Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  Before dinner was over, as I explained I had to leave in time to make my couch-surfing appointment before my hosts went to sleep, Justine asked why I didn’t just stay with her. Her husband was away on business, and she had a big house on the beach just south of the city with lots of extra room. Moreover, she had to leave for a trip soon and there were two cats that needed to be cared for while she was gone, so this was the perfect opportunity for me to get to know them and decide if staying was an option.

  Justine pointed out her little red Mini Cooper in the parking lot and suggested I follow her in my car. We drove down Highway 1, quiet at this hour but beset with stretches of thick mist, past the hazy beaches of Pacifica and around the hairpin turns of Devil’s Slide, where I struggled to keep up with the Mini as we jostled around the sharp curves, but soon we had arrived in a tiny town named Moss Beach.

  The house was large and light filled, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows and built on stilts almost like a treehouse, overlooking the ocean on one side and the forested ridge on the other. In the center of the house was a large woodstove that Justine used as heating on chillier days. She was a writer who spent most of her time in that remote house, she explained, working on her magnum opus. She had once lived in the city but left the urban life behind to live here with flowers and animals and fog tentacles, so she could retreat into the active space that was her mind. Like me, she felt assaulted after spending too much time in a city. Her thoughts needed more room to grow. “It takes most of us too long to realize that the mainstream formula for happiness might not fit and that we have to find our own,” she told me. I thought about mainstream ideas of happiness. New York promised that if you had a fat bank account everything would be wonderful. What did America promise? Would money matter as much everywhere else as it did back home?

  During the next few days, we took walks alongside the ocean, and the beaches there were always empty. The stretch of sand in front of Justine’s home was ringed in rocky ground upon which grew diverse and colorful species of moss, stretches of yellow and purple and green, after which a slight strip of sand gave way to slate-colored waters. Here and there a harrier hawk swung low to the ground; a scrub jay squealed frenetically in the brush. As we walked, I experienced for the first time the peace inherent in total isolation, and noticed how the first ideas of my future had begun to germinate quietly within my imagination. If I was to find a real home someday, I thought, would it be like this, surrounded by trees and water and birds, my identity allowed to grow into itself without being shaped and molded by any community of humans?

  * * *

  • • •

  Back at the house, I sat on the veranda for hours without any interruption, remembering those Sabbath afternoons in which I had lain motionless on our porch, eyes closed, listening to the uncharacteristic stillness and to the sounds of bird and breeze that had been allowed, only on that day of rest, to come to the fore. I remembered the cherry blossoms that would fall like swirling snow in the spring, the blue jays that came to peck at the seed my grandmother had prepared, and I thought about my grandmother then, and her ability to create for herself a sense of home in a foreign land, by planting the species of flowers and shrubs that she remembered from her childhood, in an attempt to create a familiar island for herself where she felt at peace.

  That garden had been a sanctuary for me as well, when I was a child growing up in my grandparents’ home. It was probably the only real garden in pre-hipster Brooklyn. It was the early 1990s, and most people had cemented over their backyards to keep away the weeds. My grandmother had made an agreement with the neighbors on either side of us: she would take care of the little plots of land behind their houses if they, the owners, allowed her to plant whatever she desired there. And so she did, growing strawberries in the damp, rich soil that lay just under the thick refuge of ivy filtering all that wonderful light that hit the back of our brownstone in the afternoons. She planted fat pink climbing roses so that they used the chain-link fence marking the perimeter of the yard as a trellis; the thorny stems climbed higher each year, inextricably intertwined with the metal. Crocuses and daffodils came up in late winter, and gorgeously colored tulips popped up in clusters in early spring, followed closely by brilliant blue irises and delicate lilies of the valley.

