Free When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant Page A

because they always had the police breathing down their necks.
    Talking to Leah was like looking through a sheet of glass. Everything was crystal clear and I was exhilarated. She
was
the new kind of woman herself, the kind who thought with her brains, not her womb; who took no notice of hairstyles but wanted more than a life of rural servitude; who sized people up and recognized them for what they were; who knew what she wanted and how to get it; who did not live through men.
    “But despite everything you say,” I told her, “I still want to be a Jew in a Jewish land.”
    “What do you think a Jew is? Am I a Jew, for example?”
    “Of course.”
    “How? I have no religion, just the same as you. The British call us Jews to distinguish us from the Arabs but when the British are gone, then who will we be? It is always other people who define what a Jew is. Whenever someone asks, what’s a Jew, they’re posing a slippery question. In Germany before the war there were Jews with blond hair and blue eyes. Who was saying they were Jews? Non-Jews. Did
they
think they were Jews? Maybe not. Maybe they would have been happy to forget about the whole thing. When we have our own state people will enter here as Jews but then we will remodel them and they will be turned into something else.They will be citizens of a country and that is an entirely different matter. Everyone knows what a citizen is. It’s someone who holds or is entitled to a passport. And when that happens, all our troubles will be over.”
    Leah was right. I didn’t belong there and I was bored. Apparently it was possible for utopia to induce ennui, which the books Uncle Joe gave me to read had never mentioned. Perhaps if I had been there at the inception of the kibbutz, in the days when women still shimmied with red scarves tied around their hips and the men had formed human pyramids and everyone had danced for the sheer delight of being alive, I could have subsumed my identity into its common purpose. In two weeks, I had six lovers to try to make Meier jealous, make him notice me, but that didn’t work.
    I lay on the ground as they pumped away on top of me, wondering why I was aroused when I thought of Meier on my own, but felt like a lump of meat when a young and thrusting sexual organ was actually inside me. I went through all that dreary boredom for him, the fumbling hands, the jerky spasms, the wetness sliding down into my shorts an hour late. My reward was for him to say, “You are very popular, I hear. Good. You’re young. Enjoy yourself.”
    And that, I realized, seemed to be that. There was no future here for my search for the liberation of the spirit and there was no future in being attracted to Meier. And because I was only twenty and had not yet had my heart broken, I simply stopped being attracted. How easy it is to recover when you are young.
    When I did, my thoughts turned away from the kibbutz and I began to wonder what lay beyond its fields and what the town was like on the other side of the lake.
    I did not tell Meier I was leaving. I packed my Selfridge suitcase and arranged a lift with Gadi who was going to Haifa with a shopping list of items he wanted to try to buy from a certain British corporal who had set up a black-market shop in a hut on the Jaffa Road and usually had blankets, primus stoves, petrol, picks and shovels and fire extinguishers available, pilfered from stores.
    Driving out of the kibbutz and skirting the perimeter of the lake towards Tiberias, the world I had known for the past six weeks dissolved into vapor, like Brigadoon. I regarded it if not as a false start, at least as an overture. It had not been a complete waste of time. I now had some command of Hebrew and was sexually experienced. I had a tan, which went well with my dark hair. Oddly, my breasts seemed to have grown a little, and my brassiere strained uncomfortably. I could feel the weight of them in my hands. I abandoned to the common storeroom the shorts and