About the book: 2010 / The story of Maria Amor, a former Israeli now living in the USA, “Palm Trees in the Jordan Valley” is set in the late 1970s - early 1980s. Circumstances, mostly love, prompt a young repatriate, Muscovite Sasha, to move from Jerusalem to a kibbutz. As a result, the reader gets the opportunity to observe kibbutz life with the unclouded gaze of a person from the outside. To put it mildly, the uniqueness of kibbutz orders and customs, the political dogmatism and ideological narrow-mindedness of the kibbutzniks are described with good-natured humor and even a certain sympathy. And although “there is nothing in the world more exhausting than working in a field in forty-degree heat,” at first the heroine seems that life in a team has become her life, and she wants to be accepted as an equal and respected here. However, man is not a social animal, but a person, an individual. And where the general meeting decides whether a woman should give birth or have an abortion, whether to buy a color TV for the family or be satisfied with black and white, individuality rebels. Existing in conditions of either “hot dry heat or a humid steam room” and the awareness of the unprofitability of the kibbutz economy and the uselessness of hard collective labor do not add to enthusiasm. But the main disappointment is the inglorious death of the romantic idea, to which many worthy people devoted their lives, and the inability to make their own contribution to its revival.