Author Archives: ona

Shut in in Tel Aviv Work

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For a writer, it seems isolation/quarantine should be an ideal situation to write for hours every day, day in day out. Stores, parks, gyms, theaters are all closed; there’s no place to go, and the computer is ready and waiting. 

Then why, as the weeks have passed, do I have such a hard time sitting at the computer?  Why have I begun to feel wooden?  Why do I look at the news about COVID19 several times a day even knowing the confusion of information makes me feel like I’m inside the circus fun house?  I distract myself with Wordscapes; I scrub the kitchen sink when it doesn’t need scrubbing; I organize drawers; I pack my suitcases although I know I’m not leaving for at least a month. 

Quarantine happened. I did what I was supposed to do. In the little island of our apartment, I organized and made a schedule.  I make my bed, I drink coffee, I exercise, I eat breakfast, I try to write, I exercise, I eat an early supper, I go to bed.  I sweep, I scrub, I hang the laundry on our porch, I roast vegetables.  Little effort is required of me to maintain my needs. And the tasks I do, I do with a real, but really fleeting sense of accomplishment.

Why does the sameness of the my very-well-organized days, which allow me more freedom to write than I have ever had, leave me dull and wanting? 

Robinson Crusoe. On the surface, the analogy is ridiculous, I know. His “quarantine” was 1000 X more restrictive than mine, but maybe there is at least one parallel with these dull days. 

Crusoe’s behavior in his first months on the island was, by necessity, mechanistic. He needed to survive, to live. Ingenious in his attempts, he arranges his living space, searches, finds, and prepares food. He creates a dwelling/a life if not luxurious, at least comfortable. And, like the two of us, he lives in an emotionally closed system, his “conversation” culled from the mobius strip of his own emotions. 

Until he sees the footprint in the sand. 

Another person enters, and the phlegmatic world of singular survival and internal monologue changes in an instance. The book, until the footprint, is a fascinating survival guide and diary. After the footprint it becomes a story of human conflicts, racial prejudices, passions, fears, tension, values, and ultimately, friendship. 

This is the point in the book that in its extreme example, illuminates in reverse, writing during quarantine. 

The key is Friday. When Crusoe sees the footprint in the sand, his wooden world shifts. He is not alone! The sameness of the days in which he ingeniously builds, plants and fishes is shattered by his act of courage against the cannibals, by the presence of other humans. The emotions of human interchange enter the previously mechanistic world, where the reader saw only bursts of an emotional life. The challenges of human interactions arise: fear of others, confusion, uncertainty, demand for a courage that tests his compassion, and from then on decisions of interaction: the challenge of having power, of figuring out how to apply that power, the dance of getting to know/trust another human being, and ultimately the development of caring, not just for a built environment, but for another live person. The need to protect, the need to outwit the enemy, the need to spy and plot. 

These are the things of novels, of poems, of stories. They happen in the swirl of friends, enemies, acquaintances, unknown others, and simply put, I miss them, even today in the gentle quarantine of 2020, I have a partner in this quarantine, but after years of marriage we are something of a closed system, if  in fact a delightful closed system. There is nothing beyond us. We walk out disguised by mask and hat and gloves. On the street, the only dance is the quickstep when we skirt round each other as we pass. We do not meet friends, we have no misunderstandings in our half-learned Hebrew to delight or embarrass or surprise;  the flesh of culture / conflicts/ friendships has dissipated — no groups gather, at the store we stand online 2 meters apart each waiting patiently, silently so unlike the crowding bustle of Israelis in pre-COVID times. Walking the few hundred meters we are allowed from the apartment, our conversation dwindles to our own private interests or questions for the pharmacist or to repeat our member number at the grocery store.  

The apartment could be an apartment anywhere, the air blows through, the laundry gets done, dinner is fixed. I attend to my / our needs in the most ingenious way I can imagine, but the challenges that excite my emotions, aggravate my heart, and ignite my imagination are the people, the culture around me – and this is true no matter where I live.  It’s not that I don’t see people; it’s that I’m not involved with them, with their stories. It’s that I can’t touch them, can’t see my children’s expressive faces in person, laugh with my grandchildren, hug my friend’s on greeting. The gestures on the screen are flat; the tears of stories are pretend. This isolation, so much richer than Crusoe’s hardwearing years is deadening. 

