Chapter One: Camp Kinderwelt, New York, 1963On those last stifling nights of June 1963, Sharon Levine found herself wakeful in a familiar way. She left her bedroom in the Newark house shared by several branches of her extended family and repaired to the glider on the back porch, a Howard Fast novel in hand. The temperature had hung in the nineties all week, prompting kids all over the city to pry open hydrants, stirring Sharon's father Jack to install the window fans. Sharon herself thought the heat almost comfortable. Heat meant summer. Summer meant Camp Kinderwelt. And the prospect of two months at Camp Kinderwelt, as always, made her sleepless with anticipation.
She was seventeen now, a week out of Weequahic High School, skinny and dreamy and often ill at ease as the daughter of Old World parents, immigrants with accents they weren't about to lose in middle age. Even in a Jewish enclave, her friends were the children of salesmen and doctors, people who played Perry Como records and served Twinkies for dessert. Her boyfriend, Richie, was a detective in his early twenties. It was Kinderwelt that reconciled Sharon to her parents' world -- its Yiddish, its Zionism, its sense of Jewishness without religion -- and instilled in her something like direction. "The summer was my life," she would put it later. "The rest of the year was the time between summers."
On the last morning of June, Jack packed his used Chevy for the trip to camp. He angled Sharon's footlocker into the trunk, tying down the hood with twine. In the back seat, his wife Pauline settled herself and a plaid cooler full of tuna sandwiches. Sharon took the front seat, next to Jack, her favorite place on these drives. She loved when he pushed the speed, making her mother cry over the rushing air, "Slow down, slow down." In such moments, Sharon glimpsed the Jack Levine beyond the struggling wholesaler of candy and cigarettes, beyond the mourning son of a family he could not save from Hitler. She saw the would-be pioneer who subscribed to Yidisher Kemfer, the Jewish Fighter.
The trip to Kinderwelt, though, was usually a fitful affair, sixty miles that could take four hours. First Jack stopped by his warehouse in Down Neck, across the city. Then he tried out the back roads through North Jersey, anything to avoid the crawl toward the mountains on Route 17. Eventually there was no choice but to join it, stopping halfway for ice cream and the bathroom at the Red Apple Rest, then climbing along narrow twisting roads into the Catskill foothills, past dairy farms and through hamlets like Central Valley and Highland Mills. Amid such unlikely environs sprawled 250 acres owned by the Farband, the Labor Zionist Order, with the land split between Kinderwelt and the adults' Unser Camp. Scattered along the fringes of Unser Camp, in turn, were bungalow colonies named Tel Aviv and Ra'anannah in solidarity with Israel.
When the Levines' car pulled between the stone pillars and up the long driveway beneath arching trees, Sharon looked for the landmarks. The green shingled building -- that was the Casino, Unser Camp's stage for Yiddish theater stars like Ben Bonus and Mina Bern. A couple hundred yards later, the old stone water tower came into sight, marking the entrance to Kinderwelt. From there, in a hillside meadow, Sharon spotted the social hall called Beth Sholom, the arts-and-crafts building with a map of Israel painted on the roof, the bunkhouses whitewashed and perched on cinder blocks, and the asphalt path separating the boys' side from the girls' that was called "the Mason-Dixon Line."
Five, six, seven buses idled back in the Unser Camp parking lot, disgorging forty or fifty campers apiece. As a junior counselor, Sharon waded into the mob, helping to sort the kids by bunk, finding her own contingent of nine-year-old girls, then trying to march the ragged line off to its quarters. There the scrambling began -- for the trunks piled on the porch, for the cot with the softest pillow, for the movable cubbie instead of the nailed-in kind. By three o'clock, the entire camp, nearly four hundred strong, was thronging to the chestnut tree for afternoon milk and then racing to the lake for general swim. Gazing on the joyful chaos, the grown-ups shrugged and muttered Hefker-pefker, anything goes.
