ABSTRACT
I stayed in Sha’ar Hagolan during the summer and autumn of 1939, and then shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe our group moved on to another kibbutz named Ein Shemer, located among orange groves in a valley about midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, a few miles from the Mediterranean. Our status was still that of apprentices, but after less than a year in Ein Shemer our ways parted, Naomi and I joined Kibbutz Shamir near Haifa as members, and when Shamir split we went to Hazorea. There I had begun my kibbutzic career and I was to end it there in 1944. Thus, in my five years in a kibbutz, I went through the various stages of apprenticeship, candidacy, and membership. I soon realized that one kibbutz was not like another, that there were basic differences between these communities, partly because of the age of the settlers, but also as a consequence of the ethnic-social origin of the members. In any case, the kibbutz of 1940 about which I am now going to write was quite different in most respects from the kibbutz of 1990. It had already moved far from the commune of the very early days (1920), even though in 1940 a mere twenty years had passed since the foundation of the earliest communes, which were something like an extended family.
