HAIM GUNNER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: This is Christa Whitney, and today is July 9th, 2010. I am here in Amherst, Massachusetts with Haim Gunner, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. [BREAK IN RECORDING] I thought we could focus today on talking about your early years in Israel: when you arrived there and sort of the founding of the kibbutz.

HAIM GUNNER:Let me give you a little preface to that.

CW:Of course.

HG:Because my arrival in the kibbutz was really a kind of ultimate moment in my history in the youth movement, of which the kibbutz was a kind of endpoint. The youth movement itself was called Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir, which means "the Young Guard," although we always felt uncomfortable with "the Young Guard," because there was the Iron Guard. It really came after the name of a very early group of watchmen, Ha-Shomer, which was founded around 1905, to guard Jewish settlements in Palestine at the time -- because the Arab guards who were hired were usually unreliable, and sometimes in cahoots with the marauders. And the Ha-Shomer -- the shomrim, the guards -- became legendary figures. First of all, they rode 2:00horseback. And in many ways, they adopted a kind of Arab style, with kaffiyehs. But they were truly a heroic figure, and not one or two of them lost their lives in protecting Jewish farms from Arabs, who saw these as kind of very easy prey. So, the organization was founded in -- well, the official date is 1913, but it's sort of an amalgam of memory. And it was founded in Galicia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it came about really as an amalgam -- and it became an amalgam of a kind of Freudian, Marxist, Wandervögel. The Wandervögel itself was an interesting youth movement around the turn of the twentieth 3:00century, which was founded on the basis that -- youth society and youth revolt against the mores of the parents. Typically, it was a revolt against sexual repression and the kind of bourgeois solidity and comforts that people were now rebelling against. So, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir came about as a strange amalgam: on the one hand, Marxist, with its own commanding ideology; on the other hand, Freudianism, which undermined, of course, the notion that one had objective ambitions which were not determined by unconscious drives; and finally, of course, the notion of revolt against -- it was called "Mered haben" -- "the revolt of the son." And the organization finally got to Israel, and it began to establish kibbutzim, to live out its ideal. And by 1927, they already had four 4:00kibbutzim. And eventually, by the time I arrived in 1949, there were seventy kibbutzim. And it became a very powerful factor in Israeli life. Many of the leaders of the Palmach, the commando force of the Haganah, which was basically a core element of the Israel Defense Forces, came from the kibbutz movement of Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. And they were very instrumental in shaping -- as many of the kibbutz movements were -- in shaping the mores of the country: egalitarian, liberal -- in spite of the socialist dogmatism, it created the early notion of Israel as a liberal, progressive, egalitarian state. Now what did it do for persons of, you know, my origins? It had a very interesting and, really, a 5:00socially transcending effect. Most of the -- in Europe, interestingly enough, the members of the youth movement were drawn from the middle-class -- upper-middle-class Jewish bourgeoisie -- the children who went to the gymnasia and received very good education, sometimes even going on to university. And Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir considered itself -- and its ethos was that of a selected group -- the avant-garde. We are the avant-garde, they used to proclaim. And it drew them apart from other socialist but proletarian-driven -- and children who came from working-class families. And to this day, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir is considered an elitist group in Israel. And if you read some of the literature, 6:00you can find members of kibbutzim who were not in Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir always felt much inferior. There's a kibbutz, Hulda, there that I -- a memoir by one of its members, [Avraham Rapoport?], who describes his father as kind of being -- suffering from a sense of this isolating inferiority, because he was in the Hanoar HaOved -- the Working Youth -- rather than Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. What did it do for people like me? In my group -- it got going in Ottawa, which was then the capital of Canada -- a sleepy, provincial town. But it didn't -- and it performed a number of very interesting tasks. For one thing, it gave me an intellectual framework of socialism, of Freud -- so at the age of sixteen, I was 7:00already reading "Civilization and Its Discontents," and --

CW:How did they teach that?

HG:Well, they taught it by way of -- they had -- they set up branches. They sent emissaries from Europe and from then-Palestine. We had a branch in Montreal and a branch in Toronto and a branch in Winnipeg, eventually -- to which I went. And they -- so somebody from Montreal, who, with all of the maturity of a nineteen-year-old, came to organize Ottawa. And as I think I mentioned to you, my brother -- my father sent us to this folkshul [Yiddish secular school] -- a Yiddish-oriented school -- because in spite of the fact that he practiced Orthodoxy, his own experience in kheyder [traditional religious school] and of the shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] was not one that wanted him to lead his children to that kind of restricted, constrained 8:00educational life. So, he sent us -- to the horror of his co-parishioners -- to the folkshul, where they -- we actually studied without a yarmulke, without a kippah, without headcover. And so, the folkshul was the housing for Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. The delegates -- the delegates -- the emissaries -- the kids who hitchhiked from Montreal to Ottawa -- as I used to then hitchhike from Ottawa to Montreal to spend weekends with the larger group in Montreal. And they enlisted -- first of all, they enlisted my older brother -- and I think I told you, who said, "Haim, you're going to join my club." And I said, "I certainly am not going to join your communist club." There was enough gossip in the neighborhood about us. And, I did. And I began to read. Meanwhile -- so, the club brought you 9:00through various stages. First, you were -- as a scouting movement -- you were the equivalent of a Cub Scout, and then you advanced into a full Scout and maybe even an Eagle Scout level, and eventually, you became a buger, which means an adult, and you had to make a decision at age eighteen about going to Palestine to found a kibbutz. And at the same time, you were enlisted to become a youth leader. So, at the age of sixteen, I was already leading youngsters, age twelve and thirteen --

CW:How did you move up through the ranks?

