I’ll tell you who I was then: I was a girl without a past: my mother had dwelt in a twilight land between the tenses; my grandparents were unknown to me and where they had come from, apart from the name of the place (Latvia! two syllables, that’s all), was also unknown; all of English history just a storybook. And so how could I not tell him—with all my heart and soul—that yes, a new Jew, indeed a new kind of