Customer Reviews

Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood Remembered

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Mr.Balaban's honest look at his own experience as a product of the kibbutz, allows the non kibbutznik reader to confirm what was intuitive; that the utopian experiment of the kibbutz has gone awry, much in the way other utopian experiments of a more grandiose scale based on the premise of a "new man" have gone. Mr.Balaban also enables us to use this book as a prism with which to look at Israeli society, heavily influenced by the kibbutz movement in the 50's and 60's. Although the writting is sometimes inconsistent, its candor more than makes up for it. For anyone interested in Israel in general, and in the Kibbutz movement in particular, this is a serious piece of work. To the reader's gain, the author chose to risk the spurn of his fellow gordonians and for that he needs to be commended.