Meyer Levin, the novelist, here uses the dollars-and-cents figures of an actual budget to make us see the scale of human relationships and values of a Palestine commune, that unique form of cooperative living together and working together which many think a highly valuable contribution toward the solution of the problem of collective production within the framework of democratic freedom.

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On flat lands bordering the Huleh swamp, at the northern end of Palestine, the kibbutz Cfar Blum is being built by a collective group known as the Anglo-Baits. About fifty young Americans are now in this group, which is basically composed of English-speaking pioneers from Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and America, plus a section of immigrants from the Baltic states.

The Anglo-Baits named their commune after the French socialist, Léon Blum, at the time when he was thought to be dead. (He has since expressed a very lively interest in the settlement and hopes to visit it. The side road to Cfar Blum crosses fields to which hundreds of Arabs laid claim, so that each family claiming each tiny segment had to be paid off before the road could be built. Along the way are government signs pronouncing this a 100 per cent malarial area, with “Do Not Camp Here” warnings.

During the early years of the settlement, all but one of the comrades suffered from malaria; winter and summer, about half of them were down with the disease, in rotating attacks. Nevertheless they managed to dig about ten miles of swamp-drainage canals, and also several long rectangular fish-breeding ponds that are their best source of income. Then they decided to put up their housing. The Baits wanted to do the housing gradually, but the American influence won out, and they did the entire job at a single stroke, in one year.

The buildings were being finished last year; they were constructed with double entrances and outside screening, and as a result of this new housing and an intensive DDT campaign throughout the neighboring Arab villages, there was not a single case of malaria this year.

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Tacked up in the dining hall of Cfar Blum, next to the daily copy of Davar, was a sheet of paper with columns of figures: the budget for the year. One afternoon when the dining-hall was empty, except for a few mothers who had time off and were knitting, I had the budget explained to me by Belle Eisenberg, who was once a bookkeeper in New York.

It occurred to me as I looked down the columns of figures that for the outside world there could be no better way of understanding the structure and life of a kibbutz than by pondering the items on the budget line by line—so I copied it off.

Cfar Blum’s budget for 1946 was based on a population of 250, including eighty children. The settlers had allowed for their natural increase, but had not allowed for all the immigrants and newcomers who came to the commune during the year, raising its population to 350 by 1947, so that the budget was heavily strained by year’s end.

The total estimated income was around $215,000, or less than a thousand dollars a year per person—on the original population figure. It must be remembered, of course, that this is farm economy. But that does not mean that the living-scale is augmented by “all sorts of extra things from the farm.” The cost of the settlement’s own products consumed by the kibbutz is added into the budget.

Food comes to about seventy cents per person per day, even on the farm. There is plenty of food, but nothing very fancy. There’s an egg for breakfast or supper, sometimes for both; an assortment of vegetables—tomatoes, radishes, onions, greens—is usually found on the table; each comrade makes his own salad. Coffee, milk in not too great abundance, yoghurt, fish, lots of bread, and fresh or stewed fruit, for the morning and evening meal. The big meal is at noon, with meat or fish a few times a week, a heavy soup, potatoes, and a dessert. Tea with bread and jam in the afternoon.

Clothing is figured at forty dollars per capita, annually, plus another fifteen dollars for shoes. Housing maintenance comes to about twenty-four dollars per capita.

A startling item is the sum allowed for vacations. Every kibbutznick has a week or two for annual vacation, which is usually spent in hiking around among other communes, where he feels most at home. But there is another good reason for avoiding the cities or the vacation centers such as Nahariyah and Tiberius, the Palm Beaches and Palm Springs of Palestine. The kibbutznick receives exactly six dollars to spend on his vacation! That is all the commune can afford; the sum is typical not only for Cfar Blum but for most of the settlements.

Many of the comrades augment this by modest sums received from outside, either from relatives in Palestine, or from previous homelands. And there are other ways of visiting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem—frequent trips to departmental seminars, meetings, consultations, and sometimes rest cures. But there are many settlers who have not been away from the kibbutz for years at a time.

Basic medical needs are taken care of through the Kupat Cholim, the workers medical insurance organization of Palestine, which charges about two dollars per month per capita. Additional medical expenses, sanitarium visits, and cures add up to about $3,000 yearly for the commune.

Small personal items such as tobacco, razors, and cosmetics are budgeted at $30 per person, and cultural expenses—books, magazines, newspapers—come to $8.

