KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
studied bookkeeping, finance, money management, and other busi - ness courses in Haifa in parallel with my work in the bookkeeping office. Once again, I liked the work and was good at it. I wanted very much, though, to do farm work, and when I saw all of my friends returning dirty, tanned, and muscular from the fields, I was jealous. Some of them drove tractors and would come in wearing dirt-covered goggles. I felt envy when I sat next to them in my clean white shirt. Our ideology was that a kibbutznik’s most important job was to till the land. I told some of my friends how I felt and they agreed to secretly teach me, after work, to drive the tractors and other farm vehicles. In particular, Ezra Sherman, who worked in the garage repairing combines, tractors, and other agricultural equipment, taught me how to drive and handle a tractor. Normally, we shared all of our money, even gifts from relatives, but when I next received some money from my grandfather in the United States and relatives in Argentina, I enrolled in a Haifa driv- ing school to qualify for a truck driver’s license. I used my vacation time and sick leave and took the bus to the school; the bus only cost about twenty cents each way. Getting away was not hard. I did not have to ask anyone’s permission; I said something like, “I’m going to be away for half a day.” I finally got the license, which was not easy — one of the tests, for instance, involved starting up a truck that was parked facing uphill on a steep slope without damaging a small matchbox that had been tucked behind the rear wheels of the truck. I went to Yagur’s manager of agriculture, which was the big- gest department, and said, “Listen, I have a truck driver’s license. I can drive a truck. I can do any work. I want to work in agri- culture.” I was so determined to be assigned to farm work that I considered threatening to leave if he did not agree. Fortunately, we struck a compromise. I would work fulltime at agriculture for the two or three busy months of harvest season and then go back to the office. From then on, I had two jobs, doing agricul - tural work during the harvest season and office work the rest of
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