HG:I moved up through the ranks because I was recognized -- you know, I had verbal facility and I could -- I could lead a group. And (laughs) the naïveté of it. Nonetheless, youngsters that I led eventually wound their way to Israel. And I repeated this process when I was twenty and twenty-two. And I had stayed 10:00in the youth movement. And I was asked -- sent -- to Winnipeg -- again, to replicate the formation of a branch there. And I have -- chanichim, it's called -- chanich is someone that you educate. I have -- it's not quite a pupil; it's the response to a youth movement environment, educated in the mores of the youth movement who were formers of Kibbutz Barkai and other kibbutzim. So, this really was a translational -- in the sense of you -- activities. So, my brother enlisted me. We had older emissaries from Montreal come. And we used to have a program. The core of it was the sicha -- the "discussion," one of the novel instruments of communication in the kibbutz to this day -- the sicha. So, we had 11:00sichot -- the plural of "sicha" -- every Friday, in which we discussed current events. We were led to socialist texts, to Freudian teachings. And the whole milieu was an intellectual milieu, in which we discussed ideas. At the same time, there was a social life. We, of course, were devotees of folk dancing. So, be careful, we'll swing you into the Swedish hambo if we can -- but -- so all of the mores of the left-wing, socialist milieu was -- became ours. So, we were folk dancers -- folk music -- you know, Burl Ives and everyone else associated with that --

CW:So, what kind of --

HG:We had a clubhouse -- which was more than a clubhouse. We actually shared the meeting rooms of a -- (laughs) politically, it was an oppositionist group -- 12:00they were Social Democrats and we were Marxists -- but we were all Zionists; we were going to build Palestine. So ,we shared -- in the middle of Ottawa, the center of town -- we had a lovely -- the upper floor of a store, which was capacious. We could folk dance there; we could have meetings -- and two or three groups at a time, of different age groups, would meet. And every one of these -- the branch was called a ken. The word "ken" means "nest" in Hebrew. So, we had kinim all over: ken Montreal, ken Ottawa, ken Toronto. And we would meet periodically. But then, in addition to having these weekly meetings, we would have -- we would follow our own age bent. For example, I was an avid skier, so we would go out skiing. And we would have cookouts. You can -- have to picture this -- in the freezing winter, we would -- because we were now campers and we were learning how to be self-sufficient. We built a fire, and as we froze to 13:00death, we could get the fire up. And one of our friends had a father with a butcher shop, so he purloined steaks. So, we had these steaks sizzling and cans of baked beans -- among which we forgot to open the tin, so it would explode. So, we had these marvelous moments of great social affinity. And there were boys and girls. So ,it was not just an ascetic -- how shall I put it? Baptist-style -- well, the Baptists also have girls, but the notion of a non-eroticized environment was foreign to us. Although there was -- it was very puritanical at that level. As a matter of fact, we had ten commandments, of which the last commandment was: Thou shalt not have sexual intercourse. The idea was that they wanted relationships between boys and girls to be conditioned on a shared set of 14:00values. And the notion of an exploitative relationship was very foreign. So, although we had boys and girls in the same tent when we went to summer camp, which was also the core moment of the movement's yearly schedule. The summer camp, of course, was very -- as you know, camps are very binding in their relationships. Boys and girls in the same tent, but nothing overt ever happened. I'm sure there was necking in the bushes, but to my memory, it was really remarkably puritan. Of course, eventually, as people got older, this lapsed, I'm sure. And even in the kibbutz, it was highly puritanical. But the point was that what it did -- and this is one of the sets of influences that I want to talk 15:00about -- is, it opened an intellectual world which set us apart from our financial m-- we were lower-middle-class, struggling immigrant families, but already we had an intellectual milieu which separated us from that. Secondly, it gave us what used to be called in radical circles a "Weltanschauung" -- a world outlook. We were not confined anymore to the trivial notions of gossip, of clothes -- clothes, as a matter of fact, were an issues that we dealt with. You didn't wear a tie and you wore the most simple -- I mean, I remember going to high school wearing navy blue pants, a white shirt, and a navy blue sweater. And the girls didn't wear makeup; it was -- I wouldn't say forbidden, but frowned 16:00upon as a bourgeois affectation. The word "bourgeois," by the way, has changed. Your generation has omitted the "r" -- "bourgeois" -- but it really has an "r" in it. (laughs) Anyways, so bourgeois affectation was out. And so, what it did -- so it gave us an intellectual milieu, it gave us a Weltanschauung, a world outlook. Into this, we could fit evaluation of literature. You know, was it proletarian, did it serve social purposes? Dance, art, music. Socialist realism became the kind of credo of -- of course, it simplified everything. You have to remember that we are now sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and we are speaking in terms of Freudian theory and psychoanalysis, of Marxist theory. It was wonderful in its certainties, its commitment to absolute superficiality. But nonetheless, 17:00it gave us a sense of commanding our place in the universe. And it was wonderful. So, we had a kind of intellectual sense of adventure and approach of the new and the novel. We had a world framework -- this Weltanschauung -- which allowed us to place every art form, every social activity, within this framework: Marxist, socialist, Zionist. And finally, of course, it took us out of our lower-middle-class milieu, just like the affiliation to some artistic endeavor gives you a completely new set of social connections. We now had a completely new set of social connections with an international socialist move-- you know? And everything antithetic to us -- bourgeois, which meant middle-, 18:00upper-middle-class, from which we felt otherwise excluded, we could dismiss. So, the movement armed us with this sense of security, and the capacity to create a new world, of which the kibbutz was the logical outcome. So, here I am, at the age of -- at the age of what? Twenty-four.

CW:This is after you've been in New York?

