Word: kibbutz
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...bygone scenes of adolescence are contemporary letters to the middle-aged Danny that trickle in from his Kostelec friends. Prema, the young resistance fighter, loses his focus after the war and drifts to Australia, dying a pointless death in a hurricane. Rebecca, the idealist, ends up in a kibbutz, shattered and alone after her son is killed by a bomb in an Israeli café. Jan, the poet, remains in Czechoslovakia. Blacklisted into silence, he commits suicide. As a self-described "raconteur of cynical tales," Danny concludes that the only meaning to life is that there is no meaning. "History...
...remembers what it was like at the beginning. How, as a skinny youth barely 20, he left his parents in Poland and in 1932 came to what was then called Palestine, carrying the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland. How he and other fervid believers founded the Negba kibbutz in 1939, digging wells and building huts on an arid patch 30 miles south of Tel Aviv. How he and his comrades, armed only with Molotov cocktails and a handful of shells, held off a dozen Egyptian tanks in 1948, that exhilarating year in which the state of Israel was created...
Today Israel is 36 years old, and Zvieli is 72. He proudly describes how Negba, like his country, has flourished. The kibbutz now covers 2,500 acres and is home for 330 adults and 600 children. Negba boasts not just pear orchards, 300 dairy cows and a computer-run irrigation system, but factories that make clothes and plastic bags. Zvieli, an accountant for one of the factories, is asked how things are going. "Not bad," he responds, "but the high interest is eating up profits." Zvieli pauses, pondering the larger dimensions of a question that could be asked about Israel...
...would like to see Israel acting economically as a university and socially as a kibbutz. Since we are such a small country, everything must be based on science and technology. We have the potential to introduce human cooperation and mutual aid-to create again a spirit of pioneering...
Reuben Ben-Dori claims Israel has a historic quest, he seems part of an older generation of romantic settlers. He proudly boasts of having brought the first tractor to the Holy Land. Young citizens though even on an traditionally idealistic kibbutz, are not prone to Biblical visions of a "greater Israel." Shalom, 28 years old, says "We have a state because we're strong. That...