Mourning a Father Lost
A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered
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- 44,99 €
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- 44,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Returning to the kibbutz of his childhood to attend his father's funeral, Avraham Balaban confronts his buried yet still intensely painful childhood memories. Comparing the kibbutz of today with that of his early years, the author weaves together two interrelated stories: a sensitive artist growing up in the intensely pragmatic world of Kibbutz Huldah and the rise and fall of a grand yet failed social experiment. As he moves through the seven days of sitting shivah for his father, Balaban experiences an expanding cycle of mourning—for self, family, the kibbutz, and Israel itself. With a poet's keen voice, Balaban pens a poignant, frank portrait of the emotional damage wrought by the kibbutz educational system, which separated children from their parents, hoping to establish a new kind of family, a nonbiological family. Indeed, he realizes that he is mourning not the physical death of his father, but the much earlier death of the father-child bond. Only the unwavering love of his remarkable mother rescued him. Readers will see the kibbutz movement, and Israel in general, with new eyes after finishing this book.
In the process of unearthing his earliest memories, Balaban meditates on the mechanism of memory and the forces that shape it. Thus, he examines the varied layers—familial, societal, and national—that establish individual identity. During the shivah, he discovers the tremendous power of words in shaping one's world, on the one hand, and their redemptive power on the other.
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The death of his father led Balaban to return home to Israel to mourn but when he arrived home to the kibbutz where he'd been raised, he realized that he was mourning more than the loss of his parent. As he recounts in this deeply felt, sometimes painful memoir, he was also mourning the lack of emotion his father displayed and the communal child-rearing system he believes creates adults who "evince the selfishness of people who never got enough protection and security." For most of the 20th century, kibbutz kids lived in children's houses and only saw their parents for a few hours at a time. Balaban, a poet and literary critic who has long taught in the United States, effortlessly weaves past and present, allowing the reader to travel with him as he recounts his childhood while mourning a father who embodied the words "emotionally absent." His loving mother, on the other hand, was the author's saving grace. The book is heavy, as Balaban finds little happiness in either past or present. He's shocked, for example, to find old love letters written by his parents. But his lyrical voice ("The prolonged stay in my childhood kibbutz is turning me into a flute in which all the songs of my childhood keep resounding") and his honest criticism of the kibbutz's social experiment will pull readers in to this elegy not only for a father but for the slow death of the socialist kibbutz dream. B&w photos.