  She had a real eye for landscaping—the garden was divided into three rectangular sections, each delineated by carefully trimmed white-edged Swedish ivy and bordered on the corners with broad-leafed hostas. Slabs of rock were laid in between the sections and at the borders to create a walking path, and little tufts of moss grew between the rocks. It was a magical place, so well cared for that it gave back generously and graciously each year. I had read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic by then and begun to pretend that it was my own secret garden. When I stood among the rustling leaves and smelled the delicate fragrance of the flowers, the incongruent urban cacophony was muted and remote, the sounds of honking cars and droning airplanes softened by wind-tossed stems and whispering petals. The ivy beds were like cushions that absorbed and suffocated the ugly sound of the city. In my imagination, it was as if invisible walls had gone up around the garden, and I had fallen, like Alice in Wonderland, into another plane of existence.

  Every year, catalogs would arrive from Holland, offering nothing but tulip bulbs, and my grandmother and I would pore over the varieties and talk about which ones we might like to try. We’d survey the potted African violets on the windowsill to see if they were ready to be transplanted, but we’d leave the geranium cuttings until summer. There were always exciting plans to be made in the spring, and a summer of surprise growth to look forward to.

  One morning in 1999, my grandmother and I went downstairs to check on the plants, and I watched as she fingered a strong-looking sapling that had sprung from the middle of the garden, just past the line of shade cast by the porch overhead.

  “What is it?” I asked, thinking it was something she had planted last year, wondering if perhaps we could expect another rosebush.

  “I made a mistake,” she said, looking crestfallen. “I thought it was just a weed.”

  “What is it?” I asked again, more curious this time.

  “It’s a loganberry tree,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it. I was surrounded by them as a child. I should have recognized it instantly.”

  Immediately I understood her consternation. It was too late to do anything about it now—she might have been able to tear it out when it had still been a shoot, but a tree that gave fruit could not be cut or pruned. It is against Jewish law to hinder a fruit tree’s growth in any way.

  She had to let it take over her garden, and as the years went by, it did so, eventually towering over our second-story porch. It dropped purple splats of berries for three years, until it became permissible to pick and eat them. As the tree grew, it became hungry and greedy, stole nutrients from the soil and light from the sky. Year by year, the other plants began to die. The tulips grew fewer and fewer in number; the irises disappeared completely. My grandmother saw this, and although she never said anything, I watched her make fewer and fewer trips to that garden she had once cherished. Eventually, the ivy became so neglected it grew over those carefully laid paths, and weeds began to crowd the borders and infiltrate the center of the garden. These were no mild breed either; they were the thick, broad-leafed stalks indigenous to Brooklyn, hardy plants that needed hardly any time at all, it seemed, to grow as tall as trees and drown the garden completely in darkness. When I saw that the weeds would not be addressed, I went downstairs to rip them out myself. I had no knowledge of gardening; my grandmother had taught me only to love flowers, not how to take care of them. With bare fingers I pulled and tugged on each insidious weed, feeling with every success that there were already new ones growing to replace those that had been excised. My grandmother came out onto the porch and watched me work, thinking I was doing it to please her.

  “You
don’t have do that for me, little lamb,” she said, using her traditional term of endearment. But I wasn’t doing it for her. I was desperately trying to rescue the only realized fantasy of my childhood, the one beautiful thing that had marked my upbringing in this otherwise godforsaken corner of Brooklyn. I pulled furiously, my vision blurred by pollen irritation, my nose stinging from the pungent odor of weed juice spilling onto the earth. I finished the whole backyard, and when I was done, the garden looked as if a massacre had taken place there; the weeds had left gaping holes and depressions in the ground. Never mind, I thought, those would fill. I was older by then, making money of my own from babysitting; I could plant new things in the holes to replace the weeds. Hydrangeas would be nice, perhaps some bleeding heart. I would buy weed killer. I would keep pulling them out if it killed me.

  I made my way over to some young climbing roses, shriveled and drooping sadly where the twine had come loose. I found the rusted edge of a metal tie used to affix the bush to the fence and tried to force the stems back into their original upright position, to no avail. The tie snapped back, its jagged edge tearing into the skin of my palm. Blood sprang from the gash, but I bit back my scream so that my grandmother wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t thought to ask for gardening gloves.

