Book Review: We Were the Future

“Our parents didn’t know anything about our lives and we didn’t know anything about theirs,” Neeman writes. Grown-ups were baffling — if not downright neglectful. Affection, compliments and applause were “bourgeois”, so banned. 

Kids interpreted things their own way. Weekly movie night was always delayed for wordless arguments between adult survivors wanting the window open and others wanting it shut. “Somehow we all accepted the explanation… offered by one kid to another: Anyone who was in the camps or holed up in a cramped hiding-place needed to open; anyone who was in an open area or set upon by dogs had to close. We would wait.”

At 12, they advanced to the kibbutz’s off-site “Educational Institution”, where learning was supposed to happen naturally. Instead, anxiety and apathy took hold, as teens endlessly pondered the meaning of life and, if given a task, did the opposite. “We were ignoramuses”.

The story goes only a bit further than the end of school in the 1970s and I wondered how Neeman overcame its lacunae. Kibbutz education may be dead, but deliberately limited curricula are not extinct. This Yehiam example stands not just for all kibbutzim, but raises questions about social engineering imposed on the children of the ultra-religious, too. 

Hester Abrams is Project Leader for the Willesden Cemetery House of Life and a former Jewish Book Week director