HG:After I've been in New York. On board the Queen Mary. Her last voyage from New York to Southampton. And whether I mentioned it or not, with a group of six of us. Four of us were members of the New York executive -- we had -- well, we'd been kept behind -- this was 1949, the state was set up in 1948. And we were on board the ship. And we wanted, of course, to have a table together. And I think 19:00I mentioned that unfortunately, the only way we could do this was if we ate kosher food. And this is one of those situations where divine intervention helps. The kosher food was first class. They only had one class for kosher food. And I assure you that for the subsequent -- what, seven or eight years that I was in Israel, it was probably the best meal I've had. But it had one -- how shall I say -- restriction, and that was that you could not have milk products after a meat dish, so we had to foreswear milk or cream in our coffee. A hardship that, I want to assure you, we were willing to put up with. Anyway, so the idea was that we would go from Southampton to London and --

CW:So, you weren't keeping kosher even though your father was --

HG:Oh, no. By that time, the youth movement was so antireligious and anticlerical. I had already told you that I had broken with my parents' orthodoxy at the seder, when I announced that I was an atheist.

CW:No.

HG:Oh, I hadn't told you that?

CW:No. Tell me this story. (laughs)

HG:I wanted to spare you the anguish of shedding tears with my parents. By fourteen, I was already very much involved in the youth movement -- and, of course, being persuaded that orthodoxy and religion were simply the opium of the masses. Does that phrase reach -- touch your generation? At any rate, so we're now at the seder, where everyone has a Haggadah and where everybody is repeating, and I'm sitting there very stoically. And my father says, "Why aren't you reading the Haggadah?" And I announce bravely, "Because I am an atheist." "An atheist? Avek funem tish! Leave the table!" My mother gets into hysterics. 21:00The seder is ruined. (laughs) And I've never forgiven myself. So, that was my announcement and allegiance to atheism. And I have to confess, as youthful as that recognition was, it has not left me, although I've become more and more immersed in the Jewish culture and tradition. Did I tell you what my father said to me subsequently? He said, "Listen, Haim. If you will learn something and reject it, all right. You'll be a heretic" -- in Hebrew, an "apikores," it comes from the word "Epicurus" -- "a heretic. But if you won't learn anything and you reject it, you'll be an ignoramus." (bangs fist on the table) "And that," he 22:00said, banging on the table, "I will not allow." (laughs) And he didn't. And I went on to Hebrew school and studied the Bible and Hebrew until the day that I left for university. So, here I am --

CW:So, what was it like to have all of these different educations at --

HG:At the same time?

CW:-- at the same time?

HG:Well, for one thing, there was a certain consistency. Because I was going to Palestine, a Jewish homeland with a new language, Hebrew, bathed in the tradition of the Bible, I wanted to soak up as much of that background and culture as I could get. At the same time -- although, you know, in, say, the communist circles -- and the communists used to woo us terribly, with great vigor -- What are you doing in a Zionist backwater? But their rejection of the 23:00whole culture that comes with the notion of building a new community was totally foreign to us. In the youth movement, we were very much engaged in studying the Tanakh -- the Bible -- and having a grasp of our cultural roots. So, this was quite antithetic to other radical movements that saw everything having to do with what they simply amalgamated as orthodoxy. Nonetheless, in our movement, carried a certain consistency. Sure, we were socialists. Sure, we were atheists. Sure, we were anticlerical. But that didn't mean that you had to dismiss your culture. And so, as you ask -- this enormous confusion of values -- how did they all become assimilated in a bearable way? So, that was it. So, we didn't -- 24:00there was never any sense of inconsistency. Our atheism never abrogated our need to learn our culture, which was extraordinarily rich, as you know. So, there we were, many of us struggling to master Hebrew, because the minute you reach Israel, you are now in the Hebrew-speaking world. Fortunately, by that time, I had sufficient basis. And I also was a student of the Tanakh -- of the Bible -- which I've continued to this day. You know, this week we're ending the Book of Numbers and we're starting Deuteronomy, the final book of the Five Books of Moses?

CW:I didn't know that.

HG:Well, I'm sharing this little bit of information with you. (laughs)

CW:And so, you were studying Yiddish and Hebrew --

HG:Not Yiddish.

CW:But --

HG:I should say that my Yiddish studies lapsed after I left the folkshul and I 25:00became converted to the notion that Yiddish was the language of the ghetto. And although I knew -- by that time I was conversant with Sholem Aleichem and the major Yiddish writers, I felt that, with the destruction of European Jewry, that Hebrew represented the future -- shared language and culture of the people. And I will come back to that, because later on, I recanted -- when the Yiddish Book Center, actually, prompted that recognition that we have now -- to recapture whatever shreds that remain to us, whether it's Yiddish or the language which derives from the Spanish --

CW:Ladino.

HG:Ladino. So, everything is important. But by that time, I had put aside Yiddish with a kind of ignorant snobbery that, as I say, I later recanted. All 26:00right. So, here we are. We're in Southampton. And of course, England at that time, in '49, was very drab, very broken. But we hitchhiked. I think we -- I remember hitchhiking to London. There were six of us. And so, we're hitchhiking to London. One of them -- was the -- with us in the headquarters of the youth movement in New York -- and we left, by the way, just after -- I was then, as I told you, invited to come to New York -- invitations were more mandatory than invitational -- to edit the youth movement magazine, and I told you about "Youth and Nation." And a week after I left, the FBI came, because we were a left-wing, Marxist organization. And they were extremely suspicious and intolerant. The 27:00whole Israel thrust faced great opposition from the State Department, and so there -- you know, there was an embargo on arms for Israel. So, everything had to be done -- literally secretly. And around our collective house in Brooklyn, we had begun to assemble ambulances and sent off to collect things like radar. And so, the offices were also under surveillance. Fortunately, I had left to go to Israel before the FBI pounced. Anyway, there was not much to pounce upon, and the movement survived. However, some years later, a friend of mine who was with me in the kibbutz and had been the editor previously came back to serve as an emissary working with the youth groups. And the minute he got off the ship, he 28:00was escorted by two FBI agents into a little room with a bare bulb, he describes, and he was absolutely astonished at the degree of detail they had on every single movement of his life.