  How I wanted her to come down then and work alongside me, just as we had always done. Those times seemed gone forever. No matter how hard I worked to fix it all, I knew my grandmother had given up on the garden, and my grandmother did not change her mind. She had learned to detach from the things she loved because she had experienced so much loss in her life already.

  It was from her that I must have inherited that deep-rooted ability to detach. It hurt to love things now, I had discovered, even though I wanted to love without being afraid of disappointment. I wanted to be able to invest my energies over and over again, but what was easy, what was familiar, was the act of cutting—cutting off, cutting out, cutting away. When would I be able to stop trimming at the edges of my life, gnawing it down to the bone, and start building it?

  I had already begun to miss my grandmother then in the garden. Even as I stood next to her while she cooked and scrubbed and sang tremulous tunes, I longed desperately for the woman she had been before loss and tragedy had sanded her down. After I left, it felt as if she had already died, and her spirit hovered over me like a guardian angel.

  Perhaps in this memory lay the answer to my question. Perhaps I too would have to carve out a home for myself in a territory that would always be foreign. Perhaps I too needed a garden, and the refuge that came with it.

  * * *

  —

  I stayed at Justine’s house for three weeks, a time in which I truly felt ensconced in a sanctuary, far away from the real world that I would soon have to return to. There were no social interactions, but there were long walks and time to read books, and lots of hours focused on the manuscript edits that needed to be approved. I managed to postpone all my fear about the future.

  I left San Francisco in early August to give myself enough time to complete my trip. I passed through the flattening landscape of Sacramento and the other interior California towns, then the initial dryness of the Sierras, and soon I was racing to catch the sunset at the Utah-Nevada border, where the Bonneville Salt Flats lay just west of Salt Lake City. I got there just in time. I crossed the state line and parked in an empty lot that seemed to serve as a station for freight trains, one of which stretched down the tracks as far as the eye could see this late in the day. Looking back at the receding brown mountains, I saw the sky above and between them pulsing bright pink, the clouds streaks of orange and purple. I had caught the sunset at its apex. Off to the east, a lone Joshua tree stretched up from the flat landscape against a quickly darkening horizon. The rest was all salt mud, looking almost like an enormous ice floe in the distance, reflecting the vivid neon sunset so blindingly that the effect was Narnia-like. The roaring sound of wind rushing over the flats filled my ears; the dazzling silver surface mesmerized me. I felt like I was in another galaxy. It was like no other vision I had seen or imagined, and for the first time on my trip, I felt floored by the place I stood in, unable to communicate or relate to it, feeling my foreignness emphasized suddenly. What a strange, wild, and enormous place this country was.

  I drove past the darkening flats along a quiet highway, into the compact, symmetrical skyline of Utah’s capital. I slowed down only as I passed the Mormon headquarters, because I noticed a group of women congregated outside, dressed in long pleated skirts and high-necked shirts, their hair modestly slicked back; they could have easily been mistaken for the peers of my youth. If I talked to those girls, would they be like the girls of my childhood, thinking and acting in chorus?

  The next day I drove through Utah’s hill country, where clusters of modest mountains huddled under the scant coverage of stunted conifers. After three hours I seemed to cross an invisible line in the sand as I descended yet again into the purple-veined skin of the desert, looking back at the fertile landscape that had so bluntly come to an end behind me. I drove on for five hours straight, in what felt like nothingness, on a one-lane road, and felt grateful for the red pickup truck in front of me. Its Utah license plate made me feel more comfortable about traversing such a long stretch of uninhabited and inhospitable land.

