Old stone and socialism

Hedva, a distant cousin of mine,  wasn't quite what I expected as she honked her horn in the car park at Binyamina station near Haifa.  Dressed in sunglasses, a tennis visor and sweatshirt, she reminded me of the sort of American tourist you try to avoid talking to at the London eye. Unlike Norma from New Jersey though, Hedva is a bit different. She had the sort of upbringing that might have come straight from the pages of a manual of socialist living.  Brought up as the responsibility of the commune, living in a children's house from a young age, little private property, communal dining room, laundry..etc it wasn't quite the same.  Now though, Hedva drives me to her large home, outside the kibbutz, filled with pictures of foreign trips, the electric piano, and view overlooking the Jezreel valley with it's squares of blue greenhouse covers that look like perfectly manicured pools of water.  Socialism isn't what it used to be but neither of us seem to worry about it.  Her husband works in Israel's version of silicon valley, and her son is the youngest of three boys who have just left the army.  Her relief shows.

On the way here, she drove through a small village made up of pale stone houses set on a hill overlooking the valley.  We stop at one overflowing with purple spring flowers and a date carved above the doorway '1889'.  This is where her parents in law live.  Where the family moved from the US in the 1890s.  Where they jumped from new york with its Carnegie and trams, to swamps, malaria, and a bunch of goats.  A bit like moving to the amazon now. 

Nowadays, predictably, the village is real estate heaven, with plots snapped up after funerals, and rows of jasmine and fig trees planted by new immigrant gardeners. The cypresses still grow in the same spots though. 

After black muddy coffee and dates, I’m driven over to her father’s place in Kibbutz Hazorea.  As soon as we enter it it's not just the smell of cows that hits me.  Or the silence.  There's a haze.  People call it 'shalva' tranquility.  Perhaps it's more in my mind, but to this city girl it's a long way from getting on the tube, running from the bus and finding a parking spot in crouch end. The whir of bicycle wheels greets us.  Perhaps it's memories of what things used to be.  (at this point I should mention that Kibbutzim are not what they were.  Communal ideals have become 'pay as you go living' with charges for all the kibbutz services, people with external jobs.  But it's still more shared than most of us.)

We walk in to the house of my father's cousin.  Like my father he has bright blue eyes and the same way of asking difficult questions.  He moves effortlessly from family feuds, how much people earn and what exactly your mother does during the day.  (we've already covered the why aren't you married thing..)

But it's a useful trip.  We talk of the clothes factory in Plovdiv my grandmother’s brothers used to run.  the one that switched from making underwear (very good underwear) to uniforms for the Bulgarian army.  It meant that unlike any other jew, the family was not subject to anti jewish curfew regulations. 

Of there's the story where the jews of Plovdiv were taken to the Jewish school, carrying their bags and told to wait.  Possibly for transportation to Auswizch.  So they waited.  Locked together in a big hall.  At the end of the day they were just sent back home. Lives saved by the protests of parliament members, the priests, the king.  

I take a few photos but no one likes to talk much about the war.  Who does.  On the way out we smell the apple blossom and look back as the rows of houses, looking up at the road ahead, the old bungalows superimposed on the brand new toll road above.  Life, death and saving lives.  Sometimes it all seems just so prosaic on the surface.