The Bubble

Storms

Storms came for a visit. We didn't want to get too sentimental so promised each other to meet again before I leave. I sure will miss our often hilarious, mostly amusing and extremely interesting conversations. Since she refuses to come to Israel (she hardly travels and Israel, unfortunately, is very low on her list of desired places to explore) and I doubt if I will ever return to Canada, I'm afraid we shall never meet again.

Storms asked: "so what  is the first thing you're gonna do when you get to Israel?"
“Both are parents will wait for us at the airport and me and Daniel will spend the weekend at my mom’s in Jerusalem and Uri and Ktina will spend it at Uri’s dad’s house in Tel Aviv”.
“And after that”? she continued to ask.
“Well, after that we will just start living”, I said. And only now do realize how long it’s been since I simply lived. I’m not sure if I’m any good at that - but I'm sure willing to give it a try.

Lasts (3)

Last haircut by the hairdresser with the worst hairdo in the whole wide world.

Daniel wants to cancel the plan

A family photo, circa 1931. Landing at Tel Aviv's shore from Bucharest. The child in the photo is Daniel's grandfather.

When he said that the plan was canceled and he didn’t want to go back I laughed – finding it amusing. How insensitive of me. I guess I deserved it: the inconsolable crying, the screaming, and then: the rage.  “But all my friends are here”, he said before. I reminded him of what I thought was obvious: over there we have family who loves us. He has a few friends and very quickly he will make new ones.
He had to cry; inconsolably, incessantly, violently, to make me understand: When we moved here he didn’t speak any English. He was forced to leave his family and his friend. Now, when he finally feels safe - he has to move again.

“It is an autumn afternoon in 1958, and we are all going, dressed more formally than usual, to the bergs’ house. We are going to say good-bye. I am unprepared for this. I have not accepted the knowledge that Marek is about to leave “forever”-for that is how I understand it.
As soon as I enter the apartment, though, I am jolted into instant recognition of departure, finality, the end. The apartment has been transformed from a place in which people have lived cozily and for a long time into a space from which they are fleeing - that image of lives being torn and uprooted that will be, from now on, printed on my retina with quickening regularity. The familiar rooms, which used to be warm and muffled with their thicknesses of furniture, now echo with the emptiness and the wooden crates that line the hallway. There are some trunks and suitcases, and there are people awkwardly standing about. We don’t exactly know how to behave. What are the ceremonies for such departures - departures that are neither entirely chosen nor entirely forced, and that are chosen and forced at the same time?”

Lost in translation/Eva Hoffman

Farewell

Farewell party, Toronto.

Today, after the rain

The apple of my eye

Home sweet home

West 19th st, New York, circa 2002

Elsbeth, my dear lost friend, in one of her adventurous visits - all the way from faraway Amsterdam (I miss you: where are you?).

I'm in a waiting mode. Countdown: 4 weeks.

I thought I might link an old post here, from two and a half years ago, to describe this period of waiting, to add a sense of repetition, or a closure of some sorts. I looked at the Exodus section of this blog, searching for the right link, and realized this is a totally different experience; without remorse, without regrets, without guilt; only excited anticipation. We hardly have anyone to say goodbye to (amazing how little human connection/interaction did we have in the past two and a half years, and a bit chilling, too).  The sorting was done back then, in Tel Aviv (Uri insisted that we should move to Toronto with our belongings, he said it means we’re really going to settle down this time), the moving company will do the packing, so it seems there’s not much to do. This little life we lead over here seems more a charade than ever – with the knowledge that this “routine” which constitutes it will be shuttered in a few weeks and turn into a far away dream. It already looks a bit like a far away dream, actually.

I saw a short video in the New York Times online about a homeless guy who lived for many years at an improvised underground shelter in an old train station at the Bronx that he called "The Cave". A newspaper article about him helped him move to an apartment sponsored by the city and the Catholic church. The NYT reporter follows and documents his adjustment to his new life. After four months at the apartment the homeless guy (I think his name is John) decides to return, on his own free will, to “the cave”. He misses his old neighborhood where he lived all his life and was a familiar figure - where people recognized him and where he felt he belonged. He also found it incredibly hard to live in a building with neighbors that he heard through the walls and thought they were spying on him.

“Only here I feel free”, John declares after returning to "the cave". Only he does not wish to call it “the cave” anymore. “This time I'm gonna call it Home Sweet Home”, he happily announces.
Home sweet home.

Ktina

Leroy street, New York, 2001

lasts (2)

Last bottle (alas much too big) of dish-washing soap. We will be leaving in 5 weeks.

on the way to school:

Daniel, to his friend A.: "Very soon we're returning to Israel".
A. (incredulously): "You don't live in Israel!"
Daniel: "Yes I am! we're here only for a visit."

pauses

"A very long visit".

Nostalgia

A family portrait, Israel, circa 1974

“In Speak, Memory, Nabokov makes the poetic, or the playful, speculation that Russian children before the Revolution – and his exile – were blessed with a surfeit of sensual impressions to compensate them for what was to come. Of course, fate doesn’t play such premonitory games, but memory can perform retrospective maneuvers to compensate for fate. Loss is a magical preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them.
Nostalgia – that most lyrical of feelings – crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness.

Nostalgia is a source of poetry, and a form of fidelity. It is also a species of melancholia, which used to be thought of as an illness. As I walk the streets of Vancouver, I am pregnant with the images of Poland, pregnant and sick. Nostalgia throws a film over everything around me, and directs my vision inward. The largest presence within me is the welling up of absence, of what I have lost. “

From Lost In Translation - an autobiography written by Eva Hoffman, who immigrated to Canada from Poland when she was 13 together with her family, immigrated again to the States as she reached adulthood, and now lives in England. While reading it, I felt an odd feeling: as if it was me, who wrote that book. I was mesmerized by the careful way in which Hoffman selected her words, collecting them like precious stones, to describe my own impressions and feelings.