Yotvata

On the Kibbutz the volunteers were treated with benignity. Sometimes they served as a distraction for marriages that were getting ground down by habit and routine. They provided new intrigues for the community, or worse, caused episodes of domestic violence that pulled in the local police. They could embarrass the kibbutz.

But the volunteers were almost always nubile Scandinavian Hebrew stutterers, willing to accept the original radicalism of the settlers and happy to work at menial jobs that the Members no longer felt obligated for. The Members felt their cherished ideals had been realized a long time ago, and they were content now that other people, either the tourists/volunteers, or salaried men from the surrounding Arab villages, could clean the toilets, pick oranges, and look after the original Founders who were now forgotten in their old-age home and only brought out on special occasions commemorating National This or That Day.

An English volunteer named Sarah arrived in April of that year, and an American named Caroline came in June. They had been assigned to Yotvata, a real factory-town type of kibbutz in the southern Negev, on the border of the Sinai near Eilat, that produced the most delicious yogurt and cheeses distributed all over the country. Because it was a relatively young kibbutz that ran a lucrative business, and because it had been founded by English-speakers, the whole package made a fine impression on a young woman who might decide to stay -- who might actually find a man there and produce more Members for the kibbutz (of prime concern since many of the young people had lost the revolutionary ardor of their grandparents and were mostly leaving for Tel Aviv). Of course Sarah didn't care which kibbutz she was assigned to, she had been jobless for 2 years in Manchester, so that now it just seemed miraculous that an adult could join a society that would look after all her physical needs, and demand so little in return. She only mentioned to the Association coordinator, “you mean I won’t be milking cows? “

But when Caroline arrived in the volunteers’ trailer compound in June, she said to herself, "What a motley crew of rejects from their own countries!". There was a pair of young attractive Swedish women, but there was also a surprisingly old American man in his early 30’s, who had been a roadie for the Rolling Stones. He held court and the others fawned. He professed to being more Jewish, in the sense of knowledge and observance, than was probably the case. There was also a smallish, dark, oily-skinned South American man who wanted to sleep with her on the night of her arrival; he seemed a sybarite and could not positively be interested in her for anything else. And there were other assorted Searchers, she would compare experiences with them over Maccabee beers in the bomb shelter that was fixed up for that purpose, with U2 blaring out of the sound system every night.

Caroline didn’t meet Sarah because Sarah was no longer there. Shortly after Sarah started in the volunteer group she had met a kibbutznik named Mike and set up house with him. They were just then discussing a trip to Manchester to introduce him to her family. Sarah’s non-Jewish blondness and bubbling enthusiasm had attracted enough attention so that she was absorbed effortlessly into the stream of the community. The kibbutz management was stroking her and her fiance, petting them with encouragement so that they could become future managers of the factory. Mike was not religious enough to care that she wasn’t Jewish, and he had excelled at University without wanting to abandon Yotvata. Sarah had a job in the little Kibbutz grocery store, a trusted position at the cash register-- fortunately not a new skill she had to learn.

Caroline reported to her work in the parking lot of the factory. She wondered, where did the dairy come from ? All she knew was the source of the plastic crates, the holders for little yogurt containers 10X10 that made up her job. They came off big semis; and she had to load them on hand-trucks so that they could be loaded onto two conveyor belts that started out there in the lot. As she stood in front of the belts, in a miasma of hot, sweet yogurt smells, a truck was on each side of her. She had to take a crate in each hand and push them onto the belt. She had to do this for the entire work shift, lasting 3 and a half hours. Her glasses steamed up, her thin arms were shot thru with fatiguing strain, she had plenty of time to muse about why she had attended an Ivy League college. After the first day she felt like she had been on a canoe trip and paddling in the wrong way. As she lay on her back that night and listened to the drunken crew outside her trailer, she couldn’t feel her hands although there was a dull pain radiating somewhere in her right shoulder.

The summer in that oasis was predictable, it never rained during the season. In her free hours after dinner, Caroline liked to walk down the sandy sidewalks to the end of the road, past the cultivated cactus landscaping and beyond the final street lamp to the darkness of the desert that was wrapped around the ordered little houses and meeting halls. She hoped to see Ibex or some kind of dramatic fauna (were they even in Israel? she wasn’t sure and wanted to visit the little library tomorrow). The neat border of sidewalk and the lamplight might have warned them away. There was an incongruous silence over the hills of sand and stone that she strained to see into, a holy emptiness out there that pricked her breath and almost sucked her off the corner.

A problem with the desert was the sand tracked into her trailer every day, the impossibility of ever sweeping it all out again.