Contemporary Authors

• We Were The Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz - 2016 The Overlook Press, New York, NY

• Wikipedia -

  Yael Neeman
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Yael Neeman
  Yael Neeman
  Yael Neeman
  Born Kibbutz, Yehiam
  Occupation Israeli writer

  Yael Neeman (Hebrew: יעל נאמן‎‎) (born 1960), is an Israeli author.

  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Works
  3 External links
  4 References

  Biography

  Yael Neeman was born in Kibbutz Yehiam. In the early eighties she moved to Tel Aviv. She studied for her master's degree in Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University.[1][2]

  She worked as a literary editor in Israeli publishing houses and in the late 90's started to write her own works.

  In addition to her 4 novels, she has been published in newspapers and literary journals in Israel[3] and abroad.[4] Her play (written with Amir Rotem) was performed in Beit Lessin Theatre in 2006.[5]

  In 2011 she published her third book "We Were The Future"[6][7] (Hayinu He’atid) with Ahuzat Bait Publishing House, which describes her childhood and adolescence in Kibbutz, Yehiam.[8] The book was on the bestseller lists for many months, including no. 1 for several weeks.[9] That same year, Neeman won The Book Publishers Association of Israel's Golden Book Award[10] for having sold more than 20,000 copies, and was nominated for the prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature.[11][12] The Polish version has been published under the name Byliśmy przyszłością (in September 2012) by the publisher Wydawnictwo Czarne. The book also won a special grant from The Rabinovich Foundation to be translated into English[13] by Sondra Silverston. The French version is being published by Actes Sud in April 2015 under the name "Nous étions l’avenir".

  In August 2013 Neeman's fourth book, a selection of short stories entitled "The Option" (Ktovet Aish), was published by Keter Publishing House. The book readers and remained on the bestseller list for several weeks.[citation needed]

  "The Option" was nominated for the Sapir Prize for Literature for 2014.[14]

  Neeman was awarded the "Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers" for 2015.[15]

  In 2015, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA.[16]
  Works

  "Orange Tuesday" Am Oved Publishing House, Tel Aviv 1998
  "Rumors About Love" Katom Publishing House, Tel Aviv 2004
  "We Were The Future" Ahuzat Bait Publishing House, 2011
  "The Option", Keter Publishing House, 2013

• International Writing Program Web site - https://iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/yael-neeman

  2015 Resident
  Asia
  Western Asia
  Israel
  Hebrew

  Yael NEEMAN (fiction writer; Israel) is the author of four books, including the novels [We Were the Future] and [Orange Tuesday] (1998) and the story collection [The Option](2013), nominated for the 2014 Sapir Prize for Literature. Other awards include the 2011 Book Publishers Association of Israel’s Golden Book Award and the 2015 Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers. Her work has been translated into French, Polish and English. She participates courtesy of the United States-Israeli Education Foundation.

• Tablet - http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/216532/voices-from-the-childrens-house

  Voices From the Children’s House

  Yael Neeman’s memoir ‘We Were the Future’ looks back on the bygone days of her kibbutz life
  By Judy Bolton-Fasman

  Tablet
  Notebook
  Voices From the Children’s House

  Yael Neeman’s memoir ‘We Were the Future’ looks back on the bygone days of her kibbutz life
  By Judy Bolton-Fasman
  November 4, 2016 • 12:00 AM

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  When Yael Neeman’s book We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz came out in Israel three years ago, it earned accolades for its vivid depiction of the communal yet oftentimes claustrophobic life on a kibbutz. This week, the book came out in English, Neeman’s first book published in the United States.

  Neeman was born on Kibbutz Yehiam in the northern Galilee in July 1960 and grew up in the kibbutz’s children’s house, where children were separated from their parents at birth and lived dormitory-style with other kids. In Neeman’s memoir, the house—which feels like a cross between an orphanage and Never-Never Land—stands out as its own character.