In the hubbub, Sharon sought her cherished friends, her bunkmates from the last six summers. Tami Heringman had come again, all the way from Terre Haute, Indiana, and Myra Graubard from the West Bronx and Gloria Freed from Sheepshead Bay and Merry Levy from Kew Gardens and Judi Schulman from Merrick, Long Island. They had been the core, these five girls and Sharon, leading the volleyball team and setting their hair in curlers and harmonizing on "In the Still of the Night." They had learned the facts of life together as twelve-year-olds, getting a whispered lesson after lights-out from their daring counselor Zena. They all remembered the time Judi's mother had caught them smoking the summer they were fourteen and Judi calmly offered, "Have a Kent?"
Much more than the usual teenage rites tied them. "The same values, the same ethos, the same upbringing," Sharon would later say. All their families had been Labor Zionists for generations. Tami's grandfather Hyman had helped found Kinderwelt in the twenties; he still summered in a bungalow nearby with his petite wife Minnie, whom everyone called "Rocky." Myra's parents had met as Kinderwelt campers. Sharon's older sister Lorelei and her future husband, Milt, began courting as camp waiters. And Judi's father, a longshoreman before he went into labor law, had raised money for Palestine among his companions along the docks.
They were being raised for the cause, these girls, for the Zionist enterprise. Each summer at Kinderwelt followed a theme; two summers ago, on the thirteenth anniversary of Jewish statehood, it had been "Israel's bar mitzvah." Sharon learned the folk dances of the kibbutzim, all about tilling the soil and wringing water from the desert. Ahlay uvnay, went one chant, arise and build. In the Makelah chorus, she sang not only the Yiddish lullabies like "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" ("Almonds and Raisins") but the Israeli army anthem, "Shir Hapalmach," with its vow in reborn Hebrew:
Mimetula ad hanegevMin hayam ad hamidbar:
Kol bachur vetov laneshek
Kol bachur al hamishmar
From Metula to the Negev
From the sea to the desert:
Every boy is good with a gun,
Every boy on his guard duty.
For now, Sharon would not see any guard duty beyond her occasional stint of vacht, night patrol against curfew violations and panty raids. Still, the idea of making aliyah informed the very atmosphere of Kinderwelt, and if not actually emigrating then of serving as some kind of American partner. So many of the leaders of Israel -- David Ben-Gurion, Itzhak Ben-Tzvi, Golda Meir -- had emerged from the same cluster of Labor Zionist groups as had the Kinderwelt community. Parents of Jack Levine's age had heard Israel's founders speak at the camp. And now, with Israel a secure state and America a country of proven tolerance, what stood in the way of the triumph of a new Jewish culture, secular and liberal and enlightened?
Just a few weeks before taking Sharon to Kinderwelt, Jack had attended a vast rally in Newark to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Israeli statehood. Six thousand people filled the Sussex Avenue Armory, and many weren't even Jewish. There were Marines, black civil rights leaders, a Catholic church's drum and bugle corps. The mayor, both senators, and the governor attended. And they all heard the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations declare, "Nobody's going to put us out of business."
The actors once limited to the Yiddish theater were breaking into the mainstream, being discovered by an audience far beyond Second Avenue's. The summer of 1963 found Morris Carnovsky essaying King Lear at the American Shakespeare Festival, Zero Mostel winning a Tony for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Menasha Skulnik mugging his way through Come Blow Your Horn in Westchester, Wasp Westchester of all places. Seventeen magazine, that bible of pop culture for teenage girls, had even recommended a record of Yiddish folk songs.
Sharon Levine had surprised herself by convincing three of her girlfriends from Newark, all Jewish but none of Farband lineage, to pass up the traditional Weequahic summer at Bradley Beach for the quirkier charms of Kinderwelt. So if Sharon felt there was no reason to choose -- between Israel and America, between Jewish identity and American birthright, between "Runaround Sue" and "Mayim, Mayim," between the fantasies of marrying Richie the cop or that handsome Rishon Bialer, her Kinderwelt boyfriend last summer, who always played Theodore Herzl in the camp's historical pageants -- then she was just understanding the world around her. On the morning after arriving at Kinderwelt, after all, she had lined up with the rest of the camp to pledge allegiance to two flags, first the Stars and Stripes and then, hanging ever so imperceptibly lower, the Israeli blue and white.
