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aroma always wafting from the stone ovens in the bakery at the heart of the
kibbutz, where we could see the bare-chested young men producing loaf after
loaf of bread, not just for Mishmar Hasharon but villages and towns for miles
around us.

Until our teenage years, we lived in narrow, oblong homes, four of us to a
room, unfurnished except for our beds, under which we placed our pair of shoes
or sandals. At one end of the corridor was a set of shelves where we collected a
clean set of underwear, pants and socks each week. At the other end were the
toilets – at that point, the only indoor toilets on the kibbutz, with real toilet-
seats, rather than just holes in the ground. All of us showered together until the
age of twelve. I can’t think of a single one of us who went on to marry someone
from our own age-group in the kibbutz. It would have seemed almost
incestuous.

Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim have long since abandoned the
practice of collective child-rearing. Some in my generation look back on the
way we were raised not only with regret, but pain: a sense of parental absence,
abandonment or neglect. My own memories, and those of most of the children I
grew up with, are more positive. The irony is that we probably spent more
waking time with our parents than town or city children whose mothers and
fathers worked nine-to-five jobs. The difference came at bedtime, or during the
night. If you woke up unsettled, or ill, the only immediate prospect of comfort
was from the metapeled, or another of the kibbutz grown-ups who might be on
overnight duty. Still, my childhood memories are overwhelmingly of feeling
happy, safe, protected. I do remember waking up once, late on a stormy winter
night when I was nine, in the grips of a terrible fever. I’d begun to hallucinate. I
got to my feet and, without the thought of looking anywhere else for help, made
my wobbly way through the rain to my parents’ room and fell into their bed.
They hugged me. They dabbed my forehead with water. The next morning, my
father wrapped me in a blanket and took me back to the children’s home.

To the extent that I was aware my childhood was different, I was given to
understand it was special, that we were the beating heart of a Jewish state about
to be born. I once asked my mother why other children got to live in their own
apartments in places like Tel Aviv. “They are ironim,” she said. City-dwellers.
Her tone made it clear they were to be viewed as a slightly lesser species.

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