We Were The Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz

by Stephen L Rozman, Sondra Silverston (Translator)

Overview

The beautiful, understated memoir by bestselling Israeli author Yael Neeman detailing the intimate, collective memories of children raised on the kibbutz.

The kibbutz is one of the greatest stories in Israeli history. These collective settlements have been written about extensively over the years: The kibbutz has been the subject of many sociological studies, and has been praised as the only example in world history of entire communities attempting, voluntarily, to live in total equality. But there's a dark side to the kibbutz, which has been criticized in later years, mainly by children who were raised in these communities, as an institution which victimized its offspring for the sake of ideology.

In this spare and lucid memoir, Neeman--a child of the kibbutz--draws on the collective memory of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who grew up in a kibbutz during their height and who intimately share their memories with her.

We Were the Future is more than merely a compelling personal account of growing up in the kibbutz movement; it is an unstintingly honest examination of the perils of pioneering and a new lens through which to see the history of Israel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468313864
Publisher:	The Overlook Press
Publication date:	10/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Yael Neeman was born in Kibbutz Yehiam, Israel in 1960. She studied at Tel Aviv University and participated in the International Writing Program (IWP) in Iowa City through the Fulbright Foundation. She is the author of two novels, Orange Tuesday and Rumors About Love, and a collection of stories, The Option. We Were the Future, originally published in Hebrew, was a number one bestseller in Israel and has been translated into French, Polish, and Dutch.
Sondra Silverston has translated fiction by contemporary Israeli authors Etgar Keret, Savyon Liebrecht, and Aharon Megged, among others.

Editorial Reviews

Neeman, an accomplished editor and novelist, writes about her kibbutz childhood with an imagistic, spare insightfulness. The result, translated by Sondra Silverston, is a rarely intimate portrait of the unusual collaborative communities on which Israel was founded.

The Jewish Daily Forward

We Were the Future is ultimately a compassionate memoir about a bygone life . . . Neeman does a masterful job of capturing the ennui that set in between childhood and adulthood.”

Judy Bolton-Fasman - Tablet Magazine

Readers curious about life on a kibbutz in the
1960s will love this poetic autobiography. Readers who have never wondered about life on a kibbutz should read this book anyway, as they will be well rewarded . . . The history of the movement and her own kibbutz are deftly woven together, and readers come away with a sense of this not as merely an autobiography of an individual woman but as the story of the hopes, dreams, and struggles of an entire movement. A spare, and startling book.

Christine Engel - Booklist

Extraordinarily affecting . . . Ne'eman captures both the regimentation and the romance [of the kibbutz] in a dreamy, associative, dry style that forms an exquisite counterpoint to both.

Jewish Ideas Daily

Neeman’s masterpiece is a marvelous reflection on life in the Kibbutz, a depiction of a lost world that does not fall into the trap of being too nostalgic or of repeating the clichés on life in the Kibbutz.

Dr. Vered Karti Shemtov

Both beautifully lyric and devastatingly illuminating.

The Times of Israel

A powerful reminiscence about the fall of Israel’s most idealistic experiment . . . A revealing, inside look at an often-romanticized social experiment,We Were the Futureis as much an elegy as it is an exposé, which suits the movement that many outside of Israel identify as one of the country’s most curious creations.”

Washington Independent Review of Books

A graceful, non-political account of living collectively . . .The memoir’s eloquent, almost lyrical, tone will draw young readers as well as their elders.

Manhattan Book Review

Sept. 8, 2016
One woman’s remembrances of youth in the kibbutz.Neeman was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Yehiam, a particularly vulnerable and nonarable piece of land when it was first settled in the 1940s. The author describes not only her own experiences of growing up in kibbutz culture, but also the violent and activist story behind the concept. In a socialist and humanist experiment quite removed from any religious connection to Judaism, the founders of the kibbutz were dedicated to communal living, which included the group-rearing of all children. Neeman, like all of her peers, only saw her parents for just under two hours per day. The rest of the time they lived in tiny communal groups—the author’s was called the Narcissus Group—which did everything together, from sleeping to showering, without regard for gender or individuality. While many of her early memories are bucolic and whimsical, there is a continual contrast to the utter violence into which the kibbutz was born and the threat under which it still lived throughout Neeman’s childhood. Located near the Lebanese border, Kibbutz Yehiam spent much of 1948 warding off sieges by the Arab Liberation Army, while a lack of food and water were also constant threats. Later, only through backbreaking labor was the land reclaimed from its original rocky character, allowing crops of bananas and other foods. Neeman left the kibbutz at age 12 to enter a collective educational institution, another twist in her story. Though the author is stoic in her attitude toward her youth, it is clear that the experiment in collective education left the children with great emotional and social gaps. Her narrative leaves an impression that she is still struggling to understand how this unusual upbringing shaped and affected her. An eye-opening look at a fascinating era in Israeli history and what happens when a child is part of a sociopolitical experiment.

Kirkus Review