  In the spirit of the children’s house, Neeman restricts herself to writing in the collective “we.” “We spoke in the plural,” she writes. “That’s how we were born, that’s how we grew up.” “We” means the children she was grouped with until she was 18—as opposed to “they,” the adults who remain in the background throughout her narrative. From the moment she came into the world, she writes, “they never tried to separate us. On the contrary, they joined us, glued us, welded us together.”

  Even in conversation Neeman slips into the plural. “We barely knew the grownups,” she told me in a recent Skype interview. “We grew up among ourselves. We only spent less than two hours a day in our parents’ houses, and when we were there, we felt like guests.”

  Nevertheless, her childhood memories are happy ones. Contrary to popular characterizations, she said, separating children from families was not an inhumane policy: “It was created from a belief that it would make a better human being and a better family, After all, families are not so ideal all the time. When we ex-kibbutzniks speak among ourselves about this issue, we call it a paradox because most of us were really happy in this strange arrangement. Yet none of us want our children or grandchildren growing up like that.”

  ***

  Neeman, the author of a collection of short stories and two novels before this memoir, left the kibbutz long ago; she has lived in Tel Aviv for more than three decades. We Were the Future is ultimately a compassionate memoir about a bygone life—for Neeman and for many others. A lot has been written about kibbutz life and how the dreams it evoked eventually disappeared with it. In this wonderful hodgepodge of a book, held together by memory, archival material, and a smattering of statistics, Neeman tells her reader early on that in 1960, “we were born to a star whose light had long since died and it was now on its way to the sea.” To underscore her point, she cites statistics that indicate kibbutz life dwindling in Israel. At the height of its popularity—in 1947—7 percent of the entire Jewish population in Israel lived on a kibbutz; by the mid-1970s, the numbers bottomed out at 3 percent.
  Yael Neeman (Photo: Tomer Appelbaum)

  Neeman likens the fate of kibbutz life to an unsustainable Utopian ideal. Neither, she observes, could survive. “I never use the word Utopia in the book. I wanted to show the sense of effort, the tension that we lived with in trying to make it a Utopia. The moment you say the word Utopia, you know it can’t be. It’s a spoiler.”

  Established in the shadow of the ruins of a Crusader fortress, Kibbutz Yehiam was a fount of stories. “Stories were everywhere,” Neeman writes, “they rose from the lawn sprinklers that surrounded the dining room, from the scorched remains of our Crusader fortress, from the cracks of the beautiful narrow stone sidewalks.”

  By virtue of its stark topography, Kibbutz Yehiam was also an anomaly among its counterparts. “The landscape was like another character in the book,” Neeman told me. “I really felt it was part of our home. It’s a big part of living on a kibbutz. Children are very free to hang around and be part of nature. The children are their own society.”

  Having the Crusader fortress offered Yehiam members a historical perspective that many other kibbutzniks didn’t have. “It’s very unique,” said Neeman, “because on most kibbutzim everything is built like an installation. Most of the things on kibbutzim are new, with small houses and a silo. We got this fortress that was so different and so old.” But that was where history ended. The kibbutz was fiercely secular, discarding thousands of years of Jewish tradition: No rabbi set foot to perform weddings or preside over a funeral. Members “proudly” worked on Yom Kippur and roasted wild boar on campfires.

  In some ways, the kibbutz religion was an idiosyncratic pantheism. In the book, Neeman observes that “the natural setting of Yehiam was wild and colorful, as if the buildings had been dropped into a nature reserve below the fortress. The kibbutz was rampant with flowers, bushes, trees, grass, rock gardens, soil enriched by pine needles and there were brown, green, yellow, pink and white corners everywhere.”

  For all of its rugged beauty, the kibbutz was first and foremost a memorial to a dead son, a fallen soldier: Yosef Weitz founded the kibbutz in memory of his son Yehiam, who was killed in an army operation in 1946. The elder Weitz was impressed with the remnants of the Crusader fortress, which included an imposing stone tower. He saw it as “a place for defense forestation and for agriculture.” But farming on Kibbutz Yehiam was a logistical challenge. The fields were two kilometers away from the kibbutz, and workers had to be bused to them.

