momentarily. “Listen,” she said sternly, pointing first to me, “you
being Jewish or not, and youbeing an expert on Jewish cinema mean
nothing to me. What matters is that you show up for work, and that
you behave yourselves. Got it? Most people leave here with good
memories and a full heart, but some leave here with a footprint on
their tuchus. I hope you two will be part of the first group, because we
have no room for crazy drunks and people who don’t want to work.
Kibbutzim were built on strong ideals, and you are guests, but we
expect you to live up to these ideals. Got it?”
We both nodded. “Okay,” she said, “Let’s take a tour.”
It was a beautiful place, and I was astonished to find that it was
almost entirely self-sufficient. Most of the food was farmed on the
grounds, there were extremely inexpensive stores, all sorts of creative
rooms for music, drama, painting, woodworking, and so on. There
were large athletic fields and an indoor stadium, tennis and
basketball courts, a gym and a running track. There was an
enormous, Olympic-sized swimming pool, a library, an attractive
cafeteria, a disco, a pub, a movie theater, and so on. It was a world in
itself, really. I figured that there would be at no shortage of things to
occupy my time, and seeing as how we were only meant to work a few
hours a day, provided a stipend, room and board and things like mail
and laundry were free, I figured we’d stumbled on to a pretty good
deal. Yippee agreed, and tried to get me to go check out the pub, but
I convinced him to start off slow. I liked having him around and
didn’t want him to get the boot right away.
After the tour, Anat made us fill out a lot of paperwork and
disclaimers, and then took us over to the medical clinic, where we
were given a routine physical and a blood test. She explained to us
that they had to be careful that there were no illnesses present since
some of us would be doing strenuous labor, and they didn’t want to
be responsible. It made sense to me, after all, we were covered by the
kibbutz medical insurance, and such a thing was pretty routine. She
also told us that because of the worldwide spread of AIDS, they had
to administer blood tests to make sure no one was carrying HIV into
the kibbutz. They were safe with me because I took an HIV test before
I left America that came out negative, and to be honest, I found those
brash, gun-toting Israeli girls kind of intimidating and anyway I
wasn’t looking for romance.
The next day, I started my work in the hatchery. My job was to
inspect the newly-hatched chicks and put the good ones in boxes. The
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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