So, I’ve decided: I’m just in the wooden days. I’ll keep the basics together and look forward to a tumbled, chaotic, haywire flesh-and-blood reality where, when I want to write, I have to waltz through the luscious flow of life.  

Shut in in Tel Aviv Breakfast

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A little over a month in isolation. We’re sticking to our schedule of making the bed, exercising, working, fixing meals. Without the schedule and the variation we can make within the confines of each activity, we would be overwhelmed by the enervating sameness of quarantine. The bare walls of the apartment would close in, the sounds of bottles crashing into the bin below by a neighbor’s hand and the lumbering roar of the street sweeping machine – even the children’s laughter from the street – would fade to background noise rather than making us run to the window to see or hear what’s happening.

Breakfast.  Something we can vary! We can be inventive about, plan for, especially now during Passover, when there is no bread. We have all the time we want to execute our food ideas: This morning it’s laban on matzah with lox, orange juice, and medjool dates.  Another day, a feta from goat’s milk to make an omelette, grapefruit; another day, fruit salad…… Lunch: fried eggplant over gnocchi, refried rice and vegetables, a big salad with tuna, lettuce, sweet red peppers, carrots, celery, tomatoes, red onion….  Supper:  practically nothing, a couple dates, some cottage cheese… 

If you are on social media you see, whether it’s quarantine or not, many people giving advice about the importance of breakfast, about what to eat for breakfast, about how to vary breakfasts, or specific recipes for smoothies, eggs, oatmeal….whatever.

This morning I wondered what famous people would say about breakfast.  As a mystery writer, I like Wilke Collins’s remarks the most. His words have panache, with an edge of menace appropriate to the father of the modern British detective novel:

“We had our breakfast–whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.”

Collins, raised in the Victorian era, was a British novelist, playwright and short story writer who wrote The Moonstone, The Woman in White, No Name and many other works. He was also a bohemian, an opium addict, a good friend of Charles Dickens, and a sort-of bigamist. (Can a man who lives with two women but never marries them be a bigamist?) People clamored for Collins’s stories because he wrote colorful, dramatic plots, and because some of his characters behaved scandalously, which according to current standards would be tame stuff, but must have seemed wonderfully naughty to Victorian readers, who stood in line waiting for the next installment of his serially published works. 

Well, enough. Have breakfast. Eat well. Enjoy quarantine as much as you can, and, as Josh Billings said:  

 “Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” 

Shut in in Tel Aviv Exercise

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We’ve been in isolation for three weeks.

We had just come back from a trip to the north when the restrictions went into effect. Rested, having vacationed with good friends, we came back ready to be home and entered isolation with the idea of creating and sticking to a schedule, finishing writing projects, catching up with correspondence, and making healthy meals from the abundance of fruits and vegetables we get from a stand just a few blocks away. We had two weeks to go before flying back to the U.S. We’d use isolation as an opportunity to get things done.

Our tickets were cancelled. Most airlines stopped flying and even the ones that continued, were landing at U.S. airports where the crowds looked like petri dishes bubbling with virus.

We were in for the long haul.

Okay. I was ready. I had my schedule.

            In the certainty of my own strength, I wasn’t prepared for the downside of isolation. As time passed, little termites of frustration, loneliness (yes, you can be lonely even with another or others around) crept in. I had been sleeping well, but the insomnia blew in with the night wind one night and stayed. Some days the schedule falls apart, and I cling to the fact that at least I made my bed. I have to drug myself into oblivion to get some sleep, and then walk in the haze until noon the next day. A memory slams against me so hard I can barely stand; I feel the rapier of longing for my family and friends far away.

Where is my exuberance? My determination? My strength?

Am I a whimp?

I don’t think I am. And I don’t think any of us experiencing this same phenomenon during isolation are either. I think we’re experiencing an era of reactive loneliness, of the tightening of our usual freedoms. We’re understanding the heavy weight of responsibility for the community.

