Home?

This is the spread of food at my favorite restaurant in my old hometown, Misadat Iron (pronounced EEron).  The "main course" is only two shish-kebabs, because, as you can see, it's pretty easy to stuff yourself with this amazing array of salads.  (My favorite is the pink cabbage).

Beyond those overgrown trees is the front door of the last house I lived in before my family moved to America.

This is a shot taken in between the fence posts.  That long overgrown driveway leads to what would have been the garage of my old house.  I don't think it is actually home to a car anymore.

Yesterday, I went home?  I guess you could say that.  I went to my hometown of Pardes Hana.  My mother's Best Friend in the Whole Wide World, Shulamit, picked me up in the afternoon, and we drove from Tel Aviv to Pardes Hana, a forty-minute drive.

It's weird to call Pardes Hana my hometown, because I didn't actually spend the majority of my life there.  It's also really weird to explore the idea of home at all.  On the way to Pardes Hana, I was looking out the window, and for some reason, I felt like I really knew the way there, even though had Shulamit asked me for directions (and I don't know why she would, she lives here), I wouldn't have been able to give them to her.

My entire life has been this weird disconnect from one place to another.  Like, when I'm in America, I feel disconnected, in a way, from the majority of the people who live there.  Of course I have my friends who I adore and love and we live lives that are very parallel, but there are just some customary cultural things that I don't connect with for America (like taking family pictures in front of a white sheet, where everyone's wearing the same clothes.  When I was younger and wanted to be Very American, I was into it.  Now it just seems weird.  Sorry if anyone who reads this takes those pictures; while they're weird, they're always very adorable).  Sometimes, when I am sitting with a group of Israelis in Columbus, tuning the Hebrew out (I have now learned that is one of my best skills, and one that is completely dangerous here), I feel like I miss Israel so much it hurts.

Now that I'm here, though, I can't help but notice how completely American I am.  Israelis don't use drying machines - they dry their clothes on racks outside.  Because of this, the clothes always feel very strange on my skin after they've dried.  I don't dress like Israelis, I don't speak like Israelis (even when I'm speaking Hebrew - and I don't mean the accent), I don't even have the same mindset as all Israelis.  At the same time, I don't think I 'dress American', nor do I think that I talk like most Americans (maybe I'm wrong), and I certainly don't have the same mindset as most Americans.

But there is something very fundamental about coming to a place that was the first place you'd ever seen.  There is something so familiar even when it's changed.  Tiny little things, like the fact that Pardes Hana doesn't have sidewalks, or that the sides of the roads are exploding with eucalyptis trees, or that no matter where you are, some part of the town is always under construction.  There is also something so strange about seeing people who have known you your entire life, even when a huge chunk of it is missing.

When I got to Shulamit's house, her son, Amitai, came home from school.  Amitai and I have known each other since we were both babies.  I'm talking diaper time.  Amitai is almost two years younger than me, so we both rolled around on the floor babbling nonsense together.  The first time I saw him after my family left Israel, I was seven and he was five, so there wasn't a whole lot of conversation that flowed.  The second time I was fourteen, and he was twelve.  The third, I was fifteen, he was thirteen.  Now I'm eighteen and he's sixteen.

It's remarkably strange watching someone grow from a distance, and I'm sure Amitai will agree with me.  Amitai was quieter when he was younger, but always sweet and genuine.  Now, he has a tattoo, plays in a metal band, has a spiky bass guitar, and is an all around Cool Kid.  The persona should be completed by a stand-offish attitude and a good dose of Stick It To the Man, but he's still the same sweet and genuine kid, although I guess I can't say kid anymore.

Amitai and I sat and talked for two hours straight.  His English is really great, and he's very, very sharp.  Then, at about nine, we went to his dad's house.  Roni has also known me since forever.  He is the same, but different.  Everything is the same, but different, even my favorite restaurant in Israel.  Now, it's not that Misadat Iron is particularly GOOD.  I mean, it's good, but it's not the best restaurant in Israel, nor would I assume it's the best restaurant in Pardes Hana.  It's just that it's a place I remember going to eat even when I was five, and we've been back ever since.  Every time I am in Israel, I eat here.  I suppose the food is the one thing I can say hasn't yet changed about Pardes Hana - it tastes exactly the same.  The difference is perhaps the person who is eating it.

Today, Shulamit and I went to do some banking stuff for my parents, at the same bank we always used when we lived here.  Every time I am at that bank, there is always a fight between two people as to who was in line first.  After banking was finished, Shulamit drove me to my old house.

I can't describe it, I honestly can't.  The only way I can actually describe the feeling is maybe that you walk up to this house you haven't seen in thirteen years and then you realize that there's enormous hole right in the middle of your chest that you haven't seen or noticed in thirteen years.  And this house is like, a square peg for your ciclical hole, because different things have filled in the sqaure bits to make the hole into a circle.  And as you're taking pictures of this place you used to live in, you can't decide whether you desperately want to take out all the other stuff in that hole so the square peg can fit again or if you want to close up that hole with more of that other stuff.  Maybe the reason it felt so strange was because I was there alone.  Running down the dirt road on the side of my house wearing a dress as the winter wind slapped my face was a huge freaking deja vu, and I think what was missing was my family.

