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On Memories Of Former Homes

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The market is swarming with people on Friday afternoon. Tables covered with piles of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, bread, and household goods beckon as their owners shout their prices into the din. Feral cats dart beneath the tables, dodging people and cars to snatch scraps of food. Shoppers haggle: “Ten shekels for this? No way. I’ll give you eight.”

If you listen closely, you’ll hear Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, and probably more. You’ll see men with kippas and black hats. You’ll see women, including young girls, with every inch of skin covered but their hands and faces, and women with miniskirts and crop tops. You’ll see schoolchildren shopping for their families and old men and women dragging bags of groceries on their own. There will always, at any given moment, be an old lady standing at the curb and shouting at a bus driver because the bus route has changed, and the rest of the passengers are shouting to her which bus to take instead.

More than anything, you’ll notice the heat. It beats down from the sky and rises from the pavement, seeps out of buses and cars and into your body like a poison. It’s a dry heat, which may seem like a small comfort, but it makes all the difference.

Past the market stalls and down the mountain, the Mediterranean glimmers. By this time of year it’s nearly impossible to actually swim in thanks to the jellyfish, but if you swim in the bay you’ll be fine.

The hours pass and the market starts to shut down. By the time the sun is setting, the whole city has slowed nearly to a stop: buses don’t run anymore, stores have closed, and the last few stragglers are rushing through the streets to get home. As night falls, the smell of freshly-baked challah flows out of open windows along with the prayers and songs of Shabbat.

To you, this may be unfamiliar and weird and even uncomfortable; to me, it was home.

~~~

When I was 13, I returned to Israel for the first time since my family moved away seven years earlier. That trip, at the time, meant absolutely everything to me. It was a chance to rediscover my history and heritage. It was a vacation from the boredom and bullying that made up my school days. Most of all, it was an escape from the horrible new feeling–not even just a feeling, but a way of being, really–that had seeped into every little corner of my life. Six years later, I would learn to call it depression.

Those two weeks in Israel caused mood swings the likes of which I’d never experienced before (but that would become too familiar over the following nine years). I felt ecstatic to be back in what I then considered my Real Home and full of wonder at the things I was seeing and learning. Being there caused a flood of old memories to resurface and I delighted in them.

But at the same time, I balked with increasing fear and horror at the idea of returning to my miserable American existence, which I was certain I could cure only by returning to Israel after high school. (I did not, obviously, know about antidepressants.)

Although I knew I’d miss the food and the stunning beauty and the beach and all that, what I knew I’d miss the most was just that feeling that I had there, that unmistakeable thereness.

I told my mom in tears that I was terrified of forgetting what it was like to be there, and in response she told me about a trip she took to southern Russia as a teenager, a trip that grew fuzzier in her memory over time, but that she could never truly forget. Maybe the details were gone, but the essence was not and never would be.

Somewhat comforted, I tried to capture the “thereness” in any way I could. I associated it in my mind with certain smells and songs. I kept a detailed diary. I took photos. I recorded it in poems.

Ever since, I’ve been chasing that feeling.

~~~

Summer is probably the best time of the year to be in Ohio. It’s hot and muggy as hell, but everything becomes soft and beautiful in the summer. The fields of ripening corn ripple over hills left by glaciers long ago, and the streams that wind through the woods–assuming they haven’t dried up–are perfect for dipping your feet into.

My mom and I, and later my siblings once they were told enough, would often explore the paths that lead through these woods. Many of them separated different subdivisions from each other, or they were part of school grounds or parks. One such path led to a mysterious mansion far away from any other houses; another was strewn with paintballs that my little brother eagerly collected but that my sister was for some reason terrified of.

Summer in Ohio is anything but quiet. Cicadas can keep you up at night if you’re not used to them, and early in the morning you’ll be woken up by neighbors tending to their lawns more meticulously than my family ever did. Once or twice a week we’d drop whatever we were doing because we’d hear the ice cream truck coming down the street, and that was our favorite summer sound of all. (That, and the lifeguard’s whistle when breaktime ended at the pool.)

