I hired Bermann as manager, granting him a monthly salary of 220 francs and free accommodations and authorized him to set up a farm with all the necessary buildings and equipment to assure its functioning and to recruit Jewish workers. About thirty people arrived at Kinneret, led by Zvi Yehuda, and the work began. In the beginning, the relations between Bermann and his laborers were excellent; the enthusiasm about this first Jewish farm in the Galilee smoothed out the difficulties, especially the numerous cases of malaria. But after a honeymoon period, the relations deteriorated. Accustomed to the social gulf between managers and workers in Russia, Bermann expected blind obedience from the latter. He had a four-room house built for his family and himself while four to six workers were lodged together in wretched one-room huts. Furthermore, the workers had great difficulty accommodating themselves to his management style all the more so because he disregarded their grievances and furiously rejected all criticism rather than listen to their opinions. He did not mince his words with the workers, stirring up bitterness and rancor.

It was to Bermann’s advantage that he was not a theoretician. He was a practical farmer and an excellent horseman, who knew everything related to agriculture. With his tall, muscular build, his black beard and his bright eyes, he was the incarnation of the ideal ‘Muskeljude’ [muscular Jew]. However, he was incapable of keeping the accounts in order. All his estimates of the capital investment needed and the expected profits proved to be wrong and the first year of work ended with an enormous deficit. Furthermore, he lacked the minimal theoretical knowledge required to understand how to adapt the experience he acquired in Russia to the prevailing conditions at Kinneret where he managed the farm as he would have in Russia. Lacking any knowledge whatsoever about agriculture, I had no other choice but to leave the management of the business to him and seeing that he was by title responsible for its management, I had to grant him the greatest freedom of action in the beginning. I intervened only after I had begun to have serious doubts about the wisdom of his management […]

In 1909, at the time of the first strike in Kinneret, I had several long conversations with the workers (including Berl Katzenelson who was to become the editor of the Labor newspaper Davar). They claimed that the manager, his salary, his bills and his other personal expenses were an intolerable burden on the farm. His bourgeois standard of living in contrast to the miserable conditions in which the workers lived (most of whom were better educated than he) and the bad food, created a social gulf that Bermann had further aggravated with his authoritarianism making any harmonious cooperation impossible. The workers proposed abolishing the position of manager and entrusting the management of the farm to a committee composed of their own chosen representatives […]

[This is how] in the autumn of 1909, seven workers (In the meanwhile, Shifra Sturman had joined the six men.) settled in Umm-Juni, which they later called Deganya. In the beginning, they lived in miserable conditions, lodged in a barrack and the mud huts left there by the former Arab owners. But after a year, they managed so well, demonstrating intelligence and ingeniousness, that they made profits. My confidence in them increased and I renewed the contract between us. In spite of their success, the workers who had been specially selected for the Umm-Juni experiment and had come from various cell settlements were replaced by workers who had worked as hired laborers in Petah Tikvah and Hadera. […]

During the first years, Deganya lost many of its most valuable members, victims of treacherous acts of murder or accidents. On November 25, 1913, I received the following telegram:

“Moshe Barsky of Deganya was murdered on Saturday. Joseph Salzman of Kinneret was murdered yesterday. Come.”

Moshe Barsky was a young man of eighteen years of age who was, in general, greatly appreciated because of his cheerful disposition. His tragic death was a shock to all of us. He father showed that the spirit of the Maccabees was still alive in Israel: when he received the news of his son’s death, he decided to send his second son in place of his first. The news quickly spread throughout the entire country.

The death of Joseph Bussel, who drowned in 1918 in Lake Tiberias, inflicted a particularly severe, second blow to the tiny community. During the five to six years preceding his drowning, Bussel had been at the same time both the conscientious farm manager as well as its spiritual leader. A remarkable person, he had all the qualities of a great leader.

At the outset, the workers cultivated the land as share tenants and were guaranteed a minimum salary. Then their status began to gradually change, especially after the Great War, to such an extent that they ended up establishing a cooperative, working at their own risk and on their own behalf (without the guarantee of a minimal salary). Progress was clearly made when they moved from intensive farming to extensive farming.

Immediately after the Great War, a second community (Deganya Beth) was established in the area and then a little later, a third (Deganya Gimel). Each one had twenty to thirty members and about one thousand dunams of arable land.

