Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film by Ranen Omer-Sherman (review)

Ranen Omer-Sherman's writing on Israeli society has always had something unique about it: it is erudite, but not lofty; critical, but not detached; it highlights important themes without perpetuating clichés. Indeed, the careful and sometimes overtly painful manner in which Omer-Sherman engages his subjects of inquiry often recalls the interaction that occurs in relationship counseling: pathos is balanced by honesty, and even love. His latest book, Imagining the Kibbutz, follows this same pattern of therapeutic engagement, tracing how the kibbutz, "like any other human institution," has "evolved in some ways and devolved in others" (7). Omer-Sherman, an Israeli-American and former kibbutznik whose insider-outsider experiences inform the narrative trajectory of the book, acknowledges that he felt compelled to compose it "part out of a sense of dismay and even a degree of anger at how rapidly the kibbutz's extraordinary achievements are fading into mythic irrelevance" (ibid.).

The book is structured chronologically, but it contains asynchronous meta-level analyses that accompany and substantially enrich each section. For instance, chapter 1 examines the works of writers such as David Maletz, Shlomo Reichenstein, Moshe Shamir, and S. Yizhar—early kibbutz authors whom Omer-Sherman refers to as "writers who inaugurated some of the first antiheroes in the literature of the Yishuv and the early years of the Israeli state" (15)—alongside later selections of thought-provoking contemporary memoir and literary or sociohistorial criticism that serve to add nuance and context to those early writers' depictions of the kibbutz. It also incorporates analyses of writers rarely discussed in the same vein, such as the seminal Arthur Koestler, who apparently only lived for ten days in a kibbutz (Heftziba), but for whom the kibbutz encapsulated all that was meaningful in the early Zionist ethos. Omer-Sherman presents a nuanced profile of Koestler's novel Thieves in the Night (which has long been eclipsed by that author's magnum opus, Darkness at Noon), comparing and contrasting the book's "morally troubling" support for terrorism as a means of expelling the British from Mandate Palestine with other, similar works on the same theme, such as Leon Uris's ever more popular Exodus. Correctly affirming that the "Zionist socialist revolution" is unfailingly intertwined with kibbutz history, Omer-Sherman highlights in chapter 1 how "reading the literature of the kibbutz can bring us profound insights into the ways in which ideology responded to historical contingency" (24) in this pre-state phase of the kibbutz's existence.

In chapter 2, Omer-Sherman returns to the deliciously subversive authors and themes that he has treated at length elsewhere (notably, in his Israel and Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006]), such as those who minimize or even lampoon "the heroic stature of the Sabra" (69), turn revered biblical archetypes on their heads, or highlight ideological hypocrisies with "disturbing moral force" (70). Omer-Sherman provides fresh insights into canonical works by "Generation of the State" authors such as Amos Oz, Avraham Balaban, Nathan Shaham, and others in light of recent interviews, ongoing scholarship, and changing geopolitical realities. The contribution of chapter 2 is to showcase, especially through the prism of the work of Oz, how "the kibbutz serves as a stage for [the] critique not merely of the utopian imagination but of the entire Zionist nationalist endeavor as well" (70).

Chapters 3 and 4 shed new light on the work of writers who maintain "ethnic outsider" status in the Zionist enterprise (such as that of Atallah Mansour, a Christian Arab-Israeli, and Iraqi-born Eli Amir, one of the first Sephardic Israeli writers of acclaim) or those whose preferred genres (such as those employed by Batya Gur and Savyon Liebrecht, mystery and feminist-focused, respectively) have frequently been excluded from academic discussions of literary portrayals of the kibbutz. In these chapters, Omer-Sherman convincingly galvanizes readers to broaden their notions of...