CW:When was this?

HG:This was -- he went back in 1954. I guess this was the McCarthy period. But the notion that our tiny, insignificant movement should merit such a scrutiny was an absolute shock to us. But it was a measure of the madness of the times. Anyway, so we are now in England. It's drab and dreary. We get to London, and there, in this lovely co-op house on Finchley Road is the London branch of 29:00Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. So, of course it was wonderful. I had never been to England or outside of the country other than the States. We had a marvelous time. And the notion of, you know, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir, it's here, it's everywhere, hospitable. And then on to (clears throat) -- we went to Calais. And I have to tell you that in England at the time, you had fish paste and not much else. And we landed at Calais, and I'll never forget -- we took the Channel boat, which was a terrible crossing, the only time I've really almost been seasick -- and we get to Calais. And that night, we stayed at a little inn. And the innkeeper's wife put a tureen of pea soup on the table, and we knew that we were in France. I mean, the quality of everyday cuisine at the time -- well, now it's become 30:00subverted with McDonald's, but it was just an extraordinary -- you know, the notion -- cultures drive everything, including cuisine. And we hitchhiked to Paris. And for the first time, I saw what the French countryside that I had read about looked like, these little towns with a manure pile in the center of town. No longer. It was not the Giverny of Monet. But Paris was wonderful. And I had a very painful personal mission to perform. Before I left Ottawa -- before I left for Israel -- I went back to Ottawa to spend some weeks with my family. And I have to say, to my shame, that my sister was getting married a week after I was scheduled to depart, and I did not stay for her wedding. That was the discipline 31:00of the movement -- and the shocking insensitivity of her brother. Now (clears throat) one other thing happened which -- (laughs) (sighs) -- before I had left, I was asked to see -- I got a phone call from somebody called Imrich Rosenberg. And I was told that he had been the most recent minister of social affairs in Czechoslovakia before the communists took over in 1948. I didn't know anything about him. And here I was in Ottawa, gadding about with my old friends -- and 32:00some of 'em, the kids that I had led in the youth movement, who were not going to go to Palestine. And I got a phone call, and I said, "Of course." So, I went to see him. And he said, "Look. I have a personal request to make of you. You may not know it, but I was minister of social affairs in Czechoslovakia before the communists took over. I managed to escape, but my wife did not. She is now in prison, and from what I hear, being terribly abused. You're a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir has contacts with all of the communist parties in Europe, because of their" -- actually, that's another aspect of it. They were, at that time, very Stalinist -- very down the road of Stalinist 33:00commitment. They saw Stalin's regime as, you know, the one hopeful oppositionist movement to American imperialism -- again, very naïve. But so, he said, "When you are in -- I hear you're going on aliyah. When you're in Paris -- if you're going to be in Paris -- could you ask your people to see whether they can do -- they have entrée." So, I said, "Of course." So, when we got to Paris, I got in touch with the leadership of our movement. I said, "Look, Imrich Rosenberg is a member of the Zionist youth movement, an important human being. Can you do something for him?" So, they said, We will try. We were in Paris for about ten days. So, I went back, and they said, This is at a level where we can't 34:00intervene -- ministerial level -- and the communists are not going to release her. So, I had to write a letter -- with great pain, because he had -- he was living -- well, by that time, he had established himself in Ottawa, interestingly enough, as a very successful realtor, but a man of great sadness. I will come back to that. Anyway. So, we are now in Marseilles. And Paris, of course, was marvelous. And (laughs) the father of one of the kids I was leading -- I had a wonderful group in New York that I was leading -- aside from my 35:00high-flown editorial role, I was also out in the hustings leading youth groups. And I founded a wonderful youth group out of the High School of Music and Art. These are kids about whom they make movies -- wonderful kids, all very gifted. And the father of one of them was in Paris. And have you ever read "The Adventures of Augie March" by Saul Bellow? Put it down.

CW:Okay.

HG:This is a mutual session. You're not only listening to me, I'm --

CW:Okay!

HG:-- I'm --

CW:I'll write it down.

HG:-- you're getting instruction.

CW:Of course.

HG:Anyway, Augie March is in Europe, postwar Europe, and making a bundle by buying up scrap materiel -- military whatever. Well, the father of this young woman, who was a delightful kid out of the High School of Music and happened to be in Paris, and for obscure reasons, he needed my passport. I didn't ask 36:00questions. He said, "Look, how would you like to go to dinner to Maxim's?" Why not? Maxim, of course, was at the time, one of the posh restaurants. So, here I was, abandoning my socialist instincts to have dinner at Maxim's. I think somehow, he also got me to see the Folies Bergère, with -- at the time, the whole notion of four statuesque nude women doing nothing except standing at the corners of the stage, totally (laughs) irrelevant to the performance, was (laughs) quite an interesting expression of what, you know, the notion of French daring was. I was (laughs) -- anyway. Nowadays, of course, this means nothing if you go to see "Hair," but so that was an interesting moment. When I departed from -- we were staying at a very down-in-the-mouth little hotel -- I have to 37:00tell you, the interesting -- how shall I say it? The Americanization of taste. We were in Europe, and at the time, there were very -- hotels with flush toilets happened to, you know, be of a fairly reasonable -- you know, at least three-star. And our young ladies couldn't -- would not go to a hotel which did not have a flush toilet. And, of course, we were on a very limited budget. And since I was the only French speaker, one of my tasks was to flush out hotels with flush toilets. (laughs) Anyway. So, finally, we -- on our way to Israel -- we went south to Marseilles, and side trips to Toulon. But -- and there, we 38:00confronted the transition camps. This was 1949. There were still masses of Jews moving out of Europe -- the survivors of the concentration camps -- and the North African Jewish community, driven out of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the whole African belt -- and awaiting to board ship. And then, for the first time, I saw what sh'erit ha-pletah -- the residue of the refugees -- looked like. And with these people, we boarded a ship to go to Pal-- to Is-- now, it's Israel. It's now December 1949. And we get on board this ship. And within twenty-four hours, the toilets are completely stuffed and the floors are awash, so we climb 39:00up on the deck. And we spent the -- whatever -- twenty-four, forty-eight hours on deck getting to Israel. And that was a very interesting and important introduction to what it means to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees of wildly assorted backgrounds, some who had never seen a toilet. And what --

