money is spared to satisfy their whims but still they won't till the fields as we did in the old days, or spend a day in drainage work, or bring in the harvest, or pluck oranges, or do any of the rough chores around the Kibbutz.
What is truly maddening is that they do not need to do all these things. Our agriculture is totally mechanized, if not over-mechanized. And for things which are not yet mechanised there are always nature-crazed Swedes and Norwegians who come here for three months at a time to do the dirty work and fuck around.
The expression 'bridging the generation gap', because of Elisheva's constant nagging, always irritates me beyond measure. A frustrated spinster, as she has always been, she's found herself a cause upon which to expend her energy and at the same time to make her presence felt in the Kibbutz.
Am I too hard on her? I could have said she was born a spinster and with the passage of years she became a full-blown one. Or else, spinsterhood is a career a girl chooses early in life and graduates into. But what am I then?