out gentlemen or prepare students for high society. It did not provide a broad education, but it strove to produce highly trained farmers for the colonies and the settlements of the Labor movement. It did, however, abide by some of the norms and behavior of English boarding schools. Attending boarding school meant being cut off from home, from family, and from familiar surroundings. Pupils were allowed home on holiday once every three months. Parent’s day was held at the school twice a year. Pupils seem to have found ample compensation for the break with home in the fellowship of peers and the warm relations they developed with teachers.
It was a boys’ school, as was common for boarding schools in Britain, though less so for those in Palestine, where secular society championed women’s equality and mixed learning was customary. In fact, shortly before Kadoorie’s inauguration, the Ben Shemen Youth Village had opened under Dr. Siegfried Lehmann as a joint boarding school for boys and girls. The absence of girls at Kadoorie certainly affected the school experience. The emphasis tended to be on male qualities, such as physical prowess, practical jokes, and a degree of uncouthness. To counter the lack of female company and cut their manly teeth, the boys would pay visits to Nahalal, where there was a girls’ school, to Tel Yosef, where there was a youth village, and sometimes even to faraway Haifa.
Kadoorie also adopted from the education of an English gentleman the code of honor. Two stories exist as to its source: one ascribes it to Zemach, the other to the student body. Either way, there was a gentleman’s agreement against copying during exams, with teachers showing their trust by staying out of the classrooms. As often happens when supervision devolves on a peer group, the boys were more zealous than their teachers about the honor system. If anyone faltered by glancing at a textbook, the student council soon informed Zemach of the breach (without, of course, supplying the malfeasant’s name) and called for reexamination. The code held good for smoking as well. Because Zemach’s wife, a doctor, deemed the practice most harmful, a decision was made—and kept—to ban smoking from the school grounds.
The school day was very full: in the summer, pupils would rise at five; in the winter, at six. Cowhands rose at three. Classroom work lasted six hours, and farm work, four. Formally, pupils finished their duties at 4 P.M. and were free for homework, preparing for exams, idle—and not so idle—conversation, games, or going out. The boys took their studies seriously, especially those such as Allon who found the going uphill. Lights-out was at 9 P.M., but studies often stretched late into the night with the help of a flashlight.
Sports featured strongly in student life and were encouraged by the school. Dares—such as scaling the Tabor in pouring rain—were run-of-the-mill. But the favorite pastime was soccer. The small Kadoorie student body turned out a winning team for the Galilee Cup, thus stretching its reputation well beyond the region. Soccer held the boys and filled hours of play and talk. In a friendly game between the two Kadoorie institutions, the triumph of the Jewish school over the Arab one was veritably a national honor.
Actually, the boys as well as Zemach were highly conscious that their every deed and prank reflected on the Jewish image in British eyes. The very fact of British supervision charged teachers and students with guarding Jewish honor before the powers-that-be. Every few months, they were treated to a visit by Mr. Dowe, the inspector of the Department of Agriculture of the government of Palestine,14 the momentous occurrence occasioning a feast. The school kitchen would cook up a storm compared to the regular fare, preparing, among other things, roast chickens. Being especially fond of the dish, the students—according to one story—would break into the kitchen and generously partake of the luxury before Dowe even arrived. Or, according to another story, they would burst into the dining room as soon as Zemach, Dowe, and Dowe’s entourage had left it and fall upon the leftovers with the gusto of adolescent boys. Once, Dowe forgot something in the dining hall and he returned with Zemach only to catch the boys red-handed. Zemach did not know where to hide: what would the British think of Jewish conduct now?!15 Dowe, the son of a modest farming family and a swineherd in his youth,16 presumably did not regard the boys’ actions as overly “disgraceful.” But Zemach and his boys were mortified.
The consciousness of guarding the national honor also came to the fore in another incident: two of Kadoorie’s boys were invited to dine with the high commissioner. One of the two, Sini, was seated next to a British official. All of the warnings he had been given about Jewish honor rang in his ears and whenever the waiter offered him tantalizing delicacies, he courteously asked for a mere mouthful—after all, everyone knew that in polite company one did not exhibit appetite. Sini thus walked away from the meal as ravenous as he had come to it. Amos Brandsteter, in contrast, had been seated next to a Jewish official and had indulged his appetite to his heart’s delight.
School subjects, as described earlier, were aimed at enriching the mind but hardly the soul. Pupils coming from regular high schools arrived at Kadoorie with the intellectual and emotional baggage instilled by humanist-oriented curricula. History, literature, Bible were the foundation stones of education in the city. Allon had received none of this emphasis. Zemach, an author among agronomists and an agronomist among authors as he liked to refer to himself, was alert to the paucity of Kadoorie’s syllabus. He would take the time to converse with students about literature and even ask the capable ones to write papers, which did not fall short of any produced at nontechnical schools.17 For some of the pupils, including Allon, the talks with Zemach opened up new worlds.
But on the whole, their world was small and circumscribed, centering on peers and school matters. They were not bothered by “big questions.” This was true also of top students from educated bourgeois homes. Life revolved around exams, teachers, pranks, soccer, work, and girls—they were ordinary adolescents, after all. The pecking order was determined by physical excellence.
Like the rest of Yishuv society, the boys were affiliated with either the Left or the Right, either Labor or Revisionists. The first twenty-four, as it happened, were equally divided between Ha-Noar Ha-Oved, the youth movement of the Labor Federation (Histadrut), and Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir, which was connected to the middle class. Everyone anxiously awaited the arrival of a twenty-fifth student: Israel Krasnianski, the tie breaker, tipped the scales in favor of Ha-Noar Ha-Oved,18 resulting in the election of an all-“socialist” student council (consisting of Prozhinin, Brandsteter, and Sini). The elected members were a conscientious lot, but their sense of responsibility was no match for Sini’s desire to get his hands on a steering wheel. One night, he and a few others “borrowed” the agricultural instructor’s car and set off for Afula. They knew a heady sense of mastery—they could drive! True, they could not find the rear gear, but this did not make the occasion any less momentous. When it was time to turn around, they simply lifted the vehicle and faced it in the right direction. Back at Kadoorie, they learned that the Arab guard had spotted their exit and reported them to the principal. Zemach made it plain that recklessness was inconsistent with a seat on the student council. By consensus, which was common practice at Kadoorie, Sini was ejected, making room on the council for a member of Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir—Allon.19
Allon had been involved in Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir at Kefar Tavor, where he had actually initiated and established the Mes’ha branch, an act that was a clear reflection of the village public mood: on the right of the political spectrum, yet not too far right. Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir was a middle-class, quasi-youth movement. Apart from socializing, its dominant activity was sports. Most of all, for the youth of Mes’ha, it represented a contrast to the Left, the Left that maligned them and demanded that they employ Jewish labor. Given Mes’ha’s conditions, the mere fact that local youth organized to found a branch of the league was in itself an achievement. Allon’s role in the affair had placed him at the forefront of Mes’ha’s youth. His membership in Ha-Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir showed that he toed the line, that he accepted his father’s worldview. He may have belonged to a poor family in a poor village, he may have been highly conscious of his poverty, but he likened himself to members of the middle class whose rituals and traditions he shared. His friends at Kadoorie, in contrast, who were pampered lads from “established” homes, saw themselves brandishing the socialist flag