CW:What were the camps like? Did you see --

HG:The camps were very, very simple. There were huts with bunks. Families on one side, single people on the other, men, women separated. The French were very, very helpful in that regard. This was a camp at a place called La Ciotat -- ironically, just north of Nice and Cannes -- all these luxury resort towns. We 40:00also took some time to hitchhike to Cannes, and I have a picture of myself on the beach at Nice with a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and cheese, of course, living out the college boy's dream of life at Nice. But the reality of what was going to face us in Israel really struck us in Marseilles. Anyway, we -- on December the 17th, we boarded ship, and on the 19th, in a bitterly cold, rain-driven day, the ship docked in Haifa. And I felt a kind of joy that approached delirium. The shell holes -- the walls were bullet-pocked. And there, of course, were two members of Kibbutz Sasa (clears throat) -- one of them -- both dressed in British Army greatcoats, soaking wet, with a swell of wet wool. 41:00But who cared? So, we got off the ship and they immediately took us to the mitbach hapoalim, which was the workers' kitchen -- you have to remember, our affiliation was to everything non-bourgeois, which at the time was a very, very modest little restaurant with -- I remember -- with wood shavings on the floor to sop up the mud. (laughs) And we had tea and cookies. And I think I defined them last time as "sugared cardboard." And then, we got on the bus to Sasa, which was really an eye-opening trip. I mean, we went up and up and up, through the hills, which got steeper and steeper. Finally, the bus reached the point where, in order to make a turn in the road, it had to go forward and then back up and then make a turn again, and you sat there with your nerves hitched to the 42:00seat. And we got to the kibbutz by nightfall. And here it is a -- in the mountains. And it's on top of a wrecked, abandoned Arab village. And where do I stay? There was no place. Everything was -- we were living in makeshift quarters, in these houses which -- whose walls were plastered with a mixture of mud and manure -- and so that you could see insects crawling out. And I was given the bed of my friend Davy Baum, who was then the governor -- he had naval experience -- the governor of the port of Haifa. And he only came home on weekends, so I had his bed, with unchanged linen, until some place could be found for me. And on weekends, when he came home, some other place was found for 43:00me. But at the time -- you know, it was very -- not only was the moment one of driven rainfall, but then it began to snow, and for three days, it snowed and snowed and snowed. It was -- I think it was a hundred-year snowfall record -- which was wonderful, because I, in my naïveté, and I think I had mentioned this to you -- had brought two pairs of skis, with a conviction that we would soon be skiing at Baalbek, up in the -- in Lebanon, which -- it was a famous ski resort, so that even I knew about it. Meanwhile, we slogged around amid the barely snow-covered rocks of Sasa. Then, I had the -- I was given an opportunity to -- for a week -- to get my bearings and travel to Tel Aviv and to see the country. So, I looked around at the kibbutz, which then was a collection of two 44:00or three prefab huts -- one of them was the dining hall, and a couple of others were for couples and families, and the rest of the kibbutz was scattered amid the abandoned Arab houses. Now, I went off to Tel Aviv, dressed in my -- with my raincoat on top of a -- my fleece-lined jacket, and found that I was in the middle of a lovely Mediterranean (laughs) -- heck of a spring environment. And this is another interesting moment in my experience in Israel. While I was in Winnipeg, I had made friends with the emissary of a rival youth movement, Habonim -- a social democratic, less ideologically-driven and committed movement than ours. And she was a very interesting woman, who came from a very 45:00distinguished family in Israel. Her father was the designer of Israel postage stamps -- of the Israel -- and a well-known figure in architectural circles. And so, she said, "Look" -- and before -- she went back to Israel when the war started in '48 to join her unit. And so, she visited me when I was in New York with my multiple duties as editor and youth leader. And I'll never forget -- when I saw her in New York, we were just good friends. She had had a very interesting -- (sighs) her own personal life was, at the moment, in tatters. One of the experiences she had -- when she was coming as an emissary, she had a shipboard romance, which wrecked her marriage, and her partner was then a 46:00married man who had just finished his service as a pilot in the Israel Air Force -- so it was a figure of romance, but not of commitment. So -- and I, at the time, I was committed to someone else. So, we were -- it was a very close friendship. My -- the kids in the youth movement were younger than me, and so I -- she was, by that time -- I was, what, twenty-four, and she was about the same age. So, she and I became very close friends. And on her way back to Israel, she stopped in New York and we spent a couple of days together. And I'll remember -- and this is germane to what is going to come forward, so don't feel this is a (UNCLEAR) deviation -- a wild -- so she said, "Listen, Haim, when you come to Israel, you'll of course come to visit into my house, so I have to tell you that my father has two wives." So, I said, "Well" -- I said, "People divorce. That's 47:00--" She said, "No, no. My father didn't divorce; he has two wives. So, be prepared." So, abandoning my latent bourgeois tendencies of -- two wives (clears throat) -- I got to Tel Aviv, and in this household was the father, the famous architect; one wife, who was a physician; and the other wife, who led Israel into probably the development of folk dancing. And they had a lovely house, as you would expect, at the edge of the ocean -- a block from the ocean. And at -- you know, at their breakfast table -- I mean, they were speaking English for me, Hebrew, German. I mean, it -- really, the world of sophisticated culture at the 48:00highest