All through Sharon's childhood, her father insisted on little. If anything, Jack struck her as compliant to a fault -- living in his in-laws' house, working for their wealthy relatives, dismissing any hint of vanity by remarking, "Why do I need two pairs of shoes for one pair of feet?" He reminded Sharon of the character in the Y. L. Peretz story "Bontsche Shvayg," the humble man summoned to heaven to sit at God's side and offered by the Almighty any wish. He asks only for a hot roll every morning, and God and the angels hang their heads in sorrow at what life had done to him.
On the subjects of Zionism and Yiddishkeit, though, Jack Levine suffered no hesitation. Each time Sharon entered the kitchen, she reached into her pocket for coins, and dropped them in the slot of the blue-and-white tin of the Jewish National Fund. Five afternoons a week, she attended a folkshul called Bet Yeled, the House of Children, where she learned Jewish culture, conversational Hebrew, and Zionist ideology. She resisted the place, a rickety frame house with crooked stairs, and she resisted the classes, so different from the conventional Hebrew schools her friends attended in preparation for splashy bar or bat mitzvahs. Yet, she would say later, some learning stayed with her by a function of osmosis, or perhaps by the force of a will Jack otherwise kept well hidden.
He had embraced Zionism soon after emigrating from the Polish shtetl of Butka at the age of fifteen in 1920, leaving behind the Orthodox ways he had learned both at home and in the one-room religious school called a cheder. He returned to his family once in the thirties, pleading with them to join him in America. Too irreligious, they replied. Their deaths in the Holocaust deepened Jack's belief in the necessity of a Jewish homeland. And Pauline's family, inclined toward the Communist party, brought into his life a fierce critique of religion. After the Nazi genocide, Jack didn't have to be Marx to wonder what had happened to God.
The Levines believed in art and ideas. Jack quoted from Maimonides in Hebrew, and on the Saturdays when observant Jews went to synagogue, he set the family radio to the Metropolitan Opera. Pauline educated herself about vitamins and health foods, sneaking pureed green beans into her children's orange juice. Her brother David prepared for aliyah by training in agriculture at the hachsharah, the preparation camp in South Jersey. Molly Gen, matriarch of the extended family, was no bubbe in a babushka but a modern woman who flourished a cigarette holder and presided over a monthly salon in the living room. The Levines may have strained to pay the rent, needing money both from Jack's candy orders and Pauline's cottage industry peddling pajamas at flea markets, but they held themselves above the proster menschen, the common boors.
In Newark, the Levines had company in their passions, particularly Jack's Labor Zionism. Known as the "Workshop of the Nation," Newark was a union town, populated by smelters and fur cutters, electricians and garment workers and leather tanners. And Newark was a Jewish town, home in 1948 to 56,000 Jews, the seventh-largest such community in America. Newark's Jews supported institutions ranging from two Yiddish weeklies to a rabbinical college to Tabatchnik the Herring King. At Weequahic High, the alumnus and novelist Philip Roth recalled, the football backfield consisted of Weissman, Weiss, Gold, and Rosenberg.
"All the ingredients were there," the historian William Helmreich has written about Newark's concentration of leftist Jewish groups, which included active branches of the Bund and the Workmen's Circle as well as Labor Zionists. "Poverty, conflict between labor and management, Jewish intellectualism, and the well-known Jewish passion for social justice."
Four generations enlisted in the Labor Zionist cause: the children in the Habonim youth movement, the young adults in the Dorot Zion, and the parents and grandparents in the Poale Zion. Wives and daughters joined their own chapters of the Pioneer Women. The Farband functioned as a communal parallel to the politicized Poale Zion, providing members with insurance and burial plans and, of course, the chance to vacation at Unser Camp and Kinderwelt. It did what the mutual-aid societies called landsmanschaften had long done for Jewish immigrants, but in this case what bound the constituents together was not a common birthplace in Europe but a common cause in Palestine.