  As it turns out, the kibbutz—operated under the umbrella of a larger Zionist entity called Hashomer Hatzair—was cleaved both geographically and culturally. Founding members were a mix of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and Sabras. Both groups included veterans of the intense fighting and long siege during Israel’s War of Independence. Neeman’s mother had been in a Zionist group in Hungary called the First of May; her father emigrated from Vienna in 1939. They gravitated to kibbutz life; her mother served as the nurse.
  The fortress at Yehiam. (Wikipedia)

  While childhood was happily unstructured on the kibbutz, adolescence was another story. Neeman does a masterful job of capturing the ennui that set in between childhood and adulthood. “It was the first time that we discovered boredom,” she said. “We didn’t learn to study, we didn’t have examinations. Many of just didn’t do anything at this time.” Teenagers seemed to be exempt from the heavy workload the adults carried. This arrangement enabled Neeman to find literature and romantic love as well as time to stare at the treetops and the sky. But idle behavior was not without its emotional complications. “Fear and anxiety” crept into the children’s house, she writes: “We were suddenly afraid that life had no meaning. … Our thoughts had no substantive form; they were only pieces of something that had no name and no contours, fragments of the same mute-but-present partner that lived in our rooms, the same anxiety that climbed up our legs, under the causality that explained everything in Hashomer Hatzair.”

  When Neeman and her peers turned 18, they collided emotionally and physically with the new society that Tel Aviv presented to them. Under the auspices of the kibbutz, many teens postponed army duty for a year to live in the city. “In Tel Aviv, we felt like tourists in our world,” she writes, “in a no man’s land between city and kibbutz which had been ‘lent’ to us for a year.”

  Neeman’s disorientation in the city occasionally resurfaces in her life. “Even now some things are still strange for me,” she said, “like when I meet a new person or buy something from a stranger. I knew everyone on the kibbutz. When I came to Tel Aviv I had to stand in front of a mirror to practice going from ‘we’ to ‘I.’ You have to learn these words to be part of city life.”

  Leaving the kibbutz was seen as a “defection.” Before Neeman permanently took her leave of Kibbutz Yehiam, she suffered a kind of ideological breakdown in the army. “To talk about the army in Israel is very important,” she said. “I was much more to the left than the average kibbutznik and I was serving in the territories. Kibbutzim are at the forefront of Zionism. I had a hard time in the army; I didn’t know why it was so important. Sometimes I feel closer to American Jews who don’t always feel Zionism is the main way to be Jewish.”

  By the end of the book, Neeman has taken her first trip abroad, to England and then to Scotland. But before her final departure from the kibbutz, she returns for a stay that she calls “a conscience year.” “I felt I had to give back one year to the kibbutz before I went to live in the city,” she said. “It was a year that was between childhood and adulthood. As a child on the kibbutz you’re very free, and as an adult you work very hard and do what the kibbutz tells you to do. It was a feeling of obligation and conscience.”

  We Were the Future ends when Neeman was 20, which also coincides with the end of kibbutz life as she knew it. “I wanted to describe the old kibbutz, which also ended in the ’80s,” she said. “I was never interested in its history, just in the dream our parents tried to live.”

Yael Neeman: WE WERE THE FUTURE
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Yael Neeman WE WERE THE FUTURE Overlook (Adult Nonfiction) 26.95 11, 1 ISBN: 978-1-4683-1356-7