level. And I came there just before Purim. So, they said, Haim, we're going to put you into a costume. So, they dragged out a costume of a -- I don't know, a dragoon guard from somewhere, and there I was, all primped up in a costume. And they had a Purim party which everybody in Tel Aviv -- any artistic -- they had Leah Goldberg, a major poet; they had Stematsky, the artist -- I mean, I was agog at who was there. I mean, people -- this was the intellectual, artistic elite of the country. And there I was. I really felt like a provincial. But it was a wonderful moment, and it gave me a sense of life beyond the kibbutz -- which, as it turned out, was confined. I went back, and I was asked to become 49:00the head of field crops. And the young -- one of the young -- there were two -- my friend, who was the previous editor, and the other one, who was a fellow Canadian -- and I'm going, Why is he -- Haim, what is he doing there? I understood when, later on, he wanted to get out of leading the field crop group and dumping it on me. So, that was my first job. And I'll never forget -- my first crop was planted -- we didn't have land that was really arable, because the kibbutz, being on the highest point of Jewish settlement in the country, had very narrow terraces, which we inherited from the previous residents of Kibbutz Sasa. And we were endowed -- at the time, the agricultural notion of what befitted a kibbutz was completely out of concert with where a kibbutz might be. 50:00We were a hilltop kibbutz, so they insisted that we have a herd of cows, but for cows, you need forage -- you know, you need hay. And we had these little terraces, which we decided we were going to plant with apple trees and peaches -- you know, arable -- edible fruits. And the fact that we became probably the producers of the highest-quality McIntosh apples -- we happened to have -- one of the women who was on the trip with me was a graduate of the University of California at Irvine, and she created the finest apple orchards in the country. And eventually, this led on to having a huge -- a controlled-atmosphere storage facility. But meanwhile, we had these miserable little terraces, and in order to produce forage for our herd, we were given temporary land on the coast near 51:00Nahariya. And I'll never forget putting in my first crop -- what a great feeling it was. Talk about eroticism -- you plant seed and you have an erotic experience! And then, I would go down almost weekly to see -- and I'll never forget the grain coming up -- and you plant seed and, my God, it emerges! And then, disaster. The crop was a failure. I hadn't -- we had put down conventional amounts of fertilizer, but the kibbutz where we were housed hadn't told us that that soil was totally exhausted after generations of tobacco culture, and it needed, you know, multiple quantities of fertilizer. So, that was a painful experience. But then, the next year, we were given land in the Negev. Before the kibbutz movement had apportioned to itself -- or the settler movement, the 52:00moshavim [Hebrew: settlements] -- kibbutzim from the north were given areas in the Negev temporarily. And we had an absolute bumper crop. I mean, there was no place to house -- I mean, we poured the seed onto the -- we had a cement platform near our chicken house, and it was just a marvelous experience. That trip had its own little moments. On the way down, I was taking a bus to Tel Aviv, where I was going to meet another one of the kibbutz khevre [group] to go on to the Negev. I took the last bus out of Haifa. And on the bus, I'm drowsing off, and all of a sudden I'm flung into the seat ahead of me. The bus -- there had been a huge truck filled with animals -- cows, I guess -- and the truck 53:00driver and somebody else were standing by the cab, talking. The bus driver -- it was at night already -- didn't see them, plowed right into them. They were killed. People on the side of the bus were killed. And I was sitting at the back of the bus, and all that happened -- I cracked a couple of ribs. And the next thing I know is, my name is in the newspaper as the survivor of this terrible accident. So, that's how I got down to the Negev. And there -- we got down with this little pickup truck -- which is called, by the way, in Hebrew, a "tender [Hebrew: pick-up truck]." There's nothing tender about it, it was a little Ford pickup. And it was immediately -- so we were shown the area where we were given -- allocated the land. Immediately, our truck was commandeered by the Israel Army. There was -- an infiltrator had been shot, and they needed him -- to take 54:00him to the hospital. So, they put him in the back of the truck -- and the first time I saw what a bullet wound looks like going through a human thigh. And (sighs) that, of course, compelled us to do our -- we were going around the clock to plow and to prepare the seedbed, anyway. And it compelled us to work with a STEN gun on the cab, because you could never really know what was going to happen. But that (UNCLEAR) left me with a moment absolutely out of Hollywood. One dawn, I was on the twelve-to-eight shift. As the sun was coming up, there, on the little headland, was a camel with its Arab driver sitting in a pose, you know, that was either biblical or Hollywood. Unbelievable, with the backdrop of 55:00the sun and this camel perched on this little height with its driver. So, these things stay with you forever. Anyway -- so that -- we have this bumper crop, and I feel a little redeemed. And the kibbutz is now facing other questions. The whole question of -- which has never left -- was the moral right to occupy this village. And the question was also -- the biggest mosque in Upper Galilee was in Sasa. And there was a struggle between the army and the kibbutz as to whether the mosque should be blown up. And the mosque -- the army said, We're going to blow up the mosque as a signal to the Arabs that there's no return. And while 56:00the kibbutz was sitting in the dining -- in this prefab dining hall, a huge chunk of the mosque banged into the wall of the dining hall. The army had made its decision. And that became the site of our water tower, at the top of the -- of the (sighs) hill on which the kibbutz is built.