For a good twelve years or so, that’s how all my summers felt. Nowadays they’re quite different.

~~~

More wisdom from my mom: the summer before I started college, I was dating my best friend and we were about to go off to different schools. Although I’d spent the previous summer in Israel, away from my then-boyfriend, this was the first time I’d be in an indefinitely long-distance relationship and I wasn’t taking it well. His school started a month before mine did, so he was the first one to leave. My mom told me, explaining that my anguish was perfectly normal: “It’s always harder to be the one who stays.”

Maybe that’s a small part of the reason it’s so much easier now for me to love places than people. With places, I always get to be the one who leaves. Places don’t “grow out” of me and leave me; I grow out of them and leave them. People change suddenly, without warning; places usually change slowly and very predictably, if you know anything about sociology.

That’s not to say that my relationships with places are easy or simple. It took me a long time to understand that I love my town in Ohio in some way. It was painful to realize that I couldn’t stay there and still be myself. It was even more painful to come to Northwestern and realize that what I thought for five years would be a safe haven was actually rather cold and unwelcoming, and not the sort of place I would ever learn to belong in. Yet there were things I loved about it too.

When I was little I played a game with myself. It was very simple. All I did was pay careful attention to my surroundings and pretend that I was seeing them again after having been away for a very long time, perhaps because I’d been transported to a magical alternate universe and had just now found my way back (I liked fantasy novels as a kid; can you tell?). This game made me see ordinary things like my house or my backyard through an entirely new lens. I was able to make myself feel as though my boring white-bread neighborhood was the most amazing place in the world, simply by pretending that I’d been forced to leave it for a while.

Later on, that actually sort of happened. No, I didn’t get transported through a wormhole to an alternate universe; I just went back to Israel for a whole summer (the aforementioned summer). When I returned to Ohio, I instantly fell in love with it in a way I never had before. It was so green. So quiet. So comfortable. I could understand the language strangers spoke to me. How had I ever taken that for granted?

I never really lost that feeling, and I carry it with me now as I move to a place that’s almost as different from Ohio as Israel is.

~~~

Everyone whines that they hate snow, but you can feel the energy pick up on campus as the flurries turn to snowflakes that grow bigger and bigger. Just a few hours ago it was sunny and above freezing, but that’s Chicago weather for you.

As Deering Field turns from green to white, students on break from class (or maybe just skipping) show up to throw snowballs and make snowmen. Past the field, Deering Library towers imperiously like a set from Harry Potter. In fact, we’d often jokingly call it Hogwarts.

If you walk past the library and down to the lake, you’ll see the hundreds of huge rocks that line the coast. Most of them have been painted by students to celebrate friendships, relationships, student groups, or just their lives at Northwestern in general. Sometimes I see marriage proposals, sometimes I see my favorite song lyrics, sometimes I even see Russian words; I’m not sure which of those makes me happier.

Ever since I first saw the painted rocks the summer after my seventh-grade year, I knew I had to get into Northwestern and paint my own rock someday. I managed the first half of that, but, for some reason, not the second.

~~~

You might think that, as a person with depression, I tend to focus and ruminate on the negatives of things. Although I do that sometimes, I also have a remarkable ability to find the positive in just about everything. Usually this ability serves me very well; although I’m fragile during transitional periods and dislike change, once I’ve had some time to process things I’m able to adapt to just about anything. That’s because I find the good in it.

Ironically, though, when I’m depressed this turns into a sort of weakness. Like a lifesaving medicine that becomes a deadly poison in overdose, my happy memories of past homes become so potent during depression that they rob me of my ability to appreciate the present. When I’m depressed, I’m tortured by these memories, which play over and over in my mind like faded old movies that I can’t turn off. I remember the most insignificant little things: the worn-down steps to my grandma’s apartment building in Haifa, the porch swing on the deck back in Ohio, the hard and scratchy couch in my old dorm where I’d watch football games on TV in the fall, the sound of kids jumping off the diving board at the pool my family went to (still goes to; I’m just not there anymore), the snow falling around University Hall, the taste of a sudden mouthful of Mediterranean water, the slam of the door to the garage when my parents came home from work, the music of my high school marching band echoing through the muggy summer night.

I think of these things without wanting to and I hear the same cruel thought over and over: You will never feel these things again.

I have these memories, but the places they come from are lost to me forever.

Oh, sure, I could return, physically at least. I have returned. But the feelings are gone. That thereness is gone.