One woman’s remembrances of youth in the kibbutz.Neeman was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Yehiam, a particularly vulnerable and nonarable piece of land when it was first settled in the 1940s. The author describes not only her own experiences of growing up in kibbutz culture, but also the violent and activist story behind the concept. In a socialist and humanist experiment quite removed from any religious connection to Judaism, the founders of the kibbutz were dedicated to communal living, which included the group-rearing of all children. Neeman, like all of her peers, only saw her parents for just under two hours per day. The rest of the time they lived in tiny communal groups—the author’s was called the Narcissus Group—which did everything together, from sleeping to showering, without regard for gender or individuality. While many of her early memories are bucolic and whimsical, there is a continual contrast to the utter violence into which the kibbutz was born and the threat under which it still lived throughout Neeman’s childhood. Located near the Lebanese border, Kibbutz Yehiam spent much of 1948 warding off sieges by the Arab Liberation Army, while a lack of food and water were also constant threats. Later, only through backbreaking labor was the land reclaimed from its original rocky character, allowing crops of bananas and other foods. Neeman left the kibbutz at age 12 to enter a collective educational institution, another twist in her story. Though the author is stoic in her attitude toward her youth, it is clear that the experiment in collective education left the children with great emotional and social gaps. Her narrative leaves an impression that she is still struggling to understand how this unusual upbringing shaped and affected her. An eye-opening look at a fascinating era in Israeli history and what happens when a child is part of a sociopolitical experiment.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Yael Neeman: WE WERE THE FUTURE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216122&it=r&asid=d3e6bf5ce6de593e6b557c4d7aeb90ac. Accessed 30 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216122

• Haaretz
  http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/books/hebrew-fiction-her-memories-are-mine-1.346912
  Word count: 3369

  Mar 03, 2011 1:30 PM

  Hayinu He’atid ‏(We Were the Future‏) by Yael Ne’eman.
  Ahuzat Bayit Publishers ‏(Hebrew), 216 pages, NIS 88

  How many people are capable of opening up the old photo album of a complete stranger, and find themselves depicted therein with mesmerizing accuracy? Yael Ne’eman’s book “We Were the Future” sketches, via reminiscences and archival material, a picture of her life and of Kibbutz Yehiam, where she was born in the early 1960s. There is something addictive about other people’s memories, and this addiction became either more interesting or more disturbing when it turned out that what is portrayed so exactly in the book are, in effect, my own memories. And not only mine. For hundreds of thousands of Israelis who grew up on a kibbutz during those years, these shared memories comprise the defining element of their childhood.

  In my travels around the country three years ago with the documentary film “Children of the Sun,” I was amazed over and over again by the precision of collective memory: the children’s houses and the parents’ quarters; daily rituals; being put to bed at night and waking up in the morning; celebrations; the new sandals distributed during the Passover holiday; up to the day and minute when the weekly movie was screened. Viewers of my film would sit glued to the screen and with obvious delight find themselves in photos in which they did not actually appear.

  Children’s house at Kibbutz Yehiam, 1954.
  Children’s house at Kibbutz Yehiam, 1954.Government Press Office

  Ne’eman has written a marvelous, precise and wise book about Kibbutz Yehiam, in which she skillfully captures her Holocaust refugee parents and her friends. And of course, above all, through all this, this book is about her.

  It is difficult to classify this elusive work. Just where does documentation begin and memory intrude? Which voice belongs to Ne’eman, the researcher and recollector of memories, and where has she reconstructed the view of a kid running between the children’s house and the oak trees on this Galilee kibbutz? The multiple voices and points of view present throughout the book allow Ne’eman to avoid the usual cliches that accompany those seeking to connect to the indefinable and misleading experience called the kibbutz: “Sometimes, after we’d left, we tried to tell our stories to urbanites. We could not transmit them, neither plot nor tone. Our voices grated like the off-key recorders of our childhoods, too high or too low. We gave up in the middle. The words fell hollowly between us and the city people, like the stitches knitted by our mothers during the weekly kibbutz assembly, silent next to the talking men.”

  And like the sweaters knitted during endless meetings and gatherings, Ne’eman spins her story out of endless small details that create a sense of exactitude. It is hard not to submit to the feeling of urgency that arises from her text, the need to tell the story, to document each detail obsessively, each bit of memory, large or small, as if mountains of words had not already been written about the kibbutz, about childhood and the great dreams that have vanished: “We sang and danced, played the recorder, mandolins and cymbals, and when the artistic program was over, each one returned to his place. The lawn emptied, the door to the dining room closed behind us, and we returned to our small world in the classroom called Narcissus with its tiny bathrooms, tiny beds and tiny desks, surrounded by a gang of friends − the Anemones, who were a year younger than us, and the Oaks, who were a grade above. We were happy.”

