Word: kibbutz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Well into his tenth decade, one could spot his cotton-white tufts of hair--always protruding from an austere, black yarmulke--throughout his adopted Israel, visiting this university or that Kibbutz...
Chernin's eloquent and passionate prose is divided into four main sections, beginning with a recount of her arrival and establishment at the kibbutz. In the beginning, the narrator, "I, looks back on Kim Chernin en route to Araht, in a resort town near the Sea of Galilee, in a tone replete of distaste. "If I could like that Chernin, that woman I was twenty years ago, if it were easy, there wouldn't be this gap that has grown between us. There would be an enduring I, a continuity. Something must have happened along the way, a wrenching more...
...Chernin has come to this kibbutz, a small collective of fifty people who are of various nationalities and all under thirty , upon the suggestion an Australian friend, Devora whom she knows there. The kibbutzniks have build up a community based on egalitarian collective effort and who arrived together on a pre-determined date, to live, work and study Hebrew. They must bend the rules to take her in. And they do, for that is the type of woman Chernin is, or was, at least: someone for whom the rules are ignored...
...members of the kibbutz have no idea of how great an effect Kim Chernin will have upon the community they established. Kim has come, if not for the purpose of, at least with the realization, that she will fall in live for the first and only time in her life. She will not love Simon ben Zvi, the charming young man who plays the guitar and thinks he is the man for whom Chernin came to Araht. Perhaps she wanted to love Dov Aviad, the beautiful soldier who had penetrated her dreams even before he arrived...
...final segment of the book, Chernin is writing in the present day "I about reconcilement with the past. She makes contact with people from the kibbutz, Devora and Dov Aviad. She reveals the entire story to her daughter, the title girl who had written so many years ago that she was starting to forge t the face of her mother. And she welcomes back the old "Kim Chernin," banished these long twenty years since Israel...