The only way I know to deal with this relentless, dulling sameness created by “You can’t…” is by exercise.

Exercise doesn’t prevent painful memories or regrets; it doesn’t cure the mind-whirl of insomnia, and it doesn’t change longing for family. But it does allow me to raise my endorphins and to play just a little:  

Of the 100 meters from the house I am allowed to move, how many configurations can I make? Of the thousands of aerobic exercises on YouTube, which combinations will I do today? When my sons were little I used to hold them and dance through the living room and kitchen. Today, which dance will carry me spinning toward the porch? I scrub, climb up and down the stairs of the apartment building; sprinkle the day with intervals of punching the air and flapping my arms and legs in some semblance of jumping jacks.

I may be slightly crazed by this isolation, by this bait-and-switch of emotions — but maybe my body can figure it out.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Coffee

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In the last blog I wrote about making my bed. Why did I want to write about these homely details in the first place? What compelled me, in this isolation, to think on and write about such simple things? Can these everyday things broaden my world?  My answer is that if I look closely enough at anything and give it its due in thought or study, I’ll be off on a voyage through the world around me (or in my more professional writing, through the world I have created in my mind). For the duration of the pandemic isolation I have this apartment and what I do in it. I’m curious to know what I can learn here. The challenge given me is to face the mundane: to take a look at what’s happening in my small rooms.

There’s much to think about with a cup of coffee in your hand. The physical pleasure of holding this warm, sweet drink followed by a little jolt of vitality is enough, before all else, to raise a blessing on the tongue.

I look out the window, study the cumulus clouds ambling by on their way east and think of Jim Carrey’s morning musing:  “I wake up some mornings and look out at my beautiful garden and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.”

From the kitchen table, which doubles as my writing desk, a giant palm rises almost as high as the 5 stories of our apartment building. From where I sit, I can watch the ubiquitous little green parrots of Israel play in this palm and the hooded crow (corvus corone!) flutter along the trunk. The trunk of the palm is so close I could, if I wanted, take the few steps to the window and reach out to touch the jagged bark. But today, holding my coffee, I stare out the window past the palm to the street below where early risers walk toward the store, their rolling shopping carts rattling behind them. Some are in masks, some barefaced, some wear gloves, some not. Beside some, children, oblivious to the dangers in a touch or handshake, dart back and forth, giggling along an erratic path only they can see.

From the kids, Bach comes to mind. In an unusual burst of secular creativity, Bach wrote The Coffee Cantata, a little comic opera.  In it a lively young woman loves coffee. Her father orders her to stop drinking it; she persists until he threatens he won’t allow her to marry unless she relinquishes coffee. She agrees, but secretly sends words to her prospective lovers that she won’t consider any one of them who doesn’t include in the marriage contract that she is allowed her 3 cups a day.

. . . .

Ah, How sweet coffee does taste,

Better than a thousand kisses,

Milder than Muscat Wine.

Coffee, coffee, I’ve got to have it;

And if someone wants to perk me up,

Oh, just give me a cup of coffee. . . .

J.S. Bach Kantate BWV211, ca. 1735

(To listen to the whole thing, go to openculture.com)

Coffee has a history of over 600 years replete with legends of its discovery, of travel, intrigue, slavery, seduction, betrayal, sainthood… much of this before it was even poured into its first cup in North America.

One legend says coffee was discovered around 850 by the Ethiopian goat herder, Kaldi, who noticed that his goats, after eating berries from a certain bush, “danced,” so he tried it himself, to the same effect. He then carried the beans to an Islamic monk in a Sufi monastery, who tasted the beans, was disgusted by their bitterness, and threw them into the fire. The aroma of the roasting beans filled the air, and the monk, in an epiphany and sudden conversion, quickly raked them out of the fire and threw them in water.

Ecco!  The first cup of coffee!

Other legends say the discovery of coffee was made by a Moroccan Sufi mystic, Ghothul Akbar Noorudin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, who saw that birds experienced an unusual vitality from eating the beans of a certain bush. Intrigued, he tried it himself. . .