~~~

Another season, another (very different) campus. It’s a summer night in New York City and I’m sitting in front of Columbia’s Butler Library and crying for too many reasons to explain. Students–my peers, theoretically–walk past me in chattering groups and I wonder for the millionth time what’s wrong with me. I’m finally exactly where I wanted to be and somehow it still feels awful.

After a while I pick myself up and walk somewhat mechanically off of campus onto Broadway. The sun has just set, which in most of my previous homes would mean that things have either died down or will shortly. But here, the city is just coming to life. The restaurants around campus are still full. People are standing around in front of bars and on street corners talking. The 24-hour pharmacies and grocery stores and diners (I’m still amazed at the idea of a 24-hour anything other than Burger King or 7-Eleven) are full of customers.

The night is warm, but not hot, and I feel better.

There are, right now, over 8 million people in this city who are just like me and also not like me at all. All of them have, at some point, been as terrified and lonely as I am right now. All of them have places that they love and miss. All of them have friends that they rarely see, or might never see again. All of them have parts of their pasts that they wish they could relive, and parts of their pasts that they wish they could forget, and maybe even parts of their pasts that they wish they could both relive and forget, if only because forgetting would end that burning need to relive.

It’s hard to feel alone when I think about that.

~~~

People tell me that the new memories I’m making can replace those old ones. That the new home I’ve found makes up for the loss of my previous homes. It doesn’t, just as new friends can’t replace the ones I’ve lost. Love just doesn’t work that way.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad that I’ve moved to a place that I adore so much. I’m glad that I could live here for the rest of my life and still be learning new things about it all the time. I’m glad that I’m a just a subway ride away from sprawling parks you can get lost in and from some of the loudest, most crowded city streets I’ve ever seen, from stores that sell the food I grew up with and stores that sell food I’ve never heard of or tasted before.

But those memories continue to haunt me and I know that I have to live with them somehow.

The best I can do is to try to capture them in writing so that I don’t have to carry their weight on my own, but it seems that I can’t. At best, writing provides a facsimile, a movie-set version of landscapes that were endlessly deep and rich. They didn’t end with a painted backdrop.

Sometimes I feel like I’d give anything for just one more day to inhabit these old places, homes, selves, lives. I want to feel like I felt when I lived there. I want to feel like the person I was, even though I don’t actually want to be that person anymore.

Isn’t there any way I can come back?

Most of all, though, I don’t want to lose yet another home. But it’s too late. I made the decision to move months ago, and even if I’d chosen to stay in Chicago, it wouldn’t have been the same. College is over. Those lazy days in coffee shops and bookstores are over. Running down the hall or down the stairs to see my friends is over. I will never again feel like I felt when I did those things, and I will never again be the person who did them.

I have to keep telling myself this so that it’ll sink in, even though telling myself this feels like shit. Otherwise I’ll keep feeling like any minute now I’ll wake up back in my old apartment and realize that this whole New York thing was just a weird and kind of scary dream, and it’s time to throw on some clothes and get to class.

But the funny thing is that someday this, right now, is what I’ll miss. Someday the memories I’m making right now will have a “thereness” of their own and I will miss them just as terribly as I miss Israel and Ohio and college now. Someday I’ll look back on my first days and weeks in New York and smile and cry about them.

It is probably true that whenever I travel between these four places in the future, I will simultaneously be leaving and coming home. I’m trying to make my peace with it, as awkward as it feels.

It’s weird, isn’t it? Loving more than one person feels completely natural to me.

Loving more than one place, though, feels like betrayal.

On Memories Of Former Homes
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"Home"

Miri, , , , , , , 21 Comments

This week I learned that depression and writer’s block together is a scary thing, as writing is my primary way of alleviating depression. Then I realized that the reason I couldn’t write was because I was refusing to write the piece that was trying to come out. When I finally let myself “feel the feels,” this is what resulted.