  What is this happiness? The book does not explain, which is just as well. The readers are given the possibility of finding out for themselves whether Ne’eman’s happiness is presented in quotation marks or not. She presents us with the individual emotional context as well as the political circumstances within which the collective idea functioned: She allows us to identify with the children her age in the Narcissus group, and also understand them from the distance of years: “Our story seems to be just a plot. Plot is a mode that does not suit children or adults. Our parents lived on its sidelines and we lived underneath. No one lived within; it was not meant to house people, only their aspirations and dreams.”

  Rosebud of the kibbutz

  Here is another lovely, enigmatic and precise attempt to define the significance of the thing itself, the Rosebud, if you will, of the kibbutz: “The collective community ‏(the kibbutz‏) was an abstraction and a presence at one and the same time. It was the sum of things that comprised an experiment of vast proportions, to truly live out a literary or philosophical text.”

  Like Assaf Inbari in his excellent book “Habayta” ‏(“Going Home”‏), from 2009, Ne’eman makes an effort to create the feeling of a report, of distant testimony. In an interview with Yoni Livneh in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Ne’eman spoke about the wide-ranging research she conducted using kibbutz archives, especially that of Yehiam. The endless sifting through the material that comprises the book gives it intellectual and emotional validity; its pages are flooded by her penetrating glance and great love for the figures from her childhood. When Ne’eman describes the way Hungarian kibbutz members smoked, it seems as though she has in her hand an old photo of the Sandor couple, smoking cigarette after cigarette. The interaction between archival reports and sharp observations gives the book its special tone: a combination of irony and nostalgia, sometimes in the very same sentence.

  Beyond abstraction, life on the kibbutz was a political act in itself. Members were asked to worship the vision. Ne’eman’s sentences create the sense of continuous movement involved in this life, movement in time and space. The religion of work and activity, in which everything turns in endless cycles of busy-ness, is embedded in her sentences − everyone is walking all the time. From story to story: “We would wander from place to place, searching for quiet, searching for noise. Everyone asked, ‘Where is everyone?’”

  Fear of doing nothing

  The great fear was of doing nothing. It was forbidden to ever stop and get bored. The biblical injunction “We will do and obey” [Exodus 24:7] took on an old-new meaning. What needs to be done, when it should be done and of course how. And so one day after another was apportioned from waking to sleep and back again. There were nights of laughter and games, and also of fear. The fears of that period: terrorists, jackals or just the children from the Oak grade. And there were also the fears of the refugee children.

  Their nightmares in which gangs of Nazis roamed, and for some unknown reason decided to attack the parents. To be more precise, the “biological” parents, as Ne’eman calls them: “In the morning the dream was always cut off by the song of the shutters − suddenly opened by the caregivers, and the sharp ‘Good morning’ greeting filled with the yellow light. There were the caregivers who said, ‘Good morning, time to get up,’ and those who updated us saying, ‘Good morning children, three soldiers were killed in the Suez Canal overnight. Let’s go, get up.’”

  In high school, there was suddenly an opportunity to stop and become bored. Without the beloved teacher Rachel, and in the total absence of adults, a crack appeared in the endless cycle of kibbutz activity. The black hole of meaninglessness from which everyone was trying to escape emerged.

  After she discontinued her studies, Ne’eman immersed herself in books, circled endlessly around the high school fence, fell in love, suffered disappointment. She would go to Nahariya and come back. When she was 16 or 17 she found time for the greatest sin of all − doing nothing, just lying on the grass and looking at the sky. “During recess we lay down on the grass,” Ne’eman says, “looking at the tree tops. The grass was soft, high and very green − it sparkled. We thought about things. We were happy or desperate without any connection to what was going on. One minute this way, one minute that way. We were flung from sweetness to bitterness as if from hilltop to hilltop, and in between was the gaping abyss of grass upon which we lay.”

