To mark our twentieth anniversary, Betsy and I decided to take a bicycle tour along the Rhine, where we could enjoy our love of nature amidst the spectacular scenery of Switzerland. Every morning we left our bags at the reception desk of the hotel where we had stayed the night before and set off for a ride of about 60 km along a paved bicycle path. Some time in the afternoon we would reach our next hotel, where we would find our luggage waiting for us.
After one particularly long and enjoyable day biking along the river, we reached the small village of Buchs, located on the border between Switzerland and Lichtenstein. Exhausted, we dragged ourselves up the spiral staircase to our hotel room, intending to wash off the sweat of the day and freshen up before heading out for dinner.
In the hotel room we had a delightful surprise: a basket overflowing with fancy Swiss chocolate pralines and a charming anniversary card from the warm and welcoming hotel owner. After a long, hot shower to ease our cramped muscles, we relaxed on the bed and fed each other pralines. Betsy picked up the TV remote and started flipping through the channels, trying to find one in English.
We have not had a TV in the house since our oldest child was born, because we believe children are exposed to enough garbage even without a TV. But childhood habits are hard to break - my wife grew up in America when TV was the primary household entertainment, and flipping through TV channels is a childhood bug of hers.
Europe has plenty of beautiful and interesting things for an English-speaking tourist to enjoy. Television, however, is not one of them. The vast majority of the programs are dubbed in the local language, and in Switzerland, even Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie talk in German.
For lack of a more interesting channel, Betsy ended up at MTV. "I know that woman!" cried Betsy excitedly, spotting a heavily made-up woman being interviewed about the 16th birthday party she was planning for her daughter. I will not go into the details of this idiotic program, except to say: a) The effort and expense going into the party exceeded what is required for a fancy wedding, and included a new BMW for the birthday girl. b) I thank God that my four children cannot watch such foolish programs at our house, and that young girls like that 16-year-old are not role models among their friends at Hoshaya.
Hunger finally overcame tiredness, so we turned off the TV and set out to find somewhere in the small village to have dinner. After checking the menus of the few restaurants in the vicinity, we settled on Tauber, a clean, picturesque restaurant on the main street. We were the first guests of the evening, and sat ourselves down at a heavy wooden table in the corner of the restaurant. The waitress told us, most politely, that they would not be opening for another 10 minutes, but she let us stay seated in the meantime, so I asked her to recommend a local beer.
She brought me the beer and then, because we were the only ones in the restaurant, began to chat with us. We learned she was forty, with no children, originally from the former East Germany, and had come to Switzerland three years earlier from Berlin. In response to my questions, which gradually became more and more nosy thanks to the beer and my own curiosity, she told us that she had come here because she had fallen in love with a local farmer, whom she had met in Berlin. Blinded by love, she left the busy and vibrant city of Berlin for a small farm on a Swiss mountaintop. Unfortunately, after a year on the farm she realized she could not adapt to the monotonous village life in which conversation was mostly with cows and sheep. I told her I came from a kibbutz in Israel, and I was sure one could find similarities between the kibbutz and the socialist East Germany. "Not at all," she answered firmly. "You could leave the kibbutz but we couldn't leave East Germany." After she told us she had predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall when she was 19, I asked her, "What was it like living in East Germany?" I expected another negative answer, but I was wrong.
"I'm glad I got to grow up in East Germany, and I'm proud of the education I got," she answered. "We were educated with an ideology; we understood the importance of the group, of working towards a common goal, of achievements in sport and science. We were educated with values, not like today's youth in the West - for them, everything revolves around money and material things. They don't have any values at all."
She said this firmly and decisively, but I detected a touch of sadness and bitterness in her strong words. I was reminded of my childhood on the kibbutz. We, too, were raised with ideals. Over time, some of those ideals proved to be unreasonable, and some of our educators did not necessarily live by those values themselves. Nevertheless, values were an intrinsic part of how we were raised.
Educating without values is very difficult. When we compare the socialism of the Israeli kibbutz - or even of East Germany - with the hedonistic, materialistic world-view of MTV, we might find that socialism still has something to teach us.
When we got up to pay and say goodbye to our former-socialist waitress, I asked if I could take her photograph and use it to illustrate her story in one of my columns. "Absolutely not!" she snapped. I was a bit taken aback by her reaction. She made me think of a thriller I had just read, about the secret police in Stalinist Russia. Instinctively I glanced around, looking for secret agents and bugs. Then I realized that despite the passage of time and the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the fact that we were in Switzerland and not East Berlin, it is hard to change the cautious habits of those who grew up in East Germany.
Sagi Melamed lives with his family in the community of Hoshaya in the Galilee. He serves as Vice President of External Affairs at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, and is the Chief Instructor in the Hoshaya Karate Club. Sagi received his Masters degree from Harvard University in Middle Eastern Studies with a specialty in Conflict Resolution. He can be contacted at: melamed.sagi@gmail.com.
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