Questioning Return

by Beth Kissileff

  These men did not expect to be watched. Lamdan didn’t glance her way once, his frail body encased in the group of men around him. As more men from other parts of the plane gathered, it was harder for her to see him. As she remained by Lamdan’s seat and stared at the men at prayer, she wondered what it was like to have that trancelike state, that connection to a higher power.

  “Dossim, what you want with them?” said the Israeli guy with the nose stud and tattoos who had been sitting in the row in front of her as he walked past on the way to the bathroom. He didn’t stay to hear her response. There were other people trying to get by her in the aisle. Finally the flight attendant with the breakfast cart needed to go by. Wendy was embarrassed both to be caught staring and to be in the way of so many people.

  Wendy returned to her seat and looked out the airplane’s small windows to see sunrise: lavish pink streaks extending across the sky, the glory of the sun only glancing out carefully through the clouds. The miniscule size of the airplane window only heightened the vastness of the vista. She was startled by the unexpected beauty; she wished she had her camera. She remembered something the photographer Diane Arbus wrote: “I really believe there are things nobody would see unless I photographed them.” That was the essence of what Wendy hoped to do this year: see fascinating and beautiful things, and help others see them by writing about them.

  What she’d said to Lamdan was true: this trip, her whole dissertation, almost didn’t happen. She came to her doctoral dissertation topic in a totally meandering way, completely by indirection. Her senior year in college, she needed a thesis topic and decided to write on the changes American life wrought on the practice of Buddhism. She loved the process of writing a longer research paper—the time for rumination and digestion of facts, the ability to take the time to consider and rearrange one’s work, the digging in books for nuggets of information that will encapsulate a thesis and provide it with the necessary verve and philosophical underpinnings. As an undergraduate, she had found her time in Columbia’s Butler Library thrilling, exhilarating even. Writing a thesis made her certain that graduate school was the right path.

  Doing the work of her senior thesis Wendy loved, but the topic itself, not so much. She felt apart from it, not quite invested in the why of its importance. She didn’t understand entirely the schisms that led to different strands of Buddhism—Mahayana versus Theravada—and the regions of the world where the religion was practiced. It just wasn’t her, she finally concluded, though she loved examining the impact of America on a religious group. Once finished, she had decided she would continue to work in the field of American religion, to be able to teach about the Shakers and Quakers, Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, and how individualism and democracy in America impacted religious identity. She almost went to study with a historian of American Judaism at Brandeis. When Wendy went up to Boston to meet him, he told her that he himself had trained not in Jewish studies, but in American history, and that he saw his work on the lives of Jews in America as a subset of American history. So, she decided to do the same and study Judaism within American religion at the best department in the field. She went to Princeton to work with Cliff Conrad. The work behind choosing a dissertation topic was how to put issues she found fascinating into a dissertation that would position her as a saleable commodity in the limited academic job market. This made her subject to the vagaries of hot topics that students would flock to take courses on, thus increasing departmental enrollment and clout within the university. Her dissertation topic needed to demonstrate her command and understanding of the field as well as establish a base for her future scholarly work. Wendy wanted to do a Jewish topic. It couldn’t require extensive Hebrew knowledge that she did not have, and it needed to equip her for positions in American religion, not Jewish studies. One day, complaining on the phone to Nina Distler, her best friend from growing up in Westchester, Nina said, “Debby. Write about her.”

  Nina’s sister Debby was now Devorah, morphed with a vowel shift from the casual English “e” to the Hebraic long “o,” from a tennis playing, roller-skating all-American kid, to a sheitel-wearing, Torah-studying mother of children with impossible-to-pronounce names. Yerachmiel Zvi was followed by Baila Bracha and Sheindel Menucha. In high school, Wendy had accompanied Nina for Shabbos in Crown Heights to help her friend deal with it all on more than one occasion. At Nina’s suggestion, the dissertation was born, and its title was similarly lifted from the speech patterns of Devorah’s newly religious cohort. Wendy’s magnum opus-in-progress was titled “It Was Basherte”: Narrative and Self-Identity in the Lives of Newly Religious American Jews.” Little did Debby Distler know, back when she left for Israel before college, that she was going to inspire her kid sister’s friend to spend a year studying people like her.

  There was something at stake for Wendy in writing this dissertation, different from her senior thesis. Wendy was curious about whether Debby, or other returnees, had changed at all. Her scholarship came with a sense of nosiness and voyeurism, wanting to snoop into corners of belief that their adherents would prefer to leave untouched and unexamined. But still she had to know: Was there something left behind, some remainder of who Debby had been before, or was it all as covered as her naturally strawberry blonde hair? This driven inquisitiveness, the need to know if anyone can really change, went beyond the professional.

  What Wendy wanted above all, what every graduate student desired, was to know whether all this effort, all this seemingly endless deferral of anything besides graduate school, would ever pay off. Would she work hard at her dissertation, get a series of one-year jobs, and then end up living with her parents and going to law school? She hoped only that if she kept going, continued on the path she’d set down—following the steps, courses, research, dissertation idea, fellowships—she would have a sense, eventually, of the rightness of it all. But if she were entirely sure, there would be no room for new possibilities. She had to hope that going forth into the unknown would lead to something good.

  A decisive moment. A moment when the viewer realized she was seeing something that was there, actual, but not able to be seen without the photographer’s lens. Wendy Goldberg hoped, in writing her dissertation in Jerusalem this year, to perform a similar feat.

  ONE

  Holders of Foreign Passports

  Home is a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

  —ZACH BRAFF, Garden State motion picture

  Wendy stepped off the plane. She was at the top of a flight of stairs, looking into blinding sunlight and palm trees.

  She hadn’t anticipated this: to live for a year in a place with palm trees, tall and swaying, their tops absurdly high, not necessary for a utilitarian purpose, but solely decorative, like the absurd pink crests on an exotic flamingo, sitting on one leg, rising above the water. Flamboyant—that was the word for these trees, their grandiose plumes alerting you to their presence, so different from the modest and decorous trees of the home of Wendy’s parents on Raleigh Street in New Bay, New York. Foliage there blended in, giving evidence that there was a gardener in the background whose job was to contain the wildness of nature, keep botanical growth in proportion.

  Were these trees, fifteen or twenty feet high, even real? Maybe they were only an exotic projection of what tourists wanted to see when they got off the plane?

  What else here would surprise her? She knew intellectually that in Israel the climate and topography would be entirely different. It still felt so unsettling to actually be in this place, to realize how changed her surroundings were from what she was used to.

  The heat. When she left New York last night, the summer evening had a cool undercurrent to it. In Tel Aviv, the middle-of-the-day humidity showed no signs of abating; it asssaulted her with its denseness.

  The light here was different, somehow sharper, bringing objects into clearer focus. Were she in a movie, the lenses would shift now; all would be in Technicolor, highlighted, distinct from the black and
white of her last few weeks at her parents’ house and, after she had closed down her Princeton apartment, a short reprieve from them visiting her grandmother Essie.

  This year, there were no classes to dictate how to spend her days, no students with papers needing to be graded. And no family to ask that she come home for Hanukkah or a nephew’s birthday. She breathed in the humid summer air, and it actually felt refreshing.

  Waiting her turn to gingerly tread the steep metal steps, Wendy began the slow passage off the plane, shuffling behind other passengers.

  She looked down. It was a long way to the ground.

  Wendy was seized with a sudden feeling of vertigo. What if I fall? Can I make it down these steps? She felt her heart constricting, the flow of blood to it getting smaller, more limited, as though fear might make it stop and harden suddenly, to become a great stone sitting in her chest.

  She couldn’t go down the steps. As she was panicking—picturing how she would