  At the end of the book, when the author was already living in a different country, she traveled from London to Glasgow and recalled a beloved poem from her childhood on the kibbutz. A poem by Kadya Molodowsky, written originally in Yiddish in gray and distant Warsaw: “Then Ayelet hitches all the wheels into a twisting train. And the train whistles loudly and Ayelet travels far and wide, toward the unknown land.”

  Much has been written about the kibbutz. It is one of Zionism’s greatest stories. There were propagandistic works at the beginning of the way, and presentations of victimization in more recent years. For me, reading a book like “We Were the Future” is like jumping into the kibbutz reservoir on an especially hot summer day.

  Ran Tal, director of the documentary film “Children of the Sun,” grew up on Kibbutz Beit Hashita.

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  Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/29375020-cddd-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2
  Word count: 849

  https://www.ft.com/content/29375020-cddd-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

  ‘We Were the Future’, by Yael Neeman
  A memoir of the kibbutz is a poignant reminder of lost Israeli idealism
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  January 30, 2017

  by: John Reed

  Many Israelis, especially left-wingers, remember the early kibbutzim — the socialist rural communes that were a pillar of the Zionist project — with nostalgia, tinged with regret for the harder, rightwing capitalist society their country has become.

  The novelist Yael Neeman has written a charming, elegiac memoir of growing up on a kibbutz in Israel’s northern Galilee region. Members of Kibbutz Yehiam, like others in the movement, were asked to renounce private property, and children slept separately from their parents in collective dormitories to unmoor them from the “bourgeois” family unit and free their parents for work.

  “We know nothing about taxes and fees/ but we know about flowers and trees,” the children sang. The book’s clever organising conceit, as its arch title suggests, is that it is told in the first-person plural: we.

  On Kibbutz Yehiam, religion, or at least overt practice of it, was banned: there were no synagogues, circumcision ceremonies or reciting of the kaddish prayer for the dead. Adults were assigned jobs and summoned for communal activities such as cinema evenings. During “broadening horizons weeks”, high-school-aged kibbutznik children went to Tel Aviv to see “how capitalist urbanites exploited the factory workers”, the author writes.

  Before and after 1948, the kibbutzim played a key role in assimilating Jews from around the world, steeping them in Israeli culture and the Hebrew language. Neeman’s parents, like many on the kibbutz, were Hungarian Holocaust survivors; later arrivals came from South America and France, the latter mostly Parisian Jews who moved to Israel more out of conviction than necessity.

  The Hungarians, eager to assimilate, shunned their native tongue in favour of heavily accented Hebrew, but Shlomit, the children’s nursemaid, would whisper stray endearments to them in their native tongue at bedtime. Parents did not burden children with stories from the Holocaust.

  Not much “happens” in this memoir but it imparts a vivid sense of group life lived in the countryside at close quarters, with all of its pleasure, intrigue, and boredom. Neeman writes well about how the children visited their parents on scheduled, somewhat stiff daily visits in the evening, then returned to their dormitories at night. As teenagers, they were bussed off to regional “educational institutions” meant to distance and protect them from the temptations of family life. The children returned home at weekends and holidays as ungainly, independent-minded strangers. “Our parents on Yehiam asked us not to crack sunflower seeds in the house, if possible,” Neeman writes. “They asked politely. Didn’t demand.”

  As in all good stories about socialist utopias, some things do not go to plan. I wanted Neeman to write more than she does about the pettiness and feuds that some former kibbutznikim say marred communal living, as Amos Oz did beautifully in Between Friends, his book of intertwined short stories. The author does probe the underside of the community where she grew up, though more often she errs on the side of sun-dappled nostalgia.
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  She offers an unblinkered, child’s-eye assessment of the stratification of this supposedly classless society. Some members had plum administrative jobs while others were assigned to the kitchen and toiled for years peeling potatoes. Although kibbutz life was meant to empower women, it was hard on those assigned jobs as carers. “The children’s houses were supposed to free the women from childcare but in fact they imprisoned them in their work — except that they did it with other children,” the author writes.

