A strong, single woman, she was an odd duck at Givat-Brenner. Men saw her as one kind of threat and women saw her as another kind. Like other war widows I knew later in my life, she radiated threat. Life in the kibbutz did not suit her. Indeed, though the kibbutz was a society of high ideals, in fact it was just a suburb full of petty, personal quarrels. Large clans controlled the social life at Givat-Brenner: The warm, vulgar Polish were different from the crafty Litvaks from Lithuania, and the Yekes—immigrants from Germany—were something else again. Shosh Spector, and accordingly I, didn’t belong to any of these cultures. We were outsiders—different.
In Givat-Brenner my own situation was rather better than hers. I was thrown into the seven-hundred-strong children’s society, to sink or swim among them. But I was young and still flexible. Actually, what happened to me at Kibbutz Givat-Brenner was similar to what happened to Shosh herself twenty years earlier. When she was fourteen, her father—who couldn’t support his family—sent her to a youth institution. There, in the children’s village of Ben Shemen, she found her way and her friends for life.
This is exactly what happened to me at Givat-Brenner. The beginning was tough, but eventually I made friends. The youth society I became a part of—the “brigade,” in the semi-military jargon of the kibbutz—was stormy, zealously Zionist, and naively socialist. So, like all the kids, I vowed to defend Israel, save the Jewish people, and fight for social equality and for peace and fraternity among nations. Like all of us, I was unaware of the contradictions among those conflicting goals. To find favor in the eyes of the girls, and perhaps to compensate for my incompetence on the basketball court, I became a “cultural promoter.” I became the editor, publisher, and sometimes the art director of our weekly magazine, which was displayed on walls. This was a wonderful periodical with stories and poems of local talents, such as “Captain John Marley Flies to the Moon” by Daniel Vardon, or political commentaries discussing the problem of who was going to inherit Comrade Stalin’s job when the black day would arrive. The editors bet on Georgi Malenkov, since he had no mustache. We were wrong. Khrushchev was clean- shaven, too.
On summer vacations I took every course I could get into: a month of premilitary scouting in which we traveled by foot some six hundred kilometers; a course in building model airplanes; a gliding course, and the next year piloting light aircraft. I led hikes with heavy backpacks to the three craters (unique geologic formations in the Negev Desert), and hitchhiked to Eilat on the Red Sea. Soon I was selected as a scoutmaster, and invested my evenings and weekends in my young pupils, teaching them to tie knots and make fires in the rain.
SHOSH YEARNED TO LOVE ME, but the situation had become impossible for us. My mother’s social problem, and the fact that she was a stranger in this big kibbutz, threatened my standing in the children’s society. Sometimes she tried to make me her confidant and poured her toils and troubles on my head. She described her encounters with people (she was a great mimic), but this put me in an awkward situation: I had to choose whether to be on her side, or on the side of my friends. These people were their parents and elder brothers and sisters. So I listened, dissociating myself, and saw how hurt she was, but I couldn’t really sympathize enough. Soon I stopped listening to her stories and sealed myself off from her. I rolled up like a hedgehog toward my mother.
The hurt feelings between us became stronger. I began hiding to avoid being seen with her. Instead of going to her room after school, as was normal kibbutz custom, I went out to the fields or to the vacant sports arena, where I worked long hours on the horizontal bar and the parallel rings. I became the kibbutz shepherd. I took the animals out to pasture. Once in the fields, I spent many hours alone composing endless poems while my four hundred sheep ran wild and raided people’s gardens. Sometimes I woke up to the cries of furious farmers whose crops had been destroyed, and sometimes I got hit. I walked the fields and prayed for somebody to come and take me away from this place back to my real home, to Hulatta.
IN 1953, WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, I ran away from Givat-Brenner and my mother. Before the running experiment, a dream was visiting me in the nights: I lay on a vast plain all striped in gray lines. Beyond it, heavy black lumps towered, their heads vanishing up. When I woke up I didn’t know whether this was my bed with the mattress and the lumps of blankets, or that I was on the coast of a huge marsh, and the lumps were the black mountains over it. Anyway, I felt I was home.
