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Sept. 14, 2012
Fertile past explored
Kibbutz documentary offers a pragmatic view.
MICHAEL FOX
As an international symbol of Zionist idealism and a crucial early component of Israeli nation-building, the kibbutz naturally evokes feelings of romance and nostalgia.
Toby Perl Frielich’s unremittingly thought-provoking documentary, Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, enthusiastically embraces that sentiment. For maybe 10 minutes. The rest of the time, the film delivers a pragmatic, unflinching assessment of a venerable Israeli institution.
It is precisely this willingness to pierce illusions and face up to hard truths that makes Inventing Our Life so valuable. At the same time, it’s occasionally painful to watch for anyone who loves Israel – and misses the days when it wasn’t a materialistic Western society like any other.
With the exception of a couple of professors and political observers, all of the interviewees are first-, second- or third-generation kibbutzniks. They may not currently live on a kibbutz, however, a few having left for personal or economic reasons.
Inventing Our Life gains immeasurably from focusing on individuals with direct experience of kibbutz life. It plays as a kind of first-person social history, but with uncommon urgency and emotion. Even when they’re talking about the past, the subjects convey a sense of investment and ownership that is immediate and compelling. In other words, there is a whole lot more at stake here than memories.
The first kibbutz, Deganya, was founded in 1910 by 10 Eastern European immigrants. Communal living attracted Jews committed to the ideals of socialism yet weary of antisemitism in their own country. In Palestine, they could create something that was their own, and which no one could take away.
This agrarian, utopian movement grew steadily, aided in part by financial aid from American Jews. In 1948, the kibbutzim essentially became the front line in the War of Independence. In the years after the Second World War, the influx of Holocaust survivors boosted the kibbutz population significantly. The Six Day War of 1967 provided another bump, inspiring a number of American Jews to make aliyah, most of whom didn’t come to live in the shadow of Shalom Tower. All of these individuals had one thing in common: a powerful urge to invent their own life.
Surprisingly, at the peak of the movement, only five percent of the Israeli population lived on a kibbutz. Their influence on Israeli society was disproportionately high, in part because the kibbutzim led the way in infrastructure, security, literature and several other areas.
The most controversial aspect of kibbutz life – which is at the heart of Ran Tal’s first-rate 2007 documentary Children of the Sun – was the raising of the children collectively, by nannies. Inventing Our Life provides testimony from adults who couldn’t imagine having had a happier childhood, along with some who weren’t well served by growing up among a band of kids.
As young people increasingly left to pursue more exciting lives in the cities and/or bring up their children in a non-collective fashion, the kibbutzim were compelled to adapt. They were further affected by shifting economic realities, notably the devaluation of the shekel in the late ’80s.
Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment takes us up to the present, exploring such compromises and innovations as the urban kibbutz. Yet one comes away from the film with a strong sense that the dream is over – the dream of shared ownership and equality for all – and that Israel has lost part of its soul in the bargain.
As a side note, there’s no mention in the film of the many non-Jewish volunteers from Australia, Holland, the United Kingdom and New Zealand who were attracted to kibbutzim in the 1970s, when Israel was still seen as an underdog by young people around the world.
Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
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