  By the time Neeman, who was born in 1960, was growing up, the kibbutz movement was declining, “a star whose light had long since died and . . . was now on its way to the sea”. Today the children’s homes are no more, and kibbutzim are villages whose businesses are run for profit. As a young woman, Neeman left the kibbutz. “In the end, we were transformed from the children of the kibbutz to the ones who left it.”

  I would love to have known more about what she makes of the less idealistic, more unequal Israeli society in which she lives today.

  The reviewer is the FT’s Jerusalem bureau chief

  We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz, by Yael Neeman (Overlook, RRP$26.95)

• Jewish Book Council
  http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/we-were-the-future-a-memoir-of-the-kibbutz
  Word count: 614

  We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz
  Yael Neeman; Sondra Silverston, trans.

  0
  The Overlook Press 2016
  256 Pages $26.95
  ISBN: 978-1468313567
  amazon indiebound
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  Review by Peter L. Rothholz

  In her engaging memoir, Yael Neeman tells not only her own story of growing up as a member of the Narcissus Group of Kibbutz Yehiam in the Galilee, but also the story of a generation of Israelis born into the Hashomer Hatzair movement and raised to live the labor Zionist dream.

  The memoir opens with an overview of the lifestyle of the kibbutzim of the early twentieth century, which was enthusiastically perpetrated by refugees from Europe who arrived after World War II. Yehiam was one of many such kibbutzim, and it was there that Yael Neeman was born in 1960 to immigrants from Hungary.

  Like in many other kibbutzim, in Yehiam children were not raised by their birth parents but instead placed into a children’s house, where they lived and were taken care of by specially selected members of the kibbutz. Youth spent time with their parents only a few hours a day, sometimes a little longer on Shabbat and festivals. Consequently, Neeman identified not as the child of her father and mother, but rather as a member of a specific group identified with one of Israel’s leading political movements of the time.

  In keeping with Hashomer Hatzair’s Marxist philosophy, all issues—whether public or private—were decided by elected committees of the kibbutz. If one of the children wished to pursue a special educational course or career, a committee would have to give its approval, invariably based on whether it would benefit the community as a whole. Hard as it may be for today’s reader to understand, Neeman reports that “despite the difficulties, or maybe because of them, we were very happy and enjoyed the most intense experience of togetherness.”

  As was true of most kibbutzim at the time, no members received salaries or material benefits. It was believed that the more devoted the individual was to their community, the better they would develop. While Israeli nationalism was paramount, Jewish religion played no part in the lives of the kibbutzniks—other than the Hebrew calendar, by which the community operated. There were no synagogues, no rabbis, no circumcisions, no kashruth, no mourners’ kaddish, and no mention of the Bible. Kibbutz Yehiam even worked on Yom Kippur

  Neeman describes life on the kibbutz as she and her classmates moved together from grade to grade. Year by year they grew ever more alienated from their birth parents, and their parents more estranged from them in turn, until “we suddenly didn’t know each other anymore.” In their senior year of high school, Neeman’s class was were introduced to city life through “Broadening Horizon Weeks” in Tel Aviv, studies in a special Educational Institution, and additional coursework at Givat Haviva, a Zionist camp where they trained to become youth leaders. It was, however, on those very excursions that Neeman’s classmates developed as individuals and first “collided with the world,” given the opportunity to make their own decisions about their independent futures.

  In spite of their lifelong training and indoctrination, Neeman and many of her fellow children of the Narcissus group chose to defect from the kibbutz movement. They continued to feel indebted to their kibbutz family for the life that they had been given but they felt the need to go abroad where, as Yael Neeman says, “for the first time in my life I was free.”