Various members of the commune still have relatives in Europe, whom they want to help; for this item, Cfar Blum can afford only $400 annually, for the entire membership. About $60 goes from the kibbutz to Habima, Ohel, and other theatrical groups, and a few hundred dollars are divided among the various national institutions and funds such as Keren Kayemet, the Vaad Leumi, and Keren Kibbutz. For children’s toys, Cfar Blum spends $500 yearly.

The budget, calculated in dollars, comes out as follows:

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In An average kibbutz, it is found that about 42 per cent of the work of the members goes into service and maintenance operations; the members usually feel better if they are assigned to the 58 per cent that brings income-producing results. Equalitarian ideology notwithstanding, a tractorist feels more important than a dishwasher.

The two heaviest income-producing occupations at Cfar Blum are fish-breeding and clothespin manufacture. The comrades are still arguing as to whether an artificial fish-breeding enterprise is agricultural or industrial; some of them like to call the fish business a fish factory. About the clothespins there can be no argument..

It is not generally known that Palestine’s communal farms have done an outstanding job in developing the relationship between industry and agriculture. Almost every kibbutz has a small industry. Afikim makes plywood; Yagur weaves rugs; Givat Chayim makes barrels; Cfar Blum makes clothespins.

The Hebrew name for this item is hedek, and naturally the American comrades refer to their factory as Headache. But in a friendly way. For the Headache brought in some $50,000 for the year, and may soon be counted on for a third of the community’s income.

The factory occupies a shed about the size of a barn, and provides a flexible absorptive medium for labor when agricultural needs slacken; it also absorbs secondary labor—those who are not strong enough for field work, pregnant women, and some refugees. And on rainy days, there’s work for almost everybody.

Cfar Blum’s clothespins are of the spring-clasp type; they are exported all over Africa and even to Australia. Right now, Yehuda Strimling, of the commune, is in New York, dickering for their introduction to the United States. They may yet be purchaseable at Woolworth’s.

The little factory operates a production assembly line, though the parts are turned out mechanically, and further mechanization is continually being developed by Cfar Blum’s tinkerers. One machine, designed in the kibbutz and built in Tel Aviv, bites off the bits of cypress in proper size, grooves them seven different ways, and spits them out by the thousand, just like a bullet-machine in Brooklyn. Only, the Headache stands next to a barn on a marshy plain, with Mount Hermon for a backdrop, and the Jordan river for a moat.

The long rectangular ponds of the fish-factory lie close to the river. The young settlers of Cfar Blum were the pioneers of this business, which has taken the place of orange-growing as the “sure pay crop,” dream of every Palestinian. Almost every settlement now has its fish-breeding ponds, but production has not yet reached the peak of local demand, and after Palestine has all the carp needed to supply a piece of gefilte fish on Friday for each Jewish resident, there will still remain the smoking and canning markets to be developed.

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Though they were the first group to become experts in fish-breeding in Palestine, none of the members of Cfar Blum knew anything about this art when they came to the country.

The original group consisted of about twenty Americans, members of Habonim, the pioneer youth organization, who reached Palestine in 1936. Yehuda Strimling came from Minneapolis, where he had been in the lumber business; Lami Siegal came from a prominent Zionist family of New York, and married Chayim Basin, who came from store-keeping in New Jersey; Isaak Eisenberg was a cutter in Rochester; Joey Cridon was a labor organizer in Buffalo; Joe Feldman and his wife, Kay, were students in Philadelphia; Naomi and Dave Schley were students in Baltimore; Malka Spar was a laboratory technician in Camden.

They had already been together on a Habonim training farm in New Jersey; on arriving in Palestine, they went to Afikim, the big settlement in the lower Jordan valley, for their final work-training.

There seems to be an impression that groups wanting to settle on the land in Palestine are handed a sort of ready-made proposition by the Jewish National Fund. Actually, the grant of an area where a group may endure the hardships of pioneering comes only after the group has already proved its patience and toughness through sometimes years of self-maintenance. The young Americans were not coddled. On leaving Afikim, they set themselves up in a few shacks in the neighborhood of Benyamina, where they hired out as day-laborers to orange-growers. By pooling their earnings, they hoped to acquire some vehicles, machinery, and livestock toward the day of their settlement on their own land. During this time they met and combined with a similar group, mainly Baits, so as to form a number large enough for a kibbutz. There has been no real amalgamation of the two elements, as the Americans were pretty well paired off when they arrived in Palestine; only one inter-marriage has taken place, and as a whole, even today, the Americans tend to stay together.

In the Benyamina years, the Anglo-Baits went through a most rigorous and sometimes embittering apprenticeship. Those years were bad years for orange-growers, and consequently they turned again to cheap labor, attempting to hire Arabs at one-fourth the wage upheld by Jews. The Anglo-Baits took to picketing the groves; there were disorders, and several of their stalwarts were “exiled to Siberia” by the courts—that is, they were sent to the northern mountain village of Metulla, where they might “keep out of trouble.”

