"Israeli writer Shaham explores the beams and pilings of a special mode of Zionist life--that of the kibbutz--and, especially in the first and third novellas here, lays out the psychologies of some of the pioneers with almost case-file (if undramatic) precision. In "S/S Cairo City," a delegate to a 1939 Geneva Zionist convention writes a series of letters to a lover, another delegate, who has left (disastrously) to return to Poland. As Hitler throws shadows which many of the Zionists are not yet ready to accept, they are nevertheless grateful to jam aboard a Palestine-bound Egyptian ship out of Marseilles; on the ship, Shaham probes the skepticisms of men-ideologues being turned into plain victims by what they're fleeing. ("Kuperberg spoke about the congress. He was not at all impressed with certain speeches that I found deeply moving. He said Zionism tends to be like manna. It gives the Western Jew a taste of Yiddishkeit, while to the Eastern Jew it holds forth a promise of Europe.") The last novella--"The Salt of the Earth"--is about an old kibbutznik's first trip to America--and seems like an ironic variation on the opening story; New York literally kills, the old man, hostile to every vision of social life for which he's striven back at home (and knows he's losing there, too). And the central, title novella is where Shaham shows his hand at deeper narrative: a bookish young kibbutz woman becomes erotic guardian over her married neighbor's clandestine love life--as the situation of universal daily sharing builds up such an edifice of public virtue that private weakness becomes downfall, destruction. Like Amos Oz, whose subject matter is similar, Shaham is delicate, historical, unillusioned, undogmatic; Oz's poetry is lacking here, but Shaham may have the edge in social perspicacity."-- Kirkus

The years 1909-2009 marked a century of kibbutz life-one hundred years of achievements, challenges; and creative changes. The impact of kibbutzim on Israeli society has been substantial but is now waning. Contributors discuss the hopes, goals, frustrations, and disappointments of the kibbutz movement They also examine reform efforts intended to revitalize the institution and reinforce fading kibbutz ideals. The various studies presented in this book clarify the dynamism of the kibbutz institution and raises questions about the ways in which residential arrangements throughout the world manage change.

An informative memoir of kibbutz life that reveal a piece of Israel's early story that should not be forgotten.

"In August 1970, David Biale, a 21-year-old American Jewish student, arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel's Bet She'an Valley as a volunteer. There, he met Rachel Korati, nine days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They began an intense dialogue about how a secular Jew might be Jewish and what the role of Israel and kibbutz ought to be in modern Jewish life. They also found a common language in the counter-culture of the 1960s to which both were drawn. Upon David's return to university studies in Berkeley and Rachel's first steps into independent adulthood - living in a town near Tel Aviv and working as a youth movement counselor -- the two commenced a correspondence in which they continued their intellectual and ideological discussions from the summer, engaging Jewish sources on the one hand, and contemporary events on the other. Gradually, the letters became more intimate and so began an epistolary romance, which one might associate more with the nineteenth century and which would be inconceivable in today's world of texting and email. Over the next two years, the correspondence continued, often on a daily basis. Twice, David's plans to come to Israel were dashed. The two struggled to hold onto a relationship composed primarily of written words. In the fall of 1971, Rachel was drafted into the Israeli Army and David had his own brush with the American draft in the last phase of the Vietnam War. Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters opens a rare window into the lives and thoughts of two passionate young people, trying to find their identities and life trajectories in the tumultuous early 1970s. By turns philosophical and playful, poetic and prosaic, idealistic and uncertain, pensive and erotic, this jointly-written memoir is a coming-of-age story in Israel after the Six Day War and in America in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The book is organized around the 258 letters the authors exchanged, a correspondence that takes readers back into a different age, half a century ago." --