In the dark and the stillness, the floor of my family’s house creaks and groans.

I have this ritual whenever I come home. Or, as I should probably call it, “home.”

I walk through the whole house and find all the things that are different. Like that game where you look at a picture and then you look at another, nearly identical picture and you have to spot the changes.

One time they had a new machine for juicing citrus fruits. They made fresh juice out of it. Now they make it for me every time.

Another time they had new bookshelves for me to look through. New photos, almost every time, of a little brother and sister who grow up without me now. This time they took apart the kids’ bunk bed. They’re too old for it now; they sleep on their own beds now.

Next time, maybe, they’ll have their own bedrooms.

Things will fall apart and be replaced. New gadgets will appear, charging next to the landline phone. There will be middle school textbooks, high school textbooks, someday. There will be other things, things people need as they grow old, things I can’t think about without literally weeping.

The floor will creak a bit more each time.

Before I left for college, my parents promised me that they’d never clean out my room and turn it into anything else. “This will always be your room, your home,” they said.

They didn’t lie. The only ways they alter my room is to clean it after I leave from my visits, always in a hurry, always leaving behind half my stuff and dragging away other stuff; or when my mom wants to borrow clothes that I left behind. I’ll come home and see her wearing something I’d long forgotten and she says, “Oh, I took this. Hope you don’t mind!” I don’t.

When I come “home” my room is almost the same. Entering it is like reentering the world of my high school self, although I can never really feel or understand that world again. I was so alone. Politically conservative, overly romantic, unable to put a name to the dark moods that often consumed me. The worst was definitely still to come, of course, but I already had a glimpse of what I was in for.

The only source of continuity, really, is writing. Even in high school I was known for that. A very different type of writing, sure, but writing nonetheless. My notebooks and journals fill my old room.

Nearly half a year ago my depression suddenly remitted. Before that, coming home was a treasure. It wasn’t “home” back then; it really was home. I lived for those school breaks. I daydreamed about them in class, at the gym, while I took walks. Nothing felt better than dropping my bags at the bottom of the stairs and taking that first tour of the house, playing the “What’s Different?” game.

After the depression was over, everything changed. Home doesn’t feel like home anymore. It’s merely “home” now.

Now coming “home” feels like being ripped out of my skin and put into another one. Sometimes it triggers a brief depressive episode; the rest of the time it just feels numb. Every object in the house seems to tell me stories about impermanence and decay, even as the house is gleaming and beautiful as ever.

I don’t understand the girl who once lived here. I don’t even want to. But sometimes, what I wouldn’t give to be her for just one more day.

The more this happens the less I want to come “home,” and the more the guilt builds and builds. My mom saw me crying and assumed it was about my finals (as it had been earlier), and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it’s because I have no home anymore and I don’t belong anywhere and no matter where I go I just can’t come home.

It’s like everything comes at a price. This seems to be the price I pay to be free–mostly–of depression in my day-to-day life. Religious folks might say, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” I say, sometimes shit happens. Sometimes this is just how brains work.

And, sometimes, people grow up. Some people will always cherish returning to their childhood homes and swimming through those memories. But I, it seems, just can’t do that. I love this house and the people in it so dearly but it’s not home anymore. That breaks my heart.

Now I know that if I ever want to come home again, I can’t go back. I can only go forward.

"Home"

I Won't Write About the Conflict; Or, What I Think Of When I Think Of Israel

Miri, , , , , , , , 15 Comments
My hometown, Haifa

I won’t write about the conflict.

Yes, I know I’m from there. I know I must have Such Interesting Perspectives on that whole…situation.

I know I have friends in the IDF. I know I once strongly considered moving back, and thus getting drafted myself. I know I’ve seen rubble and remains of Qassam rockets and tanks and bomb shelters and graves. What do I think of all this?

Not much, anymore. I’ve gone numb.

