Educational Media Reviews Online

These are grandmothers' stories, guaranteed to fascinate as well as inform and to cause viewers to reconsider the myths of the "good old days.” That the grandmothers are Israeli pioneers who settled in kibbutzim long before Israel was established makes their recollections more exotic and interesting.

Filmmaker Lilach Dekel narrates. Israeli-born, she lives in New York and is seen in numerous cuts of the city's notable sites, but this film is not about her or New York. She expresses great love for the home and family she left behind, especially her grandmother, who still lives on the kibbutz. She finds a Hebrew book titled Women of the Kibbutz, which sparks her desire to interview the women, now advanced in years, and hear what happened directly from them. She wants to reveal the untold history—the "herstory"—of early Jewish settlement days.

Grandmother Dekel, in her 90s, is one of a few elderly women interviewed who came to the Biblical land of milk and honey early in the 20th century, when it was all swamp and desert, devoid of agriculture, settlements, or anything else resembling human habitat. They recall the pain of parting from loving families who sheltered and indulged them, suffering bouts of malaria and typhoid, living in primitive huts, forced to share every scrap of clothing, forbidden to take gifts, and working at hard physical labor from dawn to dark. As a modern Israeli used to a different lifestyle, Ms. Dekel is hard-pressed to visualize it, but is moved that they endured every hardship to create the Israel she knows.

Acknowledging that their Zionist ideals helped them overcome terrible conditions, lack of food, clothing, and adequate shelter, the interviewees also explain it was not all unrelenting work. They danced the Hora at night around bonfires, snuck off to be alone, and got married with nothing but a song (the "Internationale") for a ceremony. They struggled with their male compatriots for equal status, despite ideological lip service paid to it. Women had to beg to do guard duty like men and work in the fields instead of laundries and kitchens. They remembered the burdens of absorbing later waves of immigrants, when married couples were assigned a "third"—a new immigrant—to live with them in their tiny private room, behind a flimsy curtain. Particularly poignant was the kibbutz's communal childcare, where parents had almost no rights and minimal contact with their children, even as babies. More than one grandmother recounted sneaking into the nursery—off limits to parents—to make certain their babies were all right.

Arabs are shown solely in a positive light, helping new Jewish kibbutzniks ashore in Jaffa. No mention is made of violence between Arabs and Jews. One grandmother recalls how she thought, upon seeing the Arabs that she had gone back in time thousands of years to the days of the Bible. Technically, the piece is varied and interesting, combining Ms. Dekel's interviews, shot in Israel, with her New York clips and archival footage from Palestine/Israel between about 1915 and 1950. It does not always move smoothly from place to place or subject to subject, but it is easy to follow. Ms. Dekel is not a master filmmaker yet, but she is getting close. Most of all, the grandmothers' testimonies are riveting, documenting a period in Israeli history akin to the U.S.'s Colonial Virginia and the Wild West, put together. The material is useful for women's studies and social experimentation as well as the more obvious Israeli history, kibbutz development, and/or (nonreligious) Jewish studies.

Recommended.