I decided, and at supper I filled my pockets with bread. At ten o’clock in the evening, while the kibbutz slept, I slipped out of bed and sneaked in the shadows to the entrance of the kibbutz. The road that led down to the highway to Rehovot was dark. I ran through the orchards crazily, dying of fear. I hoped to hitchhike north on the highway, to Dvorah and Aronchik and my sweet Ronnie in Hulatta.
I got to the road. It was silent and dark. Tall cypress treetops swished in the light wind. I sat on the ground beside the road and waited, accustoming my eyes to the night. I thought if the way north proved long, I would find work, and if my foster parents in Hulatta tried to bring me back to my mother in Givat-Brenner, I would run away from them, too, and hide, and no one would find me again.
It began to get cold.
After some time I saw lights in the distance. I jumped to my feet, gripping the signpost at the bus stop. A bus came and stopped, orange light shining dimly through its windows. I climbed in, but the driver demanded money and I had no money. I got off and the bus left, the whining of its tires fading in the distance.
Dogs were barking. I thought perhaps I should begin walking. And then the sound of approaching footsteps was heard in the distance, coming toward me down the road from the kibbutz. I recognized the ticking of those sandals; there was only one person who ran like that. I fled and hid among the orange trees in the dark orchard. From my hideout I saw Daniel Vardon coming, halting and turning around, shouting my name as loud as he could. Daniel got farther away, and his voice diminished. Another car passed. And then Daniel returned down the road. He was a boy from my own class, a year older than I. He was very dark-skinned, tall and strong. He could sing beautifully, and run faster and farther than anybody else. And he didn’t give up on me.
At last I came out of my hiding place. I tried to argue, to convince him, but he just caught my hand and dragged me after him all the way back, not letting my hand free, while I sobbed, flooded with a mix of failure and relief. At age fourteen, Vardon radiated charisma and physical power, and he could subordinate anyone to his will. On our way back he promised me with dignity, swore, that he would never tell about this to anybody, ever. Danny kept his word, but throughout the years we grew up together I felt the eye of this special young person watching me, making certain that I did not go astray.
Not a long time was left for him. In 1958 we all were drafted, and Danny began as a soldier in the Golani Division. His first decoration for valor came almost immediately, when he stood out in the attack on the Syrian position at Tel-Dan. A friend of his told me how he skipped across the trenches, fearlessly, almost happily. In 1962 Lieutenant Vardon got his second medal after taking the Syrian outpost Nukeib above the Sea of Galilee; the outpost used to snipe at Israeli fishermen and the kibbutzim below it. Danny excelled in fighting, and more so in his human behavior. He rose up under Syrian fire and stopped the firing of his own men, to let Arab citizens from the nearby village, who were caught in the crossfire, run away. Only then did he lead his soldiers down to the trenches. The commanding officers of that time saw this action of his as a shining example. Daniel Vardon won his third medal postmortem, in the Six-Day War. On June 8, 1967, he consciously risked his life to save wounded soldiers, and fell in a battle in an alley at the Egyptian town of El-Arish.
AS A RULE, THE GROWN-UPS in my family didn’t tell stories about their past. Aronchik would dismiss the past with a disdainful wave of his hand, and Dvorah would just grin and change the subject. My mother, on the other hand, had an exception to this rule. While I was a small child, before going to bed, she liked to tell me stories of her youth.
Shosh knew how to tell stories that were alive, detailed, and full of color. Many a time she made me, and herself, laugh to tears. On such occasions there was strong affection between us. But anything that happened after the end of school in the youth institute of Ben Shemen was hidden behind a curtain of silence. She didn’t tell and I was afraid to ask, and gradually the conversations between us ended. Her true, thrilling life was hidden from me.
She never talked to me about Zvi, the father I never knew, but his name was always hanging between us, an open wound. Once I took courage to ask, and she dismissed me.
“A true gentleman,” she told me, “doesn’t intrude in other people’s privacy.” And when I flinched, she cleared it once and for all, “even when he is left alone in the room.”
ONE DAY, AFTER ONE OF HIS RARE visits, my Uncle Israel—the eldest of the four brothers—left me a
