KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
went back and forth. They then began gaining confidence and drew closer to the tractor. At some point, I climbed down from the tractor and removed the pin that connected the tractor to the disks; then I chased them with the tractor, but they were persistent. Finally it dawned on me that they were picking up the scent of the meatloaf sandwiches I was carrying for a midnight snack. I threw the sandwiches down to them. They gobbled them up and disappeared. I wish every problem could be solved so easily. After about a year, we considered ourselves established at Yagur. New people were constantly arriving and our group decided that the time had come for us to return the rooms we were occupying to the senior members of the kibbutz. We moved into tents in a wooded area of the kibbutz. We decided to house two boys and two girls in each tent. We respected each other’s privacy completely. If one of the girls wanted to get undressed, she would say the word and we looked away, and it was the same for the boys. Although we may have peeked elsewhere, this was our home and we lived by the honor system. For better or worse, it was part of our culture. We lived like that for almost a year. At that point, our group joined the Palmach, and I remained at Yagur. I moved into a room in a wooden building next to the wadi (dry riverbed) that ran through the center of the kibbutz. Both sides of the wadi were lined with houses, and small bridges crossed from one side to the other. During the rainy season, the wadi would fill with water from Mount Carmel that ran off into the Kishon Creek. In the autumn of 1948, heavy rains caught us by surprise. I was in my room, one of six in a wooden building with concrete floors, when we heard a loud noise at the back wall. An avalanche of wa- ter had hit the wadi, which overflowed with such force that in no time at all, half the floor of my room was torn away and part of the building collapsed; the rest was standing on just a third of the foundation. Along the way, the current dragged with it many small dwellings and some trees, as well as hundreds of boards, windows, beds, quilts, and other household items. Nothing like this had hap-
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