I used to write about it, publicly. I had a newspaper column and everything. You can probably guess which perspective I took. My family was so proud, sending the articles to their friends, saying, See, here’s a young person who gets it.

And then I stopped, cold turkey.

I’m not ignorant. I read the news. But the news is so damn different depending on who reports it, and each side can easily counter the other with endless barrels of (factual? fake?) evidence.

I am a skeptic. When I don’t know the facts, I keep my mind unmade. Israeli politics, like Israeli cities and streets and social codes, are so much messier than their American counterparts. So on this issue, like so few others, I remain not apathetic, but agnostic.

Most of my friends don’t know that I prefer not to talk about it. Those who aren’t close enough to be friends will even ask me upon first learning about my nationality: “So, you’re from Israel, huh? What’s your take on what’s going on over there?” I usually mumble something about not really following that whole thing anymore.

Before I understood how to assert my conversational boundaries, I once let a friend lead me into a discussion about it. He didn’t know that it’s a sensitive issue, and that conversation ended with a moment that wasn’t one of my best: me snapping at him that maybe he’d feel differently if he didn’t have an aging grandmother over there, a widow, who has had to evacuate her city when the wars start.

But another time, a new friend did one of the kindest things possible: after I’d asked him a personal question, he reassured me that he’s open to discussing just about anything, except Middle Eastern politics. For a long time, I wondered what personal connection this decidedly not Middle Eastern person could possibly have to the conflict. Only later did I find out that he has no issues with discussing it at all; he’d said that only to free me from any obligation I might feel to discuss it with him. And, indeed, I’d been freed.

I disagree with those fellow Jews who think I have an obligation to defend Israel (some of whom say that my talent is being wasted on subjects like mental illness and assaults on women’s rights). I likewise disagree with those fellow progressives who think I have an obligation to denounce Israel. It is my home. I learned to breathe, walk, eat, talk, think, and exist here. My first memories are here. This hot breeze was the first to ever rustle through my hair. These salty waves were the first to ever knock me over and make me gasp for air. These narrow, winding streets are the ones on which I saw, for the first time, a world beyond myself and my family.

I can no more divest this place of its emotional significance and denounce it than I could my own mother and father.

To those who have never been to Israel–and that’s most Americans, even those who have plenty of opinions on the conflict–it must be hard to imagine thinking and writing about Israel without also thinking and writing about the conflict.

I can see why. When you think of Israel, you think of the nightly news. You think of fiery politicians and clashing religions. You think of security walls, blockades, and death counts.

I think of those things, too. I have to.

But I also think of the way the passengers burst into applause whenever an airplane lands in Israel.

I think of stepping into the Mediterranean for the first time in years. The water is clear and the sea is turquoise, and tiny fish swarm around my feet. The current pulls me in, and when the waves slam, it feels amazing.

Carmel Beach, Haifa
Carmel Beach, Haifa

I think of weathered blue-and-white flags hanging from windows, fences, car antennas.

I think of the obvious hummus, pita, and falafel, but also of schnitzel, shashlik, tabbouleh, schwarma, tahini, and beesli.

I think of eating figs and mangoes right off the tree.

I think of hearing a language I usually only hear at Friday night services–on the street, in the bus, at the supermarket. I think of how the little I know of that language tumbles out so naturally, with the pronunciation and intonation almost right.

I think of the Russian woman we talked to at the bus stop, who could remember and list all of the day’s product prices from the market.

Flowers in a park in Neve Sha'anan, Haifa
Flowers in a park in Neve Sha’anan, Haifa

I think of the strangers wishing me shana tova (happy new year).

I think of clinging to the pole as the bus careens down the mountain, around corners, and of laughing as the driver slams on the breaks, opens the door, and curses out another driver, as they do in Israel.

I think of the shuk (market) on Friday afternoon, before Shabbat.

I think of factory cooling towers, roundabouts, solar panels, and other staples of Israeli infrastructure.

I think of the white buildings designed like cascading steps, their balconies overflowing with flowers.