Jack Levine served as secretary for the Habonim in New Jersey, a board member of the Bet Yeled school, a regular in a Yiddish literature discussion group, and a mainstay of the Farband, Sholom Aleichem Chapter 59. His contemporaries counted themselves among the Labor Zionist elite, the men who proudly called one another chaver, comrade. Ralph Wechsler was an intimate of Ben-Gurion's. Ralph Goldman assisted the Israeli prime minister on his visits to the United States. When Israel mounted a trade exhibition in America in 1963, it held the exposition at the Chancellor Avenue YMHA, a block from the Levines' house.
For a dollar a year, Jack absorbed the Labor Zionist creed from the pages of Jewish Frontier, the movement's English-language magazine. He read essays on Zionism by Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and even Albert Einstein. Poems rhapsodized about "The Blooming Desert," and photos celebrated the chalutzim, the pioneers, erecting tent cities and taking spades to the earth. Jewish Frontier went beyond Palestine and purely Jewish issues, too, publishing Mahatma Gandhi on apartheid, Claude McKay on civil rights, Reinhold Niebuhr on anti-Communist liberalism. On paper at least, the parochial and universal aspects of Jewish radicalism coexisted under the banner of the working class.
Once Israeli nationhood and American pluralism had been achieved in the wake of World War II, however, the tone of Jewish Frontier turned oddly cautionary. An article in the March 1953 issue, by a mother abashed enough to hide behind the byline "Anonymous," bemoaned her son's impending interfaith marriage, one of ten in her extended family. The following year, Ben-Gurion dismissed Zionism without aliyah as merely a fund-raising operation, unworthy of "the name of a Movement of Redemption." Jewish Frontier itself filled column inches with advertisements for Israel Bonds, imprecations to "Convert Commitments Into Cash."
A decade later, as Sharon was nearing her summer as a junior counselor at Kinderwelt, Jewish Frontier chronicled a movement -- indeed, a way of life -- in the midst of an identity crisis. The magazine, once a beacon of secularism, began writing approvingly of religious practice. It reported that Yiddish, earlier in the century the language of two-thirds of the world's Jews, was now spoken by only one-tenth of Jewish students. Immigration to Israel had failed to replace that lost culture, at least for American Jews. These days, Labor Zionists organized not settlers' brigades but tours on El Al. "The builders of the Land and the State are only those who dwell and live within it," Ben-Gurion insisted in a letter marking his seventy-fifth birthday. "In the Diaspora, Jews as Jews are human dust, whose particles try to cling to each other."
But as a writer named Yaacov Morris put it, "Middle-class Americans are not likely to become farmers and miners in the Negev." And the advertisements in Jewish Frontier in the summer of 1963 showed just how middle-class American Jews, even the Farband sort, were becoming. The fancy Catskills resorts touted "Free Golf," "New Elevator," "Catalina Pool and Health Club," "Solarium," "Supervised Children's Day Camp." Newark's own Jerry Lewis declared Brown's "my favorite hotel." While Labor Zionists understood the word aliyah to mean immigration to Israel, it literally translated as "ascent." And ascending they were, toward the good life in the Golden Land.
From that first morning in July 1963 when Sharon joined all of Kinderwelt in singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and then "Hatikvah," "The Hope," camp slid into its predictable, comforting rhythms. From reveille at seven to taps at nine, from mail call to milk time, tradition guided her days. The first week of summer was dominated as always by swimming tests to see which children merited their deep-water badge. The fourth would end in visiting weekend, with all its parental kibitzing. And in the last weeks of August would come Color War, with the camp divided into Kachol and Lavan, blue and white, like the Israeli flag.