After one of the weirdest experiences in my life, I went to the Berenstein's house, or as me and my dad like to call it, Frank's Estate.  The Berensteins have been in my life since - YOU GUESSED IT - I was a baby.  Frank and Nurit have four kids - Miryam, Adah, Ayelet, and David.  Each one of those sisters have babysat me at one point - first Miryam, then Adah, then Ayelet.  Each one of them has seen some kind of development in my life.  And while we were gone in the United States, the Berensteins were off doing tremendous things, and somehow, they all landed back at Frank's Estate.  It's a huge, huge plot of land that used to be a farm and still kind of is - there are chickens and goats.  The main house is where Frank and Nurit live.  Then there's the middle house, where Adah and Ayelet and David live (David's currently off traveling the world as is the custom for Israelis once they finish the army), and where Adah, Ayelet, and Miryam manage and run their baby-clothing store.  They call it The Studio.  Then there's Miryam's house, where she lives with her husband, Itai, and her two children, Inbar and Ula.  Beyond the last house there's a bunch of bees (Frank's a bee keeper)!

I haven't seen Miryam not exhausted since I lived in Israel.  When I was here as a fourteen year old, she had just had Inbar, and so she was a thin, weathered version of herself finding out what it was like to be a mother (my own mother had much of the same experience of watching the girl that used to babysit her kids turn into a mother as I'm sure Miryam has watching me become an adult).  The next time was slightly more rested, but Inbar was still only a year old, and so sleep was not a part of the deal.  Now, Ula is three months old, and while Miryam is happy (very happy), she is exhausted.  I spent most of my time with Ayelet (Adah was in Tel Aviv at their store that day) and Miryam and her kids.

This has been the weirdest two days of my life.  How do you go back to a home that you hardly lived in?  I know that five years is five years, but compared to thirteen, it's a really insignificant amount of time.  While I am not FROM Columbus, I grew up there.  The majority of my emotional development took place in Ohio, even if my motor skills and speaking skills and you know, general human skills took place in Pardes Hana.  I have always hated the fact that there's this expectation that I should right away feel at home here in Israel, even though for the majority of my life I have lived in the United States.  I feel very at home in Columbus, very familiar, very safe.  There is something like a dull, vague familiarity about Pardes Hana, and it comes in flashes - a line of eucalyptis trees on the side of a road, sitting in the front seat of a car, looking out of the window as the sun blinds you, eating the same freaking pink cabbage salad you have always loved since you were a tiny thing.  I feel like a stranger, while everyone else keeps telling me that this is my home.  Everyone knows me, but I hardly know them.  And while this is the most upfront of what I feel here, every so often I catch myself feeling the opposite in Columbus - that I'm not at home, that I'm stuck, that I should be somewhere else.  The problem is, when I get to where I think I should be, I find that it doesn't hold the completeness that I'm looking for.

I don't mean to sound miserable, because I'm not really.  I'm disconcerted by this entire experience, and yeah, it has made me feel homesick.  The only thing is that I DO NOT KNOW WHICH HOME I AM FEELING HOMESICK FOR, AND THAT IS EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING.  I know I am supposed to be in Israel to learn more about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, help social action organizations, have fun, be independent, but I feel like I have just suddenly been confronted with one of the biggest question marks in my life, and maybe that is the real reason I am here.

On the social actiony/conflict resolution news, I had a very interesting conversation with Ayelet today.  She and I were talking about Japan, and the awful things that have been happening there.  She said, "I can't imagine if something like that happened here.  We would never recover."  I asked her to elaborate, and she told me how she really felt about this country.  She said, "My grandparents generation lived here and founded the country, and the biggest goal for them was that there would be a country to fight for.  Then my parents' generation rolls around, and their biggest goal was that by the time our generation grew up, there would be peace.  Now?  My generation doesn't even believe that peace will happen.  This is such a stuck country.  The economy is stuck, the conflict is stuck - everything is stuck.  And if people are serious about all this revolution talk?  We are so going down.  Naw, man.  Portugal's where it's at."  (Apparently there is revolution talk and the Berensteins are all moving to Portugal, although it is the first I have heard of either of this.)

I don't actually think that everyone Ayelet's age (mid twenties) thinks that this country is stuck, otherwise guys like Ro'ee and Yotam and Mahmoud wouldn't be working in organizations like Sadaka-Reut, fighting, fighting, fighting for some kind of political change.  It was somewhat refreshing to hear her opinion, because a part of me agrees with her and has for a while.  Not that peace will never happen, but it won't happen while Israel is stuck in this grind, and it DEFINITELY won't happen until the majority of Israelis admit that occupation and settlement is kind of not okay.

I could write an entire new and intensely long blogpost about how I exactly feel about a conflict I still know very little about after being here only for two and a half weeks, but I want to reiterate - I am not a self hating Jew (as in hating Israel or whatever), nor do I stand with all of Israel's policies.  There.  Reason and rationality.  It's a beautiful thing.


Tomorrow morning I am going with Ro'ee and Yotam (and I think Mahmoud and Samer) to a school in Bat Yam (a neighborhood south of Tel Aviv) where they teach art classes to children with socio-political themes.  I'll mostly observe and ask questions and take pictures, so that I have information for the newsletter when it comes time to write it.

This is the road I used to run down as a five year old wearing colorful dresses as the winter wind hit my face.

Miryam holding/kissing Ula while Inbar is trying to figure out how to eat a pillow starfish.

Miryam with Ula and Inbar as Itai sits in the background, enjoying some solitude before his children bombard him.

This was a pretty deep and forlorn post.  I promise for some more triviality next time!