I think of how things are messy. The streets aren’t laid out in a grid like in American cities; they twist themselves into knots. People are impatient. Taxi drivers charge whatever they want. Rules and signs are ignored.

Produce at the market
Produce at a market stall

I think of palm, pine, olive, and eucalyptus trees, and of the smell of the pines in the park where we used to go before the forest burned down.

I think of laundry drying on clotheslines hung beneath windows.

I think of the huge families camping on the beach with tents, mattresses, grills, stereos, portable generators, pets, and, in one case, an actual refrigerator.

I think of Middle Eastern music and Russian talk shows blaring out of open windows.

I think of heat, dirt, sand, and blinding sunlight.

I think of how, somewhere in the thickets behind my grandmother’s apartment building, there is a single grave. It belongs to a 16-year-old boy who died defending Haifa decades ago. And despite its entirely unobvious location, the grave marker is always piled high with rocks.

View from Yad Lebanim Road

I think of vendors selling huge bouquets of flowers by the side of the road for the new year, which would begin that night.

I think of how slowly life moves here in some ways. Buses run late, eating at restaurants can take hours. Young adults take years off between the army and college. Our nation has been around in some way for thousands of years, so I suppose hurrying seems a bit silly.

I think of the cemetery by the sea, where my grandfather is buried, and where the silence and stillness is comforting.

I think of the history embedded in every stone, and of how the steps of Haifa’s endless staircases are worn smooth.

Stairs between streets

I think of how it must have felt to be despised, discriminated against, and even murdered for your peculiarities, and then coming to a country where everyone shares them with you.

I think of floating in the sea at night with friends I’ve known since before my memory begins. The water, completely still now, reflects the orange lights on the shore.

And here, in a place most know only for its violence, I have found a peace that eludes me in the safe and orderly country where I live.

So I won’t write about the conflict.

I will only write about my home.

Sunrise over Haifa
Sunrise over Haifa
I Won't Write About the Conflict; Or, What I Think Of When I Think Of Israel

Coming Home

Miri, , , , , , , , 3 Comments

[TMI Warning]

This weekend I went home to Ohio, where my family lives. I hadn’t been home since winter vacation (I spent spring break in New York) so the time seemed ripe for a visit.

The drive was spectacular in that unspectacular way. I took the Megabus, sat on the upper level, and spent whatever time I didn’t spend sleeping looking out the window at the Midwestern landscape. I watched as it changed from the industrial utilitarianism of Chicago and northwestern Indiana to the vast fields, punctuated by lonely farmhouses and islands of fluffy deciduous trees, that I grew up with.

When I got to Ohio, I was stunned by how green it was. Green trees, fields, and shrubs stretched in every direction. I was reminded of how I felt three years ago, when I came home from a summer in Israel–I felt like I’d never seen so much of one color in my life.

Coming home has a certain routine. I greet my family, especially my little brother and sister, whose screams of “Mashaaaaa!” (my Russian name) are always followed very closely by screams of “iPaaaaaaaad!” (my iPad is possibly their favorite thing about me). Then I go through the house and take an inventory of everything that has changed since I was last there. My sister has a new car seat, a much bigger one. There are new drawings and school projects and children’s books lying around. My dad has been cleaning out the little closet under the stairs.

My room, though, is just as I left it, more of a museum than a space where someone actually lives. Every time I’m home, I make changes to it, because that’s the only way I can continue to believe that someone actually inhabits it. Usually I box up some relics of my old life and put them in the closet. This time was no exception.

Yet it’s impossible to avoid the reminders of the fact that I don’t belong here anymore. The first thing my dad said upon seeing me was that my outfit (leggings, boots, and a long, non-revealing top–de rigueur in Chicago) was an “outrage.” He repeated this point several times, saying that just because I could wear something in Chicago doesn’t mean I can wear it in Ohio. Then he said I look like a slut.

This was far from the first time I’ve felt this way here. Come to think of it, I’ve always felt painfully out of place in this little suburb. I was one of very few foreign-born students in my high school, and one of even fewer Jews. I didn’t know anyone else who had ever visited Israel, let alone lived there. I looked different, dressed different, talked and acted different.

