Kibbutz Amos Oz
KIBBUTZ AMOS OZ Amos Oz is the distinguished Israeli novelist. This is a translation of the introduction to a collection of stories about kibbutz life, which he edited. Copyright © 1977 by the...
...To be struggling revolutionaries—and to be a tolerant, many generational change in nature and in man...
...And if from the start this society has been optimistic in spirit, if it has set its heart on "a rapid and complete redemption of man"—then it will also be struck with amazement...
...Death...
...Suppressed insults accumulated...
...The dread of alien, malevolent landscapes...
...Hard...
...A community of equal partners, which was to be the very point of the blade for the Jewish people, and perhaps for all human society, to reform man and the world by a radical reversal of modes of living which had appeared as natural as nature itself...
...And in the dark fastness lurked the instinct...
...And more: the revelation, merciless and unforgiving, of the awful distance between the world of words and the world of deeds and things...
...Very different from the magic pattern that had beckoned them from all the beautiful children's legends, from the Pentateuch, the stories of Abraham Mapu and the pictures of the Jewish National Fund...
...Every few months, a group of volunteers from Western countries arrives at my kibbutz, Hulda...
...Manual labor, the insult of a weary body...
...The burning faith of religious people who had lost their faith but not their devotion, not their momentum, not their hunger for the absolute...
...At times a determined resolve, brave and tragic, to wrestle with mighty forces, with metaphysical evil itself...
...And you gaze with torn emotions at the bearing of their weary pride...
...An intention to forge a life-discipline beyond the capacities of flesh and blood...
...Others come to build and be built within the space of a few weeks...
...To be a model for the nation, for all nations—and to grow and ripen inwards slowly, patiently, towards a return to the cosmic cycle of earth, man and spirit...
...In the cautious formulation of Martin Buber: "The kibbutz is an experiment which has not failed...
...The din of revelling streets...
...Deep within wept yearnings which had been repressed with a gritting of teeth: Rest...
...And then: the disappointment, the distress, the astonishment—and the confrontation...
...The shade of forests...
...There were years of bitter and ascetic renunciation...
...Their first question, generally, is "Who was the prophet and where is the book...
...For it is precisely those who have succeeded in surmounting the hills of social, economic, and educational injustice who will find themselves suddenly facing the eternal ridges of existential, metaphysical injustice: fate...
...Occasionally I am asked to meet with them, to talk about the kibbutz...
...Among them are Jews and non-Jews, almost all of them very young, from the campuses, with revolutionary ideas, all of them seeking absolute universal justice, without compromises, immediately...
...They remember the bitter departures of the "defrauded," and the silent, depressed departures of broken people...
...to bind themselves to a great and resolute truth which would be articulated in the details of everyday precepts, of dedication in things light or grave...
...Copyright © 1977 by the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Tel Aviv...
...A denuded, denuding land, where the sullen climate and the back-breaking toil and the rustling nights strip man of all disguises...
...They found a hard, alienating land...
...Very consistent...
...One born in the north countries would never be reconciled to this terrible light...
...At times a light, innocently falsifying confrontation, smoothing things over with words and rounding them off with formulations...
...They left the arid camps, or the land, or life: the founders of the kibbutz remember terrible waves of suicides...
...The thin wall of primal maternal and paternal instincts, pressing from within on the chains of ideology...
...At times an inertia with an ondrawing vitality...
...Eros...
...The complexity of situations, which shatters even the most beautiful, most subtle and most correct systems of thought...
...Severe with themselves and with others...
...The temptation of distant travel...
...You look at the faces of the founders—like stone monuments: Big...
...To see in the second generation an invigorating continuation of the first generation—and to seek the traces of a distant grandfather in the faces of the sons...
...No program...
...A society which has succeeded in abolishing distinctions between a girl from a poor family and a girl from a wealthy family may discover with redoubled sharpness the irreparable distinction between the beauty and the ugly girl...
...Piano-playing...
...Some of them come to the kibbutz so that they can return home bringing back the light...
...Those who remained became very hardened...
...Strong...
...Many were seared...
...Then the great and furious disputes, the revenge of the world on its reformers, the revenge of the soul on its reformers...
...At first there were fervent souls with hearts set on reforming the world...
...And on their arrival in this land it was like a blazing in their bones...
...Where a man is tested in the nakedness of his soul, without mercy, without amnesty...
...And again there was an agitated straining...
...Loneliness...
...The father's hearth...
...Honor...
...And, of late: the very success, or "model non-failure," in the reform mation of society has revealed distortions of being which cannot be reformed...
...Orphanhood...
...Very different from "the land of the fathers' joys" where "spring will abide forever...
...A "natural" life...
...And their greatness and their pain is that they continue to reach out...
...To raise up a generation which would forget the sufferings and soul-searchings, and would be "natural," "rooted," "earthy," and at the same time, with a hard and almost irate hand to implant in the coming generation the memories, concepts and contradictions of the generation which had set its heart on being "the legislating generation...
...There was the idea: a wonderful and terrible straining towards the more than human...
...The outbranchings of life which the garments of ideology are too narrow to contain...
...And afterwards, in the way things have of suddenly touching people from behind, came the electric kettle and the stove and the apartment and the clothes and the phonograph...
...Moments oflonging and despair...
...And more: the accumulation of fiercely denied paradoxes...
...The kibbutz was created by a band of Tolstoyans out of a novel by Dos-toyevsky who landed on the shores of the Kinneret, poor, dreaming, with no book, no prophet, and had there been a prophet and a book the kibbutz movement would have degenerated like the closed, dogmatic communes of the last century, or become corrupt like the socialism of the tyrants____ Well then, they ask, what was the beginning, and how far do you intend to go...
...No vision...
...They take it for granted that any socialist, or revolutionary, or Utopian movement had to be preceded by a book containing the essence of the message, and of course by a prophet of the message (bearded, fit for posters, Marx, Trotsky, Ho, Che____) I say to them: there's no prophet, no book...
Vol. 3 • April 1978 • No. 5
