Can I Take My Identity Back From Israel?
Reflections of one Jew on her life and times.
Karen was German. She’d come to Israel to volunteer on the kibbutz before I arrived. She spoke English well but never made conversation. She’d look at you, with wide blue eyes in a porcelain face, but spoke rarely and never smiled. Karen was 18. I was 20.
We worked in the banana fields. The work was hard, hot and fast. Small workers like us pulled big brown bags up over entire stalks of hanging bananas and secured each bag with a string around the middle before moving to the next bunch.
After we finished a field, teams of larger workers — women and men — harvested. Gender equality was a fact of kibbutz life. One person ran down the row and shoved a shoulder under the weight of the bagged fruit as another lopped the stalk from its tall plant with a machete. The runner barely broke stride. Momentum carried them, bananas aloft, to a waiting truck while the next worker ran under the next stalk which then fell to the waiting knife.
After work, we rotated duties in the communal kitchen and dining hall. Music, laughter and shouting in many languages competed with clanking plates and noisy machines. Every meal was an enormous undertaking to feed the entire kibbutz of more than 500, including those with Uzis over their shoulders…