Meanwhile, the brilliant July sun of a drought summer browned the campers like the kibbutzniks they emulated. The Kinderwelt Knesset, named after the Israeli parliament, took office to weigh such matters as the relative merits of field trips to West Point and Hyde Park. Each day an imitation newscast over the camp loudspeaker brought Kinderwelt dispatches from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency -- Egypt and Syria forming the United Arab Republic, Israeli farmers being murdered in border ambushes, the army shelling in retaliation.
As for Sharon, she danced to "El Ginot Egoz" in Beth Sholom, the social hall named for Tami Heringman's late uncle. She led her campers to the summit of Schunnemunk Mountain. She anchored the volleyball team in its matches against Kindering, the Workmen's Circle camp, and Habonim -- always an easy win for Kinderwelt because the kids there were too busy raising crops and livestock in preparation for chalutz life to spend much time practicing a sport.
In the several hours each night between bedtime for her nine-year-olds and the counselors' eleven-thirty curfew, Sharon joined Tami and Gloria and Myra in putting their curlers to use on the flips and bouffants that were the season's vogue. They turned their transistor radios to Murray the K's Swingin' Soiree and turned their a cappella talents to the summer's first hit, "It's My Party." They walked into nearby Woodbury for movies, hitched to Monroe for ice cream at the diner, went to Newburgh on their day off for David and Lisa, a sensitive teenager's kind of romance.
Still, Sharon and her friends could not avoid noticing some disquieting changes at Kinderwelt. There were empty bunks, as many as four or six in a cabin built for twelve, in the younger groups, like the five-year-olds Gloria oversaw. Grass sprouted through cracks in the tennis courts, and the asphalt buckled on the basketball court where Sharon watched the college guys play pick-up games. Kinderwelt's maintenance crew had always been less than fastidious, so now the camp director's wife followed in their wake, scrubbing and sweeping and disinfecting. A ten-year-old camper named Joel occasionally fixed toilets. Sharon and her cheekier companions sang the camp hymn with a twist. Where the words were supposed to be "Kinderwelt iz shayn un sunik," Kinderwelt is nice and sunny, they made it "shayn un schmutzik" -- nice and dirty.
The satire poked at an uncomfortable truth, one that had much to do with the empty bunks in Myra's cabin. Kinderwelt was starting to lose its clientele, and with it the fees that paid for upkeep. The Farband had split along generational lines in apportioning its budget, and the greatest infusion of money went to Unser Camp, to build a hotel meant to compete with Brown's and Grossinger's. No longer able to fill its beds by word of mouth, Kinderwelt had resorted to shooting a promotional film and sending a recruiter door to door among the families of Holocaust survivors. Whatever their feelings about Zionism and secularism, they at least spoke Yiddish.
For Sharon and her crowd, the city was still home -- Weequahic, with Wigler's Bakery and Halem's candy store and the Chancellor Avenue Y. But she was the youngest daughter of parents nearing fifty, the urban remnant of a Jewish population climbing, like Neil Klugman in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, into the once-gentile suburbs. The allrightniks' ambitions exceeded a camp with Second Avenue schmaltz and a lopsided softball field. In any issue of the New York Times Magazine in the spring of 1963, they could have found pages of advertisements for camps named Iroquois, Beaverbrook, and Lincoln Farm, camps with horseback riding, water skiing, indoor basketball courts, scuba diving, French lessons. Every time Sharon played volleyball against Camp Monroe, the one member of Kinderwelt's league not operated by a secular Jewish organization, she saw in its facilities a competitor in more than sporting terms.
Sharon had to admit that some of Kinderwelt struck even her adoring eyes as dated. For years, campers had spent an hour each day in sicha -- Hebrew for discussion -- learning about the shtetl or Jewish art or Zionist heroes like Herzl. Sharon found the sessions sheer tedium. Every few weeks, she had to herd her unwilling charges to a shaded grove in Unser Camp tohear some alter kocker, some old-timer, fulminate in Yiddish few of the children understood. In earlier decades, Kinderwelt's youngsters had listened to Abba Eban and Golda Meir orate in the Literarisher Vinkl, the Literary Corner, and been exhilarated by the experience. Sharon and her peers, who could not remember a world without Israel, dismissed the place as the Narrish Vinkl, the Foolish Corner. Ironically, they were using a variation of the same Yiddish term -- narrishkeit, foolishness -- that their parents hurled at their taste for Gidget movies and rock and roll.