And still other legends say it was his disciple, Omar, who, after being exiled to a cave in the wilderness without food, survived by chewing the beans of a nearby bush. Eventually, Omar was forgiven, brought back to town, and made a saint. 

Was he made a saint because of the coffee beans? I don’t know, maybe it helped.

Whatever mix of these legends is true, the first substantive evidence of drinking or knowledge of coffee is from a Sufi monastery in Yemen. And from Yemen the news and the beans travel fast, despite bans by Islamic leaders and the Catholic Church. The ancestors of the beans that make the warm liquid so many of us hold in our hands at the breakfast table were carried from Cairo, to Mecca, and by the 16th century, throughout the Middle East, South India, Persia, Turkey, Horn of Africa, North Africa, up to the Balkans, Italy, the rest of Europe, and to SE Asia.

Today thieves steal money; in 1719, thieves with promise of rich reward from the government of French Guyana, stole coffee plants from Surinam, and coffee beans were on the road again. A few years later, eyeing the success of French Guyana’s coffee trade, the governor of the Brazilian state of Para sent his own thief, young Sergeant Franciso de Melo to French Guyana to bring back some beans.

An illegal act. What could de Melo do? 

“Baby it’s you. . .you’re the one I need. . .” sings Beyonce.  It could have been de Melo’s song.

The wife of the governor of French Guyana succumbed to de Melo’s charms and at the moment of  their sad goodbyes the distressed wife of the governor offered de Melo a big bouquet of flowers with a coffee-bean plant tucked discreetly in the center. Anticipating his reward from the governor of Para, basking in the memory of the wife of the governor of French Guyana, and salivating in anticipation of his first cup of Brazilian coffee while sitting on his porch in the cool morning air, de Melo returns to Para, bouquet in hand.

Thus begins Brazil’s coffee industry.

It took a while from the days of the love affair to the year 1852 ,when Brazil became the world’s largest producer of coffee. In the meantime, Saint Dominique had edged in, and by use of brutal slave labor to plant, raise, harvest, and export coffee beans, was supplying one-half the world’s coffee, retaining power over the market until the Haitian Revolution.

Today, I understand that this is no simple brown liquid I hold in the cup in my hand. A thousand stories wait in every sip.

Next: Keeping the mind ramped.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Make My Bed

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One Writer’s Daily Schedule for Living in Isolation

In the last posting, I wrote about being stranded in Tel Aviv because of COVID19 and my necessity, as a writer, to handle being isolated in the apartment.  My answer was to make a strict daily schedule. This post begins an outline of that schedule.

William H. McRaven, (ret’d) a four-star navy admiral, expert in counterterrorism and strategy who oversaw and executed Operation Neptune Spear said: 

“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed.”

His reasoning makes sense to me, and I like the idea of a four-star admiral advising us to make our beds. So, the first item on the daily schedule is to make my bed. 

The days pass.

I get up and make the bed. 

The general was right. Even before I’m out of my pajamas, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. And after making the bed, it seems natural to follow with other small tasks. I pull back the ceiling-to-floor curtains that enclose the porch, and then open every window in the apartment. 

What difference does it make to me, as a writer, to have a schedule, to organize my day, to be orderly? What is the admiral trying to say?

This is what happens:

Cross currents of cool morning air come rushing through the rooms, ushering in the squeaky voices of children and the gruff barks of dogs from the street below. (People with dogs and children or both are allowed outside.) One parent or the other parents other strolls along, coffee in hand, patiently attending to their child’s running commentary about the sticks on the sidewalk.)

A gentle breeze stirs the curtains, glides over chairs and couch, along the television, over the books and wraps itself around my shoulders. Living now in an aura of fear, I take great pleasure in this river of air flowing over me. Here is an invisible gassy mix of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, a little water vapor, and a tiny percent of other gasses rushing in the window refreshing me after a night’s sleep. And here are my lungs, threatened by COVID19, but for the moment, capturing the air, the oxygen, and expelling CO2 for the plants.

In bringing concentration to simple tasks, I discover that I start the day not just with my bed made, but with conscious attention to detail. This apartment and my journeys within it provide me with a much bigger world than I have ever acknowledged.