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In Metulla, the boys found jobs in a hotel, and soon they brought their wives and a few comrades and contracted for the operation of an entire hotel. Then they discovered a labor demand that would enable the whole kibbutz to transfer to the northern Galilee region. The demand came from the Schwartz brothers, a family of fish-breeders from Middle Europe who wanted to try their enterprise in Palestine. They had gained access to a stretch of Jewish National Fund land bordering the Huleh swamp, at the base of the mountain.

Few workers were eager to go down to the malarial swamp, but the Anglo-Baits took the job. They tractor-scooped a row of fishponds for the Schwartz brothers, and then learned how to breed carp.

They paid for their learning in health. But after all, they were also operating a hotel-sanitarium in Metulla.

The Schwartz enterprise proved profitable, and started the fish industry in Palestine. After a few years, the Anglo-Baits received an adjoining swamp area for their own settlement; they drained it, sowed their crops, planted fruit-trees and vineyards, and scooped out fish ponds. During this time, they lived in shacks and tents, and all caught malaria.

The formative period had taken four years. Some of the boys had been separated from their wives and babies for months at a time, as they did not wish to bring their families into the malarial region. Finally the commune decided to build its permanent living quarters. As I have said, the Baits were for doing it gradually. But the Americans felt that the most economical way would be to go at the entire job in one sweep. This meant a year of building. Building costs are incredible in Palestine at present; one must allow four thousand dollars a room for the simplest kind of housing.

The kibbutz received a basic low-interest building loan of $80,000 from the national institutions. They were able to borrow in various banks at what is considered workable interest—below 8 per cent—for the first two-thirds of the job. But before they were finished they were paying double that interest on emergency short-term loans.

They got the job done. And they finished with malaria.

But now they have the interest. During my last visit to Cfar Blum, as I walked over the fields with Chayim Basin, he said, “About all we work for now is interest. Everything we earn goes to pay on loans.”

And yet they have plans laid out for building an international center for Habonim, on their land, in a bend of the Jordan. There, young Americans and other Anglos will come to spend a year or two and make contact with life in Palestine.

And this year, too, it was from Cfar Blum that the pioneers for a new settlement went out one night. The comrades of Cfar Blum went with them, after spending a whole night building a bridge over the Jordan to get the tractors and building materials across. The new settlement was also on Jewish National Fund land, which had been bought— not once, but twice—from Arab squatters. However, on the day of settlement, there was an attack; two settlers and two Arabs were killed.

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Just after I got back to America, Yehuda Strimling appeared. He was on a mission from Cfar Blum.

Part of his job was to purchase a new machine for the further mechanization of Headache, and to see about extending the clothespin market to America. But he also wanted to find some Americans who would put up a total of $100,000, at 4 per cent interest, for ten years, so that the commune could refund its debts and pay off the high-interest loans that were consuming its energy.

There was a drawing-room meeting, one evening, at which he tried to explain the project. It was strange to see how foreign this all sounded to New Yorkers. They could not understand why the kibbutz should have all these difficulties. It was new to them that each settlement must make its own way. They seemed to have had the feeling that the settlements were completely subsidized. Yehuda explained that the Keren Kayemet and the Keren Hayesod—strange names to them—could only extend partial financing, due to limited funds, and that many kibbutzim were in similar difficulties, working themselves out only through privation and persistence.

Mostly, the New Yorkers had read about the deeds of the terrorists, and many had been attracted to the Irgun, and had given money to organizations which, they believed, supported the Irgun. They were quite startled when Yehuda stated, categorically, that none of those organizations had up to the time of his departure brought a single refugee to Palestine. “We’re the ones who do it,” Yehuda said. “And the only way we will get any part of Palestine is by going and sitting on it, as our own bunch did in the Huleh and as the new kibbutzim are doing in the Negev.”

The New York women looked at him, a bony, dark, toughened little man who might have been the chairman of a workers’ committee in one of their husbands’ shops, except that he was thinner and not so well dressed, and perhaps had a somewhat more absolute dignity.

And suddenly one of the ladies saw the light. “That’s the real thing,” I heard her whisper to her husband. “That’s a real pioneer from Palestine.. ..”

At this writing Yehuda Strimling of Cfar Blum is still in New York trying to raise his loan of $100,000, at 4 per cent, for ten years. He’s not crazy about this assignment. But as he says, “You have to do all kinds of things; in a kibbutz.”

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