What exactly was there beyond the confines of Jewish life? Six weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, Sharon still wasn't sure. "Everything in my family was related to being Jewish," she would say years later. "If Adlai Stevenson was running for president, was it good for the Jews? If there was a murder in Newark, then it shouldn't be a Jew who committed it. You knew you'd marry a Jewish person. You knew you'd have a Jewish life."
But last summer, when she kept company with Rishon Bialer, Sharon had begun to glimpse other possibilities. In some ways, Rishon was consummately Jewish, educated in a yeshiva, now majoring in premed at Brandeis. Yet he and his buddies among the waiters and athletic staff -- Artie Eisenberg, Hesh Josephson, Vic Fershko -- possessed a sophistication that impressed Sharon. Instead of the typical camp play like The King and I, in which Sharon had played a secondary role, they put on Edward Albee's Zoo Story. They listened to Tom Lehrer records, watched "That Was the Week That Was," knew enough to call it "TW3" in the Morse code of hip.
This year, with Rishon no longer at Kinderwelt, the intellectual crowd centered around Vic Fershko, Gloria Freed's boyfriend, and his single room in the rafters of the old social hall. Peter, Paul and Mary, whose folk music was already a staple of Kinderwelt campfires, had just covered Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," sending a protest song high enough on the charts to challenge "Surf City." President Kennedy negotiated a test-ban treaty with Khrushchev. Buddhist monks cremated themselves in the streets of Saigon to protest the South Vietnamese regime. The civil rights movement was building toward a rally outside the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, a few days after Kinderwelt's season would end. Myra Graubard and her friend Marty Greenfield planned to be there. Here was a bigger vision, Sharon would later put it, "than the Zionist idea of brotherhood."
As the wider world enticed Sharon in one direction, religion beckoned from another. The call came in the person of the camp director, Eli Gamliel. By almost any measure, he was an outsider to Kinderwelt's culture, which was rooted in the radical movements of Eastern Europe. Gamliel hailed from Yemenite stock, the Sephardic side of Jewry, and had grown up in Israel and America deeply observant. He had attended the Talmudical Academy high school and Yeshiva University, both Orthodox institutions, and had taught in day schools and Hebrew schools affiliated with synagogues. Though he had married into a Labor Zionist family and spent summers emceeing shows at the Unser Camp Casino, he cut a drastically different figure from such predecessors as Zvi Schooler. Gray-haired and thickly bearded, Schooler had acted in Yiddish theater and hosted a Yiddish-language radio show called "Der Graumeister," "The Storyteller." The closest he would ever get to organized religion was playing a rabbi in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof.
Gamliel, in contrast, presented himself as a modern man, clean-shaven, handsome in creased slacks and a white oxford shirt. And he was moving Kinderwelt in the direction Labor Zionism itself was going, however reluctantly -- toward reconciliation with religion. To any Orthodox Jew, even to many Reform Jews, the practices Gamliel brought to Kinderwelt would have qualified as mere whiffs of observance. Among secular Jews, though, they represented major concessions.
From its beginnings, Kinderwelt had honored certain rituals, in the same way that even militantly atheistic Jews could not bring themselves to eat ham. The camp separated both its dishes and its meals by meat and milk, an homage to the spirit if not every letter of the dietary laws of kashrut. Each Friday pointed toward sundown and Shabbat, starting with bunk cleanup in the morning and continuing with the procession of campers, all clad in white, into the dining hall for a traditional chicken dinner. Kiddush was spoken over the grape juice, and in Sharon's time Artie Eisenberg always sang "Lecha Dodi," "Welcome Bride," the bride being the Sabbath. But nobody wore a yarmulke, and on Saturday morning instead of davening, Kinderwelt shed its shoes and whirled across the meadow in Israeli dances. "You didn't think of it as holy," Sharon's friend Judi Schulman would recall years later, "but as something clean and special and fun."
