Free When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

supposed to be utopia.”
    “Did Meier tell you that?”
    “He said that was what they were building.”
    “He’s such a romantic. He’s an old-country type. It will be better here when people like Meier stand aside and let the next generation take over. Our parents are the most ideological people who have walked the earth. It’s senseless. Pragmatism is the future.”
    “I’ve just arrived. I don’t see what I could contribute.”
    “To be frank, I don’t know either. I wonder what you’re doing here in the first place. What’s the point of someone like you on a kibbutz? When you dreamed of studying art in London and couldn’t, was it your aim instead to spend the rest of your life washing floors and disinfecting urinals? You think it’s hot now? Just wait. I sound unkind but I’m speaking the truth. You don’t fit here and you never will. It’s just a romantic dream you have.”
    “Where would I go?”
    “To one of the cities. To Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.”
    “And what would I do there?”
    “I don’t know. Get a job. There are always things to do.”
    “What about you?”
    “Absolutely I will leave. Maybe I’ll come back, but only when I’m ready. I’m going to read Freud and Jung and Adler.”
    “Aren’t they just more old-country types, like Meier?”
    “It depends on the use you make of their ideas.”
    “How would you use them?”
    “To understand how your enemy is thinking. To get inside their minds. In the long run, when we have our own country, we’ll need everything a country has—an army, for example, and an intelligence service.”
    “Spies?”
    “Yes. You would make a good spy, by the way, if you could do away with your sentimentality.”
    “What do you mean? What do you know about me?”
    “You are a girl who feels herself divided and you don’t like it. You want to be a whole person, to mend what you think are fractures in your personality and you seek to do it in this romantic dream of the radiant tomorrow. Why bother? Do you really want to be the new Jew that Meier and the others want to create, which is some fantasy from a poster about collectivization in the Soviet Union in the 1920s? We used to have a poster like that on the wall when I was growing up.”
    “My uncle had them too.”
    “Then you know what I mean. Men with big muscles and women with bodies not much different. Not a type of woman Meier is himself attracted to, of course. If we do have a new Jew he will be exactly what we want him to be and he will be dedicated to more than growing a bunch of bananas.”
    “How are you going to do that? Make the new Jew the way you want?”
    “We have a library here. Have you been to it? At first it had one book. A Russian encyclopedia. You didn’t just fall asleep when you opened it,the book itself was half asleep. Now we can vote for which books we wish to include and we order them. It takes months for them to arrive but they come in the end. I am the only person who is interested in psychology so if I am sparing, and don’t request a book too often, I am unopposed. As a result, we have two books by an American called John B. Watson. From him I have learned that we can discard introspection. All behavior is determined. Behind every response lies a stimulus. You just have to find the stimulus. And by manipulating the stimulus you can alter the response so it’s possible to do away with all neurosis such as sexual deviance which can be cured. It’s interesting, isn’t it?”
    “Do you think it’s possible,” I said, “for there to be a new kind of woman?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, with the new science, anything is possible. We can be what we want.”
    Something occurred to me. “What if you like your neurosis? If you want to be a homosexual?”
    “That isn’t logical. Who would choose to be unhappy?” And it was true. The homosexuals who hung around in Soho did not seem to be happy though it was possible that this was