CW:So, how were the relations with the IDF during the --

HG:Oh, listen, we were all -- I was a member of the IDF. We were -- all of us -- we were defined as a "meshek kfar sug alef" -- a border village of the highest category. So, it meant that all of us were in the army, and we didn't have to go -- except for coursework -- to serve the three years in the army. We were in the army all the time. And we had a -- our own kibbutz had its area commander. And 57:00we had our own stock of weapons. And periodically, we would go on courses. So, I would go on -- I went a couple of times to a communications course. Tactical courses. And we used to have maneuvers, which were so realistic. I'll never forget the neighboring -- the -- we had a group of Yemenites living in the next moshav, and they were part of the army. I'll never forget -- I was the commander of a machine gun post, and the army was attacking us. And there was smoke -- and, you know, it was a real -- really a realistic maneuver. And I'm looking for my comrades, and they're cowering in the trench like this -- they're frightened out of their lives. (laughs) And here I am, heroic, with my gun. So, it was very realistic that we were -- we were at the Lebanese border. But these were times 58:00when the -- you know, there was a kind of shift in vocabulary. At this time, the Arabs were sending in what they called mistanenim -- infiltrators -- to lay mines, to steal things. And it was a very tense time, because you really couldn't travel the highways at night. In nineteen-- as late as 1956, for example, the bus going to Sasa was stopped. There was a very sharp curve -- just within -- as you approach Tzfat. We were seventeen kilometers due east of Tzfat. There was a sharp curve, and the Arabs had put boulders and a tree that crossed 59:00the -- the bus stopped. And one of the infiltrators came out and threw a grenade in the bus, which killed one of the bus members, who was six months pregnant -- a lovely woman from a very old, distinguished Jerusalem family. And others on the bus were wounded. And that's one of the reasons for the 1956 war, where the Israelis joined with the British and the French to bring an end to this constant infiltration. I mean, I went to work, for example, one morning, picked up a newspaper -- I was then at the Research Council -- left the kibbutz, working at the Research Council in Jerusalem -- and I pick up a newspaper, and there is a picture of a jeep and the body of my neighbor -- colleague -- sprawled across it, riddled with bullets. He had been setting up the bromine extraction plant -- a brilliant chemist -- setting up the bromine extraction plant, the Dead Sea, 60:00and on the way up, he was murdered. So, in terms of, you know, the sense of unrelieved tension -- right through the -- you know, the '50s. So then, they were mistanenim -- they were infiltrators. And then, they became chablanim -- chablanim was a saboteur. And finally, they became terrorists. So when -- this is with the suicide bombers and the -- when they really began to do impossible things like, you know, killing a wedding party. So, there's been a transition into their -- into the intensity of Arab opposition. But at the time, in Sasa, 61:00there was this question -- you know, the moral right -- which the army decided. They said, you know, This is a military position. It's not just a question of whether you will stay or not. This has to be manned. It is a border security role which you are undertaking. So, we were all in the army. And as I said, I participated in courses. And that was it. So, kibbutz life was very intense -- for me, as I was -- I shouldn't sound so superficial, but it was a great adventure, because I was in a position of authority all the time, whether it was field crops -- then I worked on large-scale projects in land reclamation. And at 62:00the time, we were in a very difficult period of immigrant absorption. They had flooded in literally by the hundreds of thousands, from cultures so remote from anything Western. There was a big transition camp -- it's called a "ma'abarah" -- "l'avor" means "to go over, to transit." So, they had ma'abarot -- with terrible conditions -- these little tin-roofed shacks, terribly hot in the summer, terribly cold in the winter -- absorbing these people trying to find work, education. In order to find work for them, they set up what they called "po'ale dachak" -- this emergency work. And the kibbutzim were asked to accommodate these newcomers. And we were asked if we would take on a group. So, 63:00I said, "Of course." And I'll never forget the day that truck after truck approached the kibbutz. And I always see myself sort of in a film by Fellini, panning down, and you see this little guy with shorts and sandals, and all of a sudden, hundreds of people jump out of trucks, dressed in jallabīyah -- Arab clothes and European clothes. And, of course, I had to organize them to do what I want them to do, which was clearing stones, rebuilding terraces. Some of them didn't even speak Arabic -- not that I spoke Arabic -- they spoke Berber. So, their fellow Jews -- these, from the High Atlas Mountains. So, the Jews from Morocco, which -- you know, more or less cultured -- I said -- you know, I (laughs) -- then I looked at -- there was a tall, handsome man dressed in 64:00immaculate white flannels with two-toned shoes and a white shirt and heavy French black-rimmed glasses. So, I approached him and I said -- in Hebrew, he said, "Not yet." I said, "Français -- vous parlez français [French: French -- do you speak French]?" So -- Oh, wonderful. He was from Tunis. And as it turned out, he had been the secretary to Bourguiba, who was the chairman of the Neo Destour, the group -- the revolutionary group -- that took over Tunisia from France. But he was a Jew, and that didn't matter. He had served the party loyally, but Habib Bourguiba said, "Look." So, he left with the other Jews. But for me, it was a great gift. He spoke French, I spoke French; he spoke Arabic and I spoke Yiddish -- there were Romanian Jews. And little by little, we got 65:00organized. And we had very effective groups working -- removing stones, building terraces. And I got to know Avrum and Ibraim and Makhluf. And it became really an extraordinary experience, to be integrated with this whole new population. Here I am, a Canadian -- you know, with my own background of relative comfort -- and these Jews are being driven out, totally deracinated, and having to create a new life for themselves. And it was extraordinary. I mean, within four or five years, I went back to Tzfat, and then they were -- their kids were all in shorts and all Israelis and all speaking Hebrew. And the country absorbed it. It was extraordinary. So, the kibbutz, for me, was really a great adventure. But, you 66:00know -- and it was in many ways egalitarian, truly. Besides which, it was a self-sustaining community. We had to develop our own school, our own health services -- although we had a resident doctor -- interesting -- from Chile -- a rabid communist, an anti-Zionist who came and became a very close friend of ours, and married one of our friends. And that was the source of a divorce between him and his previous wife. So, romance in the kibbutz was not unlike romance anywhere else, with its own problems, tragedies, efflorescence of love and passion. And you have to see it as a community. So, there we were. We were a growing community. We now had children. We (UNCLEAR) --

CW:So, how'd you meet your wife?

