Imagining the Kibbutz

A century after the first kibbutzim were founded, sociologists and economists have said a great deal about them, but the novelists, memoirists and filmmakers who imagined kibbutz life had never had a book-length study of their own. Ranen Omer-Sherman fills that gap, tracing novels, short fiction, memoirs and films across the movement's history, made both by insiders born or settled there and by outsiders looking in.

His subject is the tension these works keep returning to: the individual against the collective, self-sacrifice against self-fulfilment, euphoric dreaming against the slow arrival of disillusionment. For these writers and directors the kibbutz is a small world through which to read Israeli values and identity as a whole. A rewarding study for anyone drawn to Israeli literature and cinema, to utopian communities, or to the stories a nation tells about itself.