WALTER LAQUEUR
411
more worthwhile life, as individuals and as a group. According to the offi–
cial version, it was a matter of homecoming from exile, not a desperate
search for some remote corner of the world where they would find shelter.
This was a country of pioneers, of the young and very young, as
Gershom Scholem wrote in a letter to his mother, persuading her to join
her son in Australia rather than to emigrate to Palestine, where she would
have hardly anyone to talk to. The ideal type in Palestine, not only in the
kibbutz im,
was the sabra, the native, a new type of Jew; not cosmopolitan
but provincial, with few intellectual interests (certainly not in European
culture or European Jewry); extroverted ("chevreman") and not self-con–
scious; a good agricultural worker, immensely loyal to his peer group,
courageous, living modestly, with a specific sense of humor, always ready
to playa prank on someone, and with his own slang (including a strong
sprinkling of juicy Arabic expressions). Their idea of a fine evening was a
kumz itz ,
preferably followed by folk dances, East European in origin. (A
kum–
z itz
was a meal out in the fields or a forest, consisting more likely than not
of a sheep which had been stolen, or watermelons which had mysteriously
fallen from the back of the
kibbutz
lorry). How could a fifteen-year-old boy
from Germany or Austria with little or no grounding in
Ivrit
become one
of this closed elite group? This was the generation which constituted the
Palmach, the military elite units-the generation of 1948, who more than
anyone else won the War of Independence that year.
All this was very different from what a Jewish boy or girl from Central
Europe had been educated for. Some of the younger immigrants who
received most of their education in Jewish Palestine did make it into the
ranks of the sabras; this was, for instance, the generation of Leah Rabin,
whose language was unaccented and whose appearance and behavior was
that of a sabra. Yehuda Amichai (who also arrived with his extended fam–
ily at a very young age) and Natan Zakh could become leading poets of
their generation, but these were the exceptions, not the rule. To be a
yekke,
an immigrant from Central Europe, was not recommended in the thirties,
and the younger immigrants often tried hard to escape this stereotype. But
as time passed, contempt for the
yekkes
gave way in the eighties and nineties
to newly discovered fondness, an appreciation of their good qualities, and,
almost, to nostalgia. Poets like Amichai and Zakh would not at all dissoci–
ate themselves from their German-Jewish heritage even though they had
been very young when they first arrived in Palestine.
A perusal of the memoirs written in later years by young Jews from
Germany shows very different preoccupations from those of their contem–
poraries who went to England or America. Heavy manual labor, mainly in
agriculture, often in severe climatic conditions; primitive living conditions
mainly wi th regard to housing and food; poverty, tiredness, lack of time and