In the next blog, I get coffee, Yeah!! And I discover that this warm, sweet drink has a mottled history of adventure, seduction, and betrayal.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Introduction

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How it happened   

COVID19 came on fast. Steve and I were packing for the trip back to the United States for Passover with family and friends when PM Netanyahu announced the first restrictions on movement:  the drivers of busses were cordoned off from riders, stores selling unnecessary goods were to close, and with the exception of health care and other essential workers, all people were to go into mandatory isolation in their homes. 

We thought, “Well, we’re leaving soon so we’ll be confined for a only few days in our apartment on Sokolov Street.”  I continued packing, cleared out drafts of a recent mystery I’d sent off, organized files on the computer and made new files for the small amount of hard copy I had brought with me to Israel months ago. 

We soon realized it wasn’t to be just a few days. Not long after Netanyahu’s announcement, Delta sent us as email to say our flight was canceled.  We tried to call the Delta office; it had abruptly closed. An email from Delta said they would reschedule. 

I continued to think some flight would turn up, the crowding and herding of people in the U.S. airports would be solved, everyone would be careful, and the crisis would disappear. 

Then the dominos began to fall.

The reschedule never came, and one by one alternatives disappeared. Delta stopped flying to Israel, United flights became sketchy, uncertain. Flights to the U.S. from Europe were prohibited by the U.S. so we couldn’t go that route; Turkey shut down.  Doors were closing; our sons in the U.S. urged us to stay in place because the U.S. was not handling the situation well. Each state was making its own restrictions, and the federal government was sluggish in its response to the needs of the states. The U.S. appeared to be a nation confused.

Since we were stuck, I decided I’d use the time to get more writing done. I could pretend I was in a comfortable prison with lax restrictions that allowed me to walk 100 meters from my “cell” and to go to the grocery store or pharmacy when I needed. 

But, there were problems. I could no longer escape the particular distractions of working at our apartment kitchen table by running off early morning to my secluded corner in the café on Arlozorov. 

I needed to make a new schedule that would suit both my husband (also a writer) and I. It turned out to be a good idea, and it turned out we would be following the new schedule for much longer than a week……

In coming postings, I’ll be outlining 

One Writer’s Daily Schedule for Living in Isolation 

A Whole and Divided Heart Who Am I Now?

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I’ve been thinking about what different people we become when we speak different languages.  How does character manifest differently say, when you switch from English to Hebrew? Or from Italian to Arabic? Or from German to Swahili, or from Swedish to Njerep?

I know that in English my outgoing, mildly assertive side stands in front of me happily being the person I think I am. I admit that flapping in the breezes just at my shoulder are remnants of the high school girl’s fears of dating because she was too shy to eat with anyone but family members, but English Ona’s language runs to her tongue like a world class sprinter; verbs drop from the air as lushly as leaves in fall, prepositions shuttle into place at precisely the time they are supposed to – just like a train pulling into the station.

But who is Ona, in Hebrew, this woman studying Hebrew 5 hours a day plus 3-4 hours of homework?  Who the immigrant Ona, who even has a different name in this other language?  Where is assertive Ona, when Libi is shame-facedly pulverizing verbs at the stationary store in an attempt to buy a notebook?

Is this Libi an idiot? A sit-in-the-back-row sort of a woman who’s never done anything interesting? A dullard…?

In English, I was creating my language-self from the time I learned to talk. In some ways, I made myself by my language, and like an expert actor, I practiced and practiced, growing into me, becoming more and more the only one who could ever play the role with any expertise, who could ever get the accent just right, who could ever choose the word Ona would choose.  

Who was I when I learned Italian? Who will I be now, learning Hebrew. In Italian, did I become a luscious Italian beauty with a slightly mysterious accent and some sexy little turns of  prepositions that made handsome waiters return to my table time and again to lean close and ask, “Un altro bicchiere di vino, signorina?” 

That didn’t happen. But I did learn about Italians and Italian culture. I did get a bigger mind; stereotypes did fall away. I changed. Still shy at times, still assertive when need be, I grew. In Hebrew I’m hoping as well — to paraphrase Don DeLillo — to ride the sentences I’m beginning to understand into new perceptions.

