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The Ravases By Avner Avrahami and Reli Avrahami Tags: Israel News Kibbutz Karmiya The cast: Malka (53) and Eli (18). The home: Situated near the livestock, in an area with lots of neighbors (You can hear everything) and creepers, the family's house has a red asbestos roof and a peltophorum dubium (a broad, multi-branched tree) outside. In the front, a bird of paradise and palms grow by a garden of ferns and herbs. We park on a dirt road and make our way to a porch, on which is a bicycle (red) and a pesticide container (5 liters). Playing on the grass are Mary-Lou (a reddish cat) and Kitty (mixed-breed dog), both foundlings brought to the house to reinforce the existing pet collection. Advertisement Pet collection: Also includes a cage of finches, small birds with a melodious (to certain ears) chirp, and Uri, a delightful three-year-old dog (from the SPCA). The screen door is open, and the wooden door, too. We enter. Entering: This is a small house (60 square meters) crammed with things and consisting of a living room, two bedrooms and a kitchen. There is not enough room for a dining table (they eat in the living room) or for a bathtub (they shower). In the living room are two light-colored sofas arranged at a right angle; one is from IKEA, the other from Kalman Shemi, an artist and a former kibbutz member, who dabbled in carpentry. On the wall is a decorative wooden frame with small shelves that hold mini-sculptures and pictures. Close by is a glass table on which are books (including the best-sellers "Woman of Valor" and "The New Zealand Experience"). We peek into the kitchen: Two apple cakes (baked by Malka) are cooling on the marble counter. Refreshments are served. There is nothing like a just-opened pomegranate. On to Eli's room. Eli's room: Next to a long table with a computer and amid an array of clothes, dolls, bedding and painting canvases, we find Kadi. Kadi: Her boyfriend. Onward. On the bed in Malka's room is "Water for Elephants" (a novel by Sara Gruen, in Hebrew translation) and an alarm clock set for 4:45 (A.M.). Malka: "But I get up at 2 A.M." We sit down to talk and to ask about the (very) early rising. Livelihoods and occupations: Malka is a hired hand on the dairy farm of nearby Kibbutz Sa'ad, where she is in charge of the newborn calves (about 50). She also helps with the milking "and with whatever is needed." Her work is in shifts. Shifts: Morning milking, from 2 A.M. until 12:30 P.M., or from 6:30 A.M. until 4 P.M. Once a week she has an evening shift and, consequently, a split day. She works 50 to 60 hours a week(!) for a straight salary(everything factored in) and likes her job very much ('I don't want to change a thing"). She reads "Farm and Milk" ("That's the La'Isha [popular women's magazine] of the dairy farmers," she says. She gets to and from work in a 2001 Mazda Lancet ("An amazing car, I'm not selling"). A good day: "Lots of milk." Sa'ad cows, she says, give 40 liters of milk a day. Eli: Graduate of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai high school, will enter the army in January. She does some painting (acrylics and pencils), but mainly waitresses (Cup O' Joe cafe, Yad Mordechai Junction), doing four or five shifts a week (mostly in the evening). She has served the singer Amir Fey Guttman, the writer and journalist Yehonatan Geffen ("terribly scatterbrained") and the tycoon Nohi Dankner ("no big thrill"). She also works in the kibbutz kindergarten (as an assistant teacher), is a photography buff (nature, landscape, Kadi) and is in charge of cooking at home. Cooking: Pasta, stir-fry, fish. "Tasty stuff," Malka says. They both abstain from meat and from the kibbutz dining hall. The kibbutz: Privatized ("n excellent shape". Malka pays for "everything" (electricity, education, dining hall, library). Still, she says, there is a good atmosphere ("People in Karmiya are always complementing you"). She does not attend the weekly kibbutz meetings, adding that the only participants are those involved in communal life ("which I definitely am not"). Marital status: Malka is a single mother and has never been married. Mother-daughter relations: "We fight and make up," Eli says. Malka agrees: "But I think you are the most wonderful person in the world and the best thing that ever happened to me in my life." Malka's bio: Born 1955, Tel Aviv, disadvantaged Yad Eliahu neighborhood ("a meter from the [basketball] stadium"), traditionalist family, four siblings (one of whom has died). Her late father (who immigrated to Palestine from Egypt in the 1930s) worked as a delivery person for Haaretz ("on a bicycle and afterward on a motor scooter"); her mother, who is from Salonika, was a homemaker and now lives in an old-age home on Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. Malka went to elementary school in the neighborhood and to high school at Seminar Hakibbutzim as well as doing courses in an external framework. She was drafted in 1973 to the Nahal paramilitary brigade and came to Karmiya with a settlement group from the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. She was living on the kibbutz during the Yom Kippur War and afterward moved to Netzarim-then a secular kibbutz-in