Aviva

by Larry Lefkowitz

Aviva ("Spring" in Hebrew, though in the end, nothing sprung), I met when I volunteered to work on a kibbutz for a month. For the novelty for me, your urban male plus the opportunity to meet a kibbutz maiden who might be willing to exchange her socialist life for a (limited) capitalist life with me.

I rose at 5:30 in the morning on the first day of my work, and reported to the tractor shed, wearing pants given to me which were too big. A wagon pulled by a tractor loomed out of the morning mist like a tumbrel bound for the guillotine. I climbed aboard with what I hoped was a jaunty step (difficult to pull off when one's hand is continually hitching up one's pants), and we lurched off.

None of the other orchard workers held on to the sides of the wagon and I resolved to do likewise, sitting so as to best balance my body as casually as possible. The kibbutzniks, despite the cold, wore their collars open in good Israeli style. I forwent buttoning mine, despite an increasingly chilled neck. My kibbutz hat, a round cloth type like an inverted sailor's cap, was stuck in my pants to provide bulk to help hold them up, so that my head was cold, too.

We were to pick grapefruits that day and I only needed to know how to twist the grapefruits so they would come off easily instead of merely pulling at them, which was harder and brought along part of the stem. The more difficult job of picking them from ladders was never assigned to me. Aviva, who also worked in the orchard, was a ladder-picker (I feared she would look down on me also in the metaphoric sense). Perhaps our orchard-picking leader decided it was too risky to hold up one's pants and pick from that perch. (I was not displeased; I do not like heights.) Now at least I knew grapefruits grew on trees, I had always assumed they grew on the ground like pumpkins.

My feet were cold; it took two or three hours to finally thaw them with the help of the rising sun. I watched the sun ascend with the interest of an ancient priest whose sun-cult rites were based on its position in the heavens. The sun's light hit the top of the trees and slowly worked its way downward. My feet awaited it expectantly.

Aviva perked my interest (with her superb long legs displayed in shorts despite the cool weather), and though at the beginning I was a sort of curiosity for her, and perhaps a source of secret mirth, I managed to work alongside her, trying to impress her with my (non-agricultural) knowledge and my sense of humor, albeit it was more subtle than the Israeli brand. The Israelis go in for more slapstick humor (think of The Three Stooges); the kibbutzniks went in for shaggy-dog humor. It featured a long, drawn-out anecdote concluding in an absurd or anticlimactic punch line.

Two days later, we turned to lemons. I was such an initiate that I thought the few green lemons were limes. Like grapefruits, lemons grow on trees; unlike grapefruits, one can't just snap them off the branches with a twist of the wrist. A snapping tool is necessary—lemons are more grudging in yielding their fruit. Grapefruit trees only infrequently contain thorns; on lemon trees, they flourish. I was pricked so many times through my gloves, I feared some substance might enter my bloodstream and I might break out in lemons. I also assimilated many small cuts caused by the way the hand reaches into the brambles for the fruit. On the other hand, picking lemons was more aromatic – there was a "lemony" fragrance worthy of a Durrell description. He wrote a book titled, Bitter Lemons, though not about lemon picking.

But, of course, my main interest in fruits was the peach, Aviva, ripe for the picking, or so I hoped. When she frowned at my picking efforts, I told her, "Marx said, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' The first part applies to me.'" No slouch, she put me down with "Marx also said, 'Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.'" Yet she seemed to like me, and I was even the butt of a few jokes by the other orchard workers who saw my interest in her. I tried to woo her after picking hours, including trying to impress her with my Israeli folk dancing skills from my days of such dancing in the US, but I was a poor specimen compared to the kibbutz dancers.

In the end, nothing came of it. Maybe I hadn't help matters when she asked me if I could live on a kibbutz. Without thinking of its implications, I said no, too collective and insular for me. She nodded and added, "Clearly you wouldn't be suitable as an orchard picker."

All my efforts for nought. Maybe if I had only been able to pick from a ladder.

Larry Lefkowitz's stories, poetry and humor have been widely published. He has had two books published. His book just published by Fomite Press The Varieties of Jewish Experience contains stories, a novella, and a humorous Yiddish glossary.