their father Podhotzur, the brash businessman and social climber; Hodl’s children adored their father, Perchik, the ascetic revolutionary and hardworking official. Beilke’s children were uncertain Jews and incomplete Americans; Hodl’s children were native-born Russians and perfect Soviets. But what about Chava’s children in Palestine? Their Moscow cousins were too close to the center of the world and the end of history to pay much attention (other than to extend a generic promise of salvation), while the ones in New York were too busy looking toward Moscow (or doing business). One of Beilke’s daughters may have preferred Eretz Israel to the Soviet Union, but her voice was drowned out by the chorus of world revolution. Meanwhile, Chava’s children were living a revolution of their own—building, consistently and unapologetically, socialism in one country. Like their Soviet cousins, they were the first generation: “first” because they were Sabras (the Yishuv’s firstborn) and a self-conscious “generation” because they knew that they all belonged to the fraternity of fulfilled prophecy and eternal youth. In the words of Benjamin Harshav, “The cell of life was not the family but the age group sharing a common ideology and reading the new Hebrew journalism. Theirs was a consciousness of the end of all previous history: the end of two thousand years of exile and the end of thousands of years of class warfare—in the name of a new beginning for man and Jew.” And, like their Soviet cousins, they had little use for Tevye. Or rather, Hodl’s children pitied Tevye when they thought of him at all: most of them knew that Sholem Aleichem was the Yiddish Pushkin even if they had never read Tevye the Milkman , and many of them had heard of Mikhoels’s Yiddish theater even if they never went there. In Eretz Israel, the repudiation of Tevye was the cornerstone of the new community, the true beginning of the new beginning for man and Jew. According to Harshav, “it was a society without parents, and for the children growing up, without grandparents; the former admiration for grandfather as the source of wisdom was turned upside down, and the orientation of life was toward the utopian future, to be implemented by the next generation.” 87 The American cousins questioned—and sometimes disowned—their fathers. The ones in the Soviet Union and Eretz Israel joined their mothers and fathers in disowning their grandfathers. The task of the “next generation” was to show themselves worthy of their parents by completing the patricidal revolution they had begun. As a fourteen-year-old boy wrote to his parents from Kibbutz Yagur in 1938, “I feel happy that the yoke of the general good has been laid on me, or more precisely, that I have placed the yoke of the general good on my own back and bear it. . . . I desire, as they say, to put myself at the service of my people