HG:My wife -- I met my wife in New York. She was working in the movement's executive, and I was brought there to edit the magazine. And so, we took an immediate dislike to each other. She was a -- she's a woman with very strong opinions, and she disliked my style intensely. What had happened was, she -- when I was in Winnipeg, she used to send me copies of "Youth and Nation" to distribute. And it was problematic -- so she sent me once a letter, and I remember -- in a grouchy mood, I sent a letter back and corrected her grammar. (laughs) She never forgave me. (laughs) And to this day -- when you meet her, she'll tell you about how I corrected her grammar. But anyway, we were very much drawn to each other, in spite of the fact that we are absolutely, in many areas, 68:00poles apart. She's prose; I'm poetry. She's detail; I'm concept. So, we fit together. And what can I say? I pursued her till she caught me. As you know, all relationships are more complex than can be described. But I want to say, she's a very strong, vital woman with a tremendous sense of responsibility. In the Jewish community, she's known -- if you want to get anything done, ask Yaffa. And in the kibbutz, too. However, in the kibbutz, she became very, very unhappy with the child-rearing practices, which at that time were called "chinoch meshutaf" -- collective education. But the minute you came home with your infant, you put the infant in the nursery to be looked after by a children's nurse. The theory was that you didn't want a child -- remember, we were creating 69:00a youth society -- Mered haben! Revolt against the old! And if you had an objective nurse, the child could not manipulate or be manipulated by bowel movements and that sort of thing. Everything was going to be very objective, so -- and you were not deprived after work; you came and picked up your child. So, from four to six or whatever bedtime was, the child had you for a period of love with -- devoid of any tension and any conflict. My wife immediately -- what happened was, there wasn't room in the children's house. So, we had Naomi with us for the first six weeks. And after that, for my wife to deliver Naomi into the arms of a nurse -- an objective nurse -- proved to be too much. And after three years, it was really the -- I mean, it was ironic, because for me, 70:00everything was just beginning to bloom. We're harvesting the first crops -- and she said, "Look, I can't -- it's just impossible for me to accept this. We have to make a decision. You have to make a decision, because I'm leaving." It was a choice, you know, between the kibbutz ideology or family. So, I left, and picked up my career -- my career in science -- at the Israel National Research Council, which proved to be a wonderful experience, about which I have already told you. And I look back on the kibbutz -- you know, where it took a long time for the kibbutz to forgive -- although I always had close relations with the kibbutz. But as a -- in terms of a collective identity, it took the kibbutz a long time to forgive us. We had abandoned them. And it wasn't until the thirty-fifth 71:00anniversary of the kibbutz -- and I think I mentioned to you that we had now become founders -- that we were welcomed back. And it was very moving. (cries) (pauses) Yeah. (pauses) Christa, you're extorting feelings from me that -- (pauses) -- I shouldn't put the blame on you.

CW:Tell me about it.

HG:Hm?

CW:Tell me about it.

HG:Very difficult. Because -- but my daughter said, "You know, there's been a subtle change in your relations to ima [Hebrew: mom]" -- to my wife -- after the 72:00thirty-fifth -- I didn't have a sense, but my daughter, who suffered terribly when we took her out of the kibbutz -- she cried every night when we were in Jerusalem. Why had she been separated from her group? It took her years. And I don't -- you know, it's very hard to say what the results were. But she also had -- we found out -- cerebral palsy. In the kibbutz, they said, Oh, she has -- she's very strongly left-handed. But my wife said, "No, there's more to it than that." You know, she wasn't walking, she wasn't responding. And finally, we got to see a doctor who recognized it and said, "Cerebral palsy. What have you been waiting for?" So, when we got to Jerusalem, my wife was taking her every day to Hadassah for the beginning of physio- and occupational therapy, which went on 73:00till she was practically in college. And I -- so, that was a very -- you know, the kibbutz, as I told you -- before you asked me about the kibbutz, I wanted to give you the context in which the kibbutz shaped my life. Not only that -- it shaped my life as -- my professional identity. I went off to a college of agriculture and entered the sciences as a consequence. And here I am, Christa -- an old scientist.

CW:(laughs) Well, what has it meant to be -- you know, a founder of this kibbutz since then?

HG:As I said upstairs, these are the two events which made me feel that I was a participant in history. Finding -- being a founder of a kibbutz -- a great -- 74:00it's still a living, very successful community, which helped shape the culture of the country. Made me feel -- you know, I haven't lived outside -- my life has meaning. And the Book Center, which is another very profound achievement. So yeah, it gives me a great sense of gratification -- and the boundless optimism, which you've heard me talk about. I want to give you a little postscript --

CW:Yeah?

HG:-- which -- it also is (sighs) terribly moving. After I finished Cornell -- I told you I went back to school -- I went back to Ottawa to do a postdoc. And one evening, we were invited to a party -- old friends that I assembled. And at the party was Imrich Rosenberg. (sighs) He said, "I want to show you something." He 75:00showed me the letter I had written twenty years ago. (sighs) I think we both broke down. (cries) Anyway, for the time we were in Ottawa, we became very close friends. He'd begun to paint, and I have one of his paintings. And he'd remarried, also -- a survivor -- who just wrote a book -- having survived by being thrown out of a train on the way to Auschwitz -- as a little blond kid who managed to survive as a servant in a Polish farm family. (clears throat) Truda Rosenberg. (pauses) So -- I think that's enough for today.

CW:Yeah. Thank you so much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]