  This is America, then, I considered, this vast stretch of emptiness that lay between the coasts. I drove the rest of the way through Utah’s parched southeast region feeling an urge to rejoin civilization. I relaxed slightly once I ascended into the winding, mountainous roads of Colorado’s ski country. I passed the perched chalets of Vail, noting the elegant, manicured gardens and contemporary vacation homes with a sense of guarded relief—this at least was familiar in the sense that luxury will always be familiar to a New Yorker. By the time I hit Denver traffic, it was two hours past nightfall. I stopped at a roadside bar called the Grizzly Rose, where a neon sign outside announced that it was ladies’ night. That meant free drinks.

  The women who were square-dancing on the polished wooden floor wore very short shorts and tube tops, and the length of leg between hem and cowboy boot inevitably boasted a smooth, dark tan, but what stood out the most for me were the large, gem-encrusted crosses dangling wildly over tightly compressed cleavage, the ostentatious display of piety in jarring relation to the overall atmosphere of drunken hedonism. Those girls in long skirts outside the Mormon temple had made sense to me; I had recognized in their garb the same severe lines as in the clothing of my own childhood. I would always connect religion with the modest concealment of women’s bodies, with the stilting humility of their movements. I was flummoxed by what felt like an irreconcilable contradiction: here were people clearly advertising their devotion to Jesus while engaging in what seemed to be some kind of bacchanalian ritual. America just didn’t add up.

  My GPS said it was a sixteen-hour drive from Denver to Chicago, but I did it in twelve, stopping only once for gas, chips, and beef jerky. What a thrill it was to find myself again on a booming highway, a silvery skyline thrusting powerfully ahead of me! It could easily have been Manhattan; the traffic was similarly aggressive, and the New Yorker in me swerved confidently through it. I gaped at the impressive architecture as I followed the directions to my friend’s address, which turned out to be a brownstone very similar to the one I grew up in, tucked into a small side street a block away from elevated tracks, like the ones I heard rattling through my childhood dreams every night. It could have been the same neighborhood. Instantly I was soothed by a false sense of the familiar.

  I visited the famous sculpture Cloud Gate, known as “the Bean,” and made my way through the Art Institute. As I turned a corner from a room filled with Manets and Boudins, I found myself suddenly face-to-face with a famous Nazi propaganda poster, The Eternal Jew. The familiar image, that of a wizened, humpbacked Jew holding coins in one palm and a whip in the other, set on a bright yellow background, seemed discordan
tly out of place in a museum of art. Nothing could have prepared me for its assault on my consciousness. Underneath the poster was a description of the temporary exhibition of Nazi and Soviet propaganda posters from World War II.

  I stepped inside the room, which was quiet, lined with brown carpeting that muffled my footsteps. Dimmed as if in a theater, spotlights shone softly on the yellowed posters stretched and displayed in glass cases on the walls. Many of them contained Jewish symbolism juxtaposed with images of horror and evil; always there was the ugly face, with its hooked nose, its piercing eyes peering from under thick, dark brows, and its menacing scowl.

  I moved from poster to poster, feeling as I progressed through the exhibit that each one resonated with something inside me, that in every image was something recognizable, something horrible yet true.

  It is this that terrifies me about the stereotypes I learned growing up, and the ones I’m still incorporating as I make my way through the world as a new sort of wandering Jew—that there is always a speck of truth packed into the core of each accusation, and that I will never be able to fully rid myself of that self-affront. I did not want to leave my world only to be forever chased and haunted by the identity it bestowed on me. I had been raised in America without knowing what it was to be an American—it was that problem that I had hit the road hoping to resolve.

  Here in the Art Institute, it felt as though the rest of America was involved in discussing the influence of Jews in art and culture, but that the physical Jewish presence was concentrated only in negligible pinpricks throughout the country, a speck here and there, except for the powerful communities that coalesced into a blob on the East Coast. Here in Chicago, I felt I wasn’t even real, but just an apparition. I felt keenly that I had no identity other than the abstract of the Jew; I could pretend to blend in, but it would be a false construct that would deflate immediately.