Now Gamliel gathered the camp in Beth Sholom every Saturday morning for a distilled service -- the Shema, Judaism's declaration of faith; excerpts from the parsha, the weekly Torah portion; and the sermon known as a d'var Torah. "Why do we have to do this?" parents occasionally complained. He had his answer: He wouldn't subscribe to any Zionism that denied religion. Besides, the faction of campers from Holocaust survivor households tended to be quite observant. Even some of the American-born kids came from families that had returned to Judaism's rituals, if not exactly fervent faith. Sharon had always sensed that her own father longed in some unspoken way for the synagogue and the connection it offered to his vanquished family in vanished Butka. As it was, he settled for worship on the High Holy Days.
Sharon didn't even know about Tisha b'Av, for instance, until coming to Kinderwelt. There the holiday commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples was becoming yet another measure of religion's renewed claim on Labor Zionism. Well into the fifties, Tisha b'Av had consisted of little more than a handful of Unser Camp adults fasting and the Kinderwelt children forgoing swimming for the day. Then, toward 1960, a ritual emerged. The campers would congregate at dusk along the lake shore and watch as a wooden model of a temple was set aflame and set adrift.
By the time Tisha b'Av was commemorated on July 30, 1963, Gamliel had devised a more elaborate pageant. As the entire camp settled on the hillside between the boys' and girls' cabins, floodlights struck stage flats painted with scenes of the First Temple being destroyed by Babylonian conquerors. Then the assemblage, having rehearsed for weeks, sang "By the Rivers of Babylon" and recited verses from Psalm 137:
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.Let my tongue stick to my palate, if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in my memory, even at my happiest hour.
More flats appeared -- the Romans ravaging the Second Temple, the martyrs at Masada choosing death before captivity, and finally the modern pioneers working the land. The camp-ers' voices rose again, this time in "Hatikvah," Israel's anthem.
In one respect, Gamliel was doing exactly what Zionists since Herzl had done, conflating Biblical symbolism with secular politics. Hadn't Ben-Gurion himself called Zionism a "Movement of Redemption"? But Ben-Gurion also was a leader who once issued a press statement announcing that he hadn't fasted on Yom Kippur, who boasted to a convention of American Orthodox rabbis that he'd been married by a justice of the peace. There had long existed a religious Zionist group, the Mizrachi. The Reform and ultra-Orthodox Jews who had opposed Zionism prior to statehood now, for the most part, adopted it. So why did the Farband, which had been right about Zionism all along, have to bend to religion? Never before had Kinderwelt's leftists and laborites sought clerical cover.
Any such concern got lost in the last dizzying weeks of camp. Just after Sharon turned eighteen on August 17, Color War broke out, splitting Kinderwelt into armies of Kachol and Lavan. Over the next four days, the teams competed in events from riflery to water polo to "Name That Tune." Bunk inspection counted for points. So did a ready knowledge of Jewish history. Neither team entered the dining hall without delivering, by way of a chant, proof that this was not any camp's version of Color War:
Out of exile came the Jews,Back to their land ascending,
Built a state as a Jewish home,
Determination unending.
Farmers, man your guns, then return to the soil,
For fighters you must be to preserve Yisrael.
Elijah's spirit is here to incite us.
Rise and conquer those who'd defy us.
Color War always made Sharon feel defiant. Straining till her arms ached in the tug-of-war, swimming the winning leg of a relay race, she exulted in physicality. And Kinderwelt put her physicality in the service of something grander than mere sport; she was part of the Zionist mission to forge a new kind of Jew, the robust rejoinder to the pale, cowering product of Galut, the Exile.
Sharon had been rewarded over the years, not only as a teammate but as an individual. He