One hundred years ago, Yosef Bussel, Yosef Baratz, eight other young men, and two young women arrived in Umm Juni on the southern shore of Lake Tiberias. There they established a kommuna, a small agricultural settlement that was to become the first kibbutz. Bussel, who drowned tragically in the lake a few years later, was 21 at the time. Baratz was the same age. They and their fellow pioneers, all Zionists and socialists, had come from Russia a few years earlier. Besides their ideological attractions to the communal agricultural lifestyle in Palestine, they were moved by pragmatic concerns: their common lack of capital or experience to engage in individual farming.

The anniversary has been duly remembered throughout Israel and celebrated with special fervor in Degania, as Umm Juni was quickly renamed, "after the five different kinds of grain (deganim) that are grown here." At least this is what Bussel reported to Arthur Ruppin, the head of the World Zionist Organization's Palestine Office, in a letter cited in the volume under review. The most massive of a number of tomes commemorating the anniversary, 100 Shnot Kibbutz (100 Years of Kibbutz), is part narrative, part album. Edited by Eliezer Saks, it is lavishly and attractively produced, with many maps, perhaps too many illustrations, and a preface by the president of Israel, Shimon Peres. It has brief sections about the development of kibbutz agriculture and industry, kibbutz culture and education, and how festivals are celebrated on a kibbutz. But the bulk of the book consists of profiles, usually a page long, of individual kibbutzim—265 of them.

A lot of the grainier photos in this volume are from the time that I knew the kibbutz from up close. Not long after arriving in Palestine in 1938, I went to . . .

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