A Whole and Divided Heart Adjectives

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The reality for me, an immigrant, is that whatever sophistication of language I have in English will manifest itself only erratically in Hebrew.  As much as I might want to speak to my friends here in Israel in their native tongue, to relate to them with all the complexity of thought and emotion their lives and mine hold, as an immigrant, I’ll only ever get partway there.

This is something I never thought of when I was younger and going off to live in West Africa, in Afghanistan, in Italy – not as an immigrant, but as a resident of some length. In the egotism of my youth, I rattled along in those languages, feeling perfectly fluent, oblivious to the look of puzzlement / bemusement on native faces.

That was youth. Older now, more aware, and an immigrant, I think of all the immigrants to the United States, to Israel, or elsewhere, who have crossed one ocean and, having landed in their new country, face yet another: the ocean of language, lying vast and daunting in front of them, replete with slippery creatures behaving in confusing ways.

I’m working hard to put what’s in my mind on my lips, and I know I’ll keep trying even given the odds. I also know I can’t complain; I have the good fortune to have as a mother tongue the lingua franca of the era.

Given I could get along in English, what’s the purpose of even trying to learn?  Our mother tongue is fundamental to our sense of the world, to whatever it is that forms our character, our vision, so why jump into a current where I’m fated forever to swim upstream?

My reason: Learning a language allows me in a modest, but exciting way, to let go of certainty. I used to find this adventure and stimulation by mountain climbing in the Tetons, by running marathons, by riding on top a load of peanuts through the savannah and jungles of Nigeria, by taking a Pakistani army truck to Hunza along the steep cliffs and alluvial fans of the Himalayas….

My vision of what constitutes adventure, has broadened, has moved into a new adventure in learning. And I have found that language learning packs the same punch you experience when you first learn to read, when the symbols come alive on the page. Do you remember how exciting it was to be called on and be able to read: “See spot run.”?

Learning a new language has always compelled me outside myself. Peoples’ lives are embedded in their grammar, their nouns, adjectives and prepositions.  I need to be extra aware, to let studying Hebrew open me to note my surroundings with new eyes. Out of the rut of my own comfortable language and reading of the world, I travel to a stance where I always should be, but mostly am not:  that of struggling to understand the people and the world around me, never vacant even during the simplest experiences.

Adjectives wink at me, verbs box me in the ears, laughing, “I’m different! You never met anyone like me before! Hang out with me and we’ll go places.”

A Whole and Divided Heart Airport to Airport

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At the airport in Newark, while we waited to board the plane for Israel, I understood that it would be impossible to describe an “average” American oleh (immigrant to Israel). Steve and I were early, so we had the advantage of seeing the other 71 olim hadashim (“new immigrants” to Israel) as they arrived.

There was a woman and her husband from West Texas with one big dog and one little dog; a single man in his late 70s; a few single Orthodox women, one in simple headdress, plain gray skirt, olive sweater and gray shoes, another in brilliant black and white patterned dress and striking black headdress ; a family of tall father, short mother, and three medium-sized teenage girls; a modest young couple in their twenties; another young couple with a baby just a few months old, a young Hasidic family . . . The list goes on, with no clear pattern.

To emigrate from the United States today is not to be as an immigrant coming to the States in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, or during/just after the Holocaust. We were not ragged, not hungry, not penniless. As far as I can know, most of us in the airport that day were going to a new life, not escaping from an old one of poverty, famine, or deadly anti-Semitism (though perhaps anti-Semitism of a less immediately lethal sort?).

In a logical and efficiently organized process, Nefesh b’Nefesh had guided our initial Stateside immigration steps, and that efficiency continued at Newark airport. Every question was answered, every help given. It was a foretaste of what our welcome to Israel would be.

We olim were traveling that day with a group of young people from Birth Right, the ten-day trip to Israel for Jewish young people from 18 to 26 who have never been or who have spent only short vacations in Israel. I noted in the Birthright group the great excitement youth-on-a-new-  adventure generates, and I contrasted their liveliness with my own oddly-reserved spirit.

