An Emigrant to Israel Gets Tripped Up by His Feelings

Reflections on things and people lost

Photo by Akhil Lincoln on Unsplash

I emigrated to Israel from the US—the area around Schenectady, New York to be more exact—thirty-eight years ago. Quite a long time. But it took quite a long time for it to start to feel like a long time ago; that happened only in the last few years. It’s in the last few years that the time I spent back there has started to feel “mythic,” almost like an earlier incarnation.

“Man is nothing but a little plot of land, / Nothing but the mold of his native landscape,” wrote the prestatehood Israeli poet Shaul Tchernichovsky. Well, I wouldn’t say “nothing but.” After so much time here, I’m welded to Israel, have never even been tempted to return to the “native landscape” I once knew, or to move anywhere else for that matter (and that includes now, a time of political turmoil). As far back as forty years ago, I became convinced that Israel was the place for me to be; the rest was just preparations, and since then I’ve never wavered in that conviction.

It may have been the force of that conviction that made me, for a long time, screen out any feelings of nostalgia, of missing the area where I grew up. It was, in those days especially, quite a beautiful area; we lived in a rural part of the township of Clifton Park, in a one-story brick house on a little plot of land across the road from a cornfield. We were almost the only Jews for miles around; I feel myself now to have been very deep in a kind of elemental America. As teenagers, I and my friends even engaged in Tom Sawyer–like escapades, sneaking out of windows at night to roam the roads, sometimes going one-up on Tom Sawyer with illicit bottles of booze.

Yes, it took me this long to acknowledge that emigration—even when strongly driven by a cause, in my case becoming part of Israel—doesn’t sever the bond you had with where you were. There may be exceptions to that—such as my father, who never evinced an iota of nostalgia for the place where he grew up; but that place was Vienna, where, in March 1938, he witnessed the invasion of the Third Reich and saw, as he put it, “[Nazi] flags begin to appear everywhere, as if upon a secret command”—big flags on the balconies, little ones on the lapels of his supposed neighbors.

But when you grew up in much more normal circumstances (yes, I encountered antisemitism—but not like that), especially in quite green and pastoral surroundings, certain feelings may eventually catch up with you no matter how fused you are with the place you emigrated to. It’s been happening in recent years—a sense of wonder about that lost, distant world, in which English was my only language and Israel seemed something admirable but remote. A son not just of immigrants but of refugees, at a time when the large majority of American Jews still lived in cities among other Jews, I found myself out there in the farm country in an America that wouldn’t have looked much different a hundred or two hundred years earlier—its drowsy summers, glorious autumns, white winters, lush springs, so different from their counterparts here in the Levantine subtropics.

And emigration exacts other losses, too, beyond missing a landscape (much of it by now shopping malls and apartment complexes). Losses that you feel more with the years—less time spent with people with whom your basic connection will never weaken; the possible loss of connections with people that were less strong, and that would have been kept if you’d stayed where you were. I was last there three years ago, and became aware that certain connections might, finally, have been lost utterly. Of course, even with the geographic distance, I could have done more to sustain them; but I just didn’t anticipate the moment of reaching out for them and finding they were no longer there.

In the end, I accept all of it because I have to be where I am and want to be where I am; in fact, finally opening the door to those feelings has been good for my writing. In recent years I’ve written some books (mostly novels) that are based on that America-to-Israel structure and deal, among other matters, with the impacts of emigration. In the end, of course, for writers, everything is grist for new writings and even loss is gain. But loss is still loss, too. You can’t have it all.