I was the subject of much speculation and well-meaning humor. I’ve been called such epithets as “commu-Jew,” “Russian spy,” and “weird Jewish Russian flute player.” I’ve been asked all sorts of naive questions; ranging from the innocent, such as, “Have you ever tried wearing your hair straight?” (Yes, I have. It’s ugly. I am Jewish and my hair is meant to be curly) and “Which church do you go to?” (Um, actually, I don’t go to any church); to the simply ridiculous, such as, “Do they have cars in Israel?” (Yes, Israel has come a long way since biblical times).

(Or, as an addendum–do I like bagels? Do I like vodka? Do I party a lot? How much can I drink? How much can my parents drink? Do my parents belong to the Russian mafia? Are they spies? Political refugees? Do they keep nukes in the basement? Will my dad beat up any guy I bring home? And while we’re at it, why didn’t the Jews accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah?)

I also found myself struggling to explain my developing identity to those around me. Whenever I tried to tell my friends about my life in Israel, I was generally met with blank stares, because many of the people I knew had never even traveled outside of the United States, and some had never even left Ohio or the Midwest. When discussing my travel plans, I usually encountered dumbfounded confusion as to why I would ever want to go to “that place,” since American media tends to portray Israel as a war-torn wasteland. One friend’s mom, a well-meaning woman who treated me like family, asked me to consider not going to Israel anymore because, and I quote, “We want you to be safe with us.”

Everything I’ve mentioned above, I generally took in stride, often even with a laugh. But sometimes the ignorance drifted subtly (or not-so-subtly) into prejudice. A boy in my third-grade class called me a “stupid Jew” (an experience now shared, sadly, by my nine-year-old brother). When a high school friend jokingly insulted me and I got a bit defensive, he smugly suggested that perhaps my defensiveness has to do with my Israeli nationality. Somewhat more disturbingly, a close friend in high school began to tell me once that her mom considers me egotistical–here I wondered, How? She’s hardly even talked to me–but then my friend inserted the explanatory qualifier–because I’m Jewish.

Oh, okay then. Makes perfect sense now.

Whether harmless and funny or crude and prejudiced, the way people interpreted and responded to me when I lived in Ohio could only have told me one thing–you don’t belong here.

Chicago is a different story. People mostly couldn’t care less which country my passport comes from or which type of religious congregation I attend (or, in fact, whether or not I attend one at all, which by the way, I don’t). When I tell friends about my time in Israel, they say “That’s really cool” and tell me about studying in Argentina or traveling through China. Although prejudice of various sorts still exists, even here, I don’t know which is rarer–someone deciding that I’m “egotistical” because of my ethnicity, or feeling like enough of a smart-ass to tell me that their mother thinks so. For the first time in my life, I’ve met people my own age who share  bits and pieces of my culture, and my identity has become even stronger because of it.

And yet…and yet. How I love coming back to Ohio. I miss the greenness and simplicity of it, the friendliness of the people, the lack of noise and traffic. Sometimes I even miss the prevalence of lawn gnomes and pickup trucks. I love escaping the pace of the city, and the police sirens screaming past my window at all hours of day and night. And the girls in heels and sunglasses looking down their noses at me, and the men who try to say things to me on the street.

In Ohio I don’t have to feel bad that my shoes are from eBay and my perfume is from T.J. Maxx–because so is everyone else’s. Even the extra pounds on my body seem to melt away when I’m home, because the “fashionable” waifishness I encounter every two steps at Northwestern is, needless to say, very rare back home.

In Ohio, in other words, I’m a big fish in a small pond.

I used to hate Ohio and especially Beavercreek, the suburb where I lived. They represented everything I hated about the United States–the stifling conservatism, the ethnocentricity, and, on a less serious note, the complete and utter lack of things to do. But over time I’ve grown to appreciate this leafy town. It is, in its own small-minded way, comforting, familiar, and serene.

I’m coming home, I’m coming home
Tell the world I’m coming home
Let the rain wash away
All the pain of yesterday
I know my kingdom awaits
And they’ve forgiven my mistakes
I’m coming home, I’m coming home
Tell the world that I’m coming

Coming Home