I was emigrating; why was I feeling reserved?

I think there are three reasons:

First, I have traveled so much for so many years, I have come to feel the excitement of travel as an internal hum rather than a burst of song. When I left home for Africa at age 19 I had never been on an airplane. I remember the emotional pandemonium of watching the earth slide away below me and running images of Africa through my mind.

In the ensuing years I repeated the experience through Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, Canada, the U.S…. and I seem in retrospect to have been constantly ascending and descending to and from planes, trains, busses — or hiking, or riding horseback. I became an itinerant, practiced at moving (and resigned to current airline travel in cramped seats and with diminished service. — Hiking and horseback-riding has stayed fun.)

Second is that making Aliyah has come, like I mentioned above, in steps, not just in the final process, but as I moved through life.

I was 19 years old, living in West Africa and had several Israeli friends when I first thought of moving to Israel. The next time I came close to immigrating was when I was 24, living in Afghanistan. The next time, it was the Yom Kippur War; Steve and I had our passports and were ready to go, when the Israeli government began asking people not to come. From then Steve and I often spoke about immigrating, but we entered the flow of American life: graduate school, professional work, three sons. Still, we made trips to Israel, and for the past 11 years I have been going every year to volunteer with the IDF.

The third reason I was more reserved during immigration is one I’ve talked about in an earlier blog. When you leave a place, you leave people as well. Just as when you arrive, you arrive to people as well as to place. Such loss and joy will always be tangled. I am a fortunate immigrant in that, G-d willing, as long as I am healthy, I can travel back and forth. I can float in the river that runs two ways. But I also must live as one who, if she gains months here, loses months there. A whole and divided heart:  children/grandchildren/friends on both sides of the world. Loss and joy will always be tangled and one becomes more reserved with that braided blood.

Is there an inevitability to what happens in our lives?  I can’t answer it with any true understanding or rationale. But in retrospect I can see the steps, can see the way I was headed, although I couldn’t see it at the time. There were reasons I didn’t come to Israel those first times I thought of coming. Good reasons? I can’t tell; at midnight, I sometimes wonder what would have been. It’s human to do that, and I may sometimes yearn for the people who have been lost in death or in the obscurity of time, but when morning comes, I think of my family and friends, and experience a sweet ache at all the gifts I’ve been allotted.

So I like to think that now is the right time, that now, if my earlier reasons were wanting to come were selfish, now they are less so. Now, coated with a thin patina of cynicism, I can live in the reality of Israel, not in the dream of it. I like to think too that now I have the ability and understanding to carry two passports at once. I hope so.

The last step of immigration happened in an instant. We received our identity cards as soon as we landed. We were citizens. Hundreds of people outside the baggage hall were waiting as we stepped from the confines of the airport to the reception area.

“Baruchim Ha Bayim!!” (“Welcome home!”), People shouted and sang to us.

I felt as if I were swimming in a river of history.  Even as I write this, over two weeks since it happened, I am emotional. Where but in Israel?

 

 

 

A Whole and Divided Heart New Language

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I had planned to post blogs according to the chronology of our move here, but I need to interrupt myself. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you….” an alert:

Today is the birthday of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922)!

Who was Eliezer Ben Yehuda?

A Jewish lexicographer, a newspaper editor, and the driving force behind the revival of Hebrew in the modern era. He would have been 158 years old this month. When he came to what is now Israel in 1891, his motto was “Hebrew in the home, Hebrew in School, and words words words!”

I won’t make a foray into the whole history behind the development of modern-day Hebrew, but for just one aspect of that history, think of what it meant (and still means) to create new words for a new language, not just for new technological terms of the era, but even for everyday words like “clothes-iron” (mag-hetz), “ice cream” (g’lida), “furniture” (rihut) and “k’ruvit” (cauliflower). Of course other languages had to go through a similar – if not quite as daunting – process; they would have had the everyday words, and they would have already had hundreds of thousands of speakers.

As Wikipedia says:

“The process of Hebrew’s return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language” without any native speakers subsequently acquiring several million such native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of “first language” speakers.”