Dovid clenches his other hand in a fist and looks to Zmira, who squeezes the screaming Malka tighter in her arms and starts walking with her bellowing burden toward the infants’ house.
But Malka isn’t a baby any more. Malka is already a little girl who uses her own brain, and Shlomith knows it. She has a special connection to this child. The girl speaks in very short sentences, only a few paltry words, but her fearless expression illuminates the idea. Malka’s place is with her mother: they both agree about that. But how can she say this to the kibbutz so the kibbutz will believe? To the kibbutz, which speaks with so many different mouths, and increasingly with Dovid’s mouth, which has started to nauseate her, against which she absolutely no longer intends to press her own mouth. Because Dovid has turned evil. Evil! Dovid has joined forces with all of Methuselah against her.
Shlomith has listened to the voice of her heart, but Methuselah thinks she has committed terrible crimes. A week ago she peeled and separated an orange for her child and received a warning for her trouble. There is only permission to eat in the common dining room, says Methuselah with the mouth of every single member. Personal snacks are the lea-ven-of-pri-va-ti-za-tion, and they also bind children to their mother in an inappropriate way. Dovid agrees. “Don’t irritate them for no reason. Malka and Moti will get to eat plenty of oranges tomorrow.”
The next morning Shlomith skips her work shift in the barn. The cows moo in agony with swollen udders as Shlomith lies on her back in the orange grove, surrounded by the fruit she has torn from the trees, and weeps in anger.
Every child is everyone’s child, the Methuselites sing as they plough the fields and sweat in the vineyards, to the same limping tune they try to use with all the hymns meant to bind the kibbutz together, to each according to his needs, from each according to his means. But Shlomith can’t blame Dovid for this. Dovid told her back in Park Slope, as they lay on that mattress with their bellies full of nourishing food and waited for sleep, that professionals raise the children of the kibbutz. Adults have a responsibility to live their own lives. Then it had felt like an almost romantic idea: adults have a responsibility to live their own lives. Not, for example, her mother Miriam’s fussing, meddling life, a nauseating life of self-sacrifice but her own life. In that closet in Park Slope, Shlomith had closed her happy eyes. She had thought of the first years of the twentieth century, the indescribable zeal and ecstasy which had driven Jews to journey there from every corner of the globe. Most came from Eastern Europe, having had enough of stifling ghetto life and cruel persecutions. They came and worked the barren, deserted land . . . Almost deserted . . . Their land . . .
Dovid swallows his anger once again and lets his hands relax and open. He turns again to Shlomith standing on the porch of the white stucco house and arranges his words carefully. “Zmira cares for Malka just enough and with exactly the right intensity so she can naturally find her own place. And that place is with her peer group. You know that. So why this exhibition again, dear?”
Dovid speaks to her like to an idiot. And every night when Malka and Moti are taken away from her, she cries. For Dovid, the children’s disappearance is a relief. For Dovid, the children are toys, which someone else can clean up and put away once the games are done. And everyone thinks that’s “OK”. Of course, the whole kibbutz plays with the children! The children are like Harry Harlow’s monkeys, and Shlomith can’t stand it any more. She could let everything else go, including that cigarettes have to be ordered through a committee established for that specific purpose, but ruining children is really serious. Shlomith has noticed a number of concerning things. The young people of Methuselah are apathetic. They’re deadbeat after school, farm work, and homework; they aren’t given a moment of their own time. They always shuffle around in a group, and if you happen to address a personal question to one of them, without glancing at the others, they begin to babble in a way that makes you wonder if they imagine the members of the education committee are applauding behind their backs.
The most frightening thing is that they don’t imagine. They don’t imagine anything. The ability for imagination has been rooted out of them. When they speak, they’re sincere. All that bullshit comes straight from their hearts. All the platitudes, the banalities, the predigested truths: not the slightest hint of doubt. Not even a second of embarrassment.
Shlomith’s eyes begin to open. This wasn’t actually emancipation with socialist, Zionist, and Tolstoian flavors, as Dovid had described to her in Park Slope. This was a machine construction program. They were recruited for Methuselah to produce “new Jews”, robots that look like humans but have been programmed to slog their guts out without troubling their heads with revolutionary ideas, who had hands for building a new world but minds untarnished by excessive intellectualism. Who weren’t neurotic shit talkers.
Even though Shlomith didn’t know it at the time, she wasn’t alone in these thoughts. Around the same time a certain Bruno Bettelheim had visited Atid, another Israeli kibbutz, where he conducted a participant observation study about child rearing. He published his conclusions in 1969 in the book The Children of the Dream, which became a bestseller and one of the most talked-about books of the year. “The kibbutz-born generation is committed to an entirely different Sachlichkeit, a literalness, a matter-of-fact objectivity which has no place for emotions,” Bruno B. said on an episode of 60 Minutes Shlomith didn’t see since she