the Gaza Strip ("that cursed place"). There she contracted jaundice, was discharged and set out to see the world. The world: Europe, Canada, the United States. She traveled alone ("lots of hitchhiking"). She returned to the kibbutz ("to the guys") in 1977, but was discontent and traveled again (to France and Germany). Returning, she cleaned homes in the affluent Zahala suburb of Tel Aviv, waitressed in a place at the London Ministore in Tel Aviv, went to performances at the Tzavta theater, saw Mazi Cohen in "Mami," felt she had exhausted the big city and returned to the kibbutz. "And then I conceived Eli." Conceiving Eli: "If I had known, I probably never would have done it. It's hard to raise a child without a father." She has never told Eli who her father is. Eli: "I asked, but didn't get an answer. I knew it upset her, so I dropped it." Eli thinks she will never know and says she can live with that ("The subject does not bother me"). Malka: "I can't see myself without Eli. Who will wake me up at 1 A.M. and say, "Come and take me home, when I have to get up by 2" Eli: "I really appreciate what you do for me." Daily routine: Malka gets up at 1:50 A.M. (for a night shift), makes herself a cup of coffee (Jakobs, one brown sugar, plenty of milk) and drives to Sa'ad (15 minutes). She is usually the first to arrive at the barn ("They don't wake up"), pulls on high boots (green) and goes to the milk containers to check the cleanliness. From there she goes to the shed of the newborns to see what's new. Most calves enter the world on their own, she says, but this past week she had two "pull-outs." Then it's on to the milking station; by this time her coworker has arrived. Milking starts at 3 A.M., breakfast is at 9:30 ("in the cowshed dining room"), with lots of kibbutz-made salted cheese, vegetable salad, omelets (with onion) and toasted cheese. Lunch is at home (a slice of bread with cheese), after which she catches up on her sleep before working in the garden. The garden: Every day. Malka waters, prunes, weeds and "talks to the plants." She then goes to the barn to meet Einat, her closest friend, and the two have a cup of mint tea and talk ("We exchange information"). Later she helps feed the kibbutz horses and get them into their stalls ("Marvelous horses"). Sometimes she goes to Yad Mordechai to visit her mother in the old-age home ("93 and lucid"). The place is simply wonderful, she says (NIS 10,000 a month). Evening: "At 8 I go out with my partner." She has had a relationship with a man for nine years, but it's "still secret," she says. They usually go out to eat in Ashkelon (at Luna) or Sderot (the restaurant in the gas station at the entrance to the town) or to a place in Kibbutz Miflasim. She goes to sleep by midnight and is not tired ("I am like an Energizer battery"). She is not considering the formalization of the relationship ("I wouldn't want anyone to live with me") and is certain that she would not be able to stand anyone after a short time ("him or me"). Pressure and advice: "Mother would like me to get married, but she respects my decision." She, for her part, will not intervene in Eli's life ("She is a different type from me"). Regret: "Absolutely not." Really: "If it will come, it will come; if not, not." Nostalgia: "For my youth, for 1975, for the period after the discharge from the army, for the first trip abroad. Everything was different then, the people were different, there was less greed." Television: "Only British series," Eli says. She avoids "Big Brother" ("There's a limit"). Malka likes the documentary channel of YES satellite TV, also French films and BBC Prime. She does not watch the news. Qassam rockets: "I got through them peacefully," Malka says. "There was a rough period," Eli says. The present lull, they think, is the calm before the storm ("That's what people in Sa'ad are saying"). They do not have a protected security space. "There is a start, though," Malka says, pointing to a one-centimeter hole, which marks the exact place where such a room will be built one day. Will they move from here? "No." At the same time, Malka thinks an agreement "with them" should have been reached long ago. Dream: "For peace to come" (the two of them). Eli adds: "And for my face to be on a huge building on the Ayalon Freeway in Tel Aviv." God: Malka: "When I am in Sa'ad [a religious kibbutz], I believe" (laughs). Eli: "I believe." Romance: "I've forgotten what it's like" (Malka). "A Bamba [snack] that Kadi buys me at 2 in the morning at a Yellow [convenience store]" (Eli). Happiness quotient (scale of 1-10): 10 (mother and daughter). Update: "We were hit by Qassams, but people here are talking only about Obama." The place Karmiya-A kibbutz located about 4 kilometers north of the Gaza Strip, founded in 1950 by a Nahal group affiliated with the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, privatized, has a neighborhood of Gaza Strip-settlement evacuees and suffers from Qassam rockets. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Who's missing? Haredi parties absent from Jerusalem coalition for first time in decades. 'Kavosh 2' Amid nuclear tensions, Iran says it successfully launched rocket.

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