A. Ruppin, Memories, Diary and Letters

 

Dear Gershon,

Two weeks have passed since you left. We do not even feel time pass as we are to such an extent taken up by the events here. And they have not been lacking during these last fifteen days! Last week, we held a meeting that lasted from two o’clock Thursday afternoon to late into the night between Saturday and Sunday, with short pauses to eat and to rest a little. And on Sunday night, we assembled together once again! Yes, it has been a long time since we have had such a memorable meeting!

You are surely asking yourself what our discussions were about? Unfortunately, this time I cannot tell you as much as I would like to do so. I can only confide to you that this meeting was very important if for no other reason than that we spent two days in discussion. It made an impression on all of us although it did not provoke any major change in our lives. […] The comrades had to make a decision about questions regarding the future. In short, we had to specify our ideal. […] Be it as it may, we spoke candidly with such sincerity that we were bowled over. Feivel, in particular, and some of the others had many fine things to say.

Sunday morning, we were still so moved, our hearts so heavy, that we were unable to begin working. Six of us also gathered at Moshe’s tomb where we wept a great deal and talked a great deal, relieving ourselves of everything that was heavy on our hearts. How we missed you and Yosef! It was not until later that evening that we pulled ourselves together, returned and immediately... convoked a new assembly during which at the end of a long discussion, we decided to regularly hold this type of meeting every Saturday. And on Monday, we finally began to work with enthusiasm and pleasure.

 

The meetings were strange, wrapped in secrecy and stamped with solemnity. I have never forgotten my first one a few months after my arrival. The comrades began examining their consciences; they described their vision of the commune, in the present and in the future, their motivations and their opinions about the other members. One would have said that they were standing before a tribunal, rising one after another and speaking quite frankly. During the course of the meeting, a judgment was made regarding the new candidates, deciding who deserved to be admitted [to the kibbutz] and who didn’t. It was like Kippur [the day of General Forgiveness that the faithful spend in prayer to be forgiven for their sins], a long day devoted to examining our souls.

It proved to be that as far as the comrades were concerned, most aspired to remain simple workers. As for the rest, whoever wanted to become a landowner or even a salaried farmer was classified as a heretic who deviated from the glorious path of the pioneers. Only the rare eccentrics cherished such a strange vocation; we were possessed, to that extent, with the solid conviction that the country needed conqueror-workers.

On that judgment day, I too was to be submitted to the torture of criticism. There were even three comrades who declared me unworthy of being a member of the kibbutz, not because I had not passed the work test or because I had not become acclimated to the difficult living conditions as was feared at the very beginning when I had just arrived, but because of “the crime of my fathers” – because of my bourgeois origins and capitalist ideas from which I had not succeeded in liberating myself…

 

Endless discussion were held at Deganya about the question of knowing if the kibbutz could permit itself sugar in its tea without threatening its economic independence. The majority supported sweetening tea with carob. Itzhak disagreed:

- What will the workers say, he once screamed, if one day we decide to deny the horses oats. Won’t they protest, rightly so, that without nourishment their animals would be unable to plow. What would the cowhands say if we denied their cows hay? That without hay, the animals would not produce milk. Consequently, what about us, the poor humans?! Would we be able to continue working in that way? All the same, we do produce something!

- Ah Izthak, Itzhak! sighed Hayuta, you forget that we the others, the poor humans, are endowed with volition.

 

S. was naturally aristocratic. He refused to share his bench with three others. As soon as we were four, he would get up and eat standing. He would never ask the others to move nor would he go sit on another bench. We all knew that S. would not eat four to a bench because he was very concerned with his privacy…

 

We lived in a cabin in the middle of the courtyard. The partitions that separated the rooms did not reach the ceiling and on occasion we transmitted messages to each other over the partition-wall; they were always friendly. When Tanhoum and I decided to marry, it was in this manner that I announced the news to Yaacov.

During those days, everyone felt that he had the right to openly tell the others what he thought of them, sometimes concerning the most intimate details of one’s private life. A few months after our marriage when I was not yet pregnant, I received a letter from a friend telling me:

“It is a crime against the Palestinian community [the yishuv]. You must fulfill the commandment prescribed to us to procreate and to reproduce as soon as possible.”

I immediately transmitted her message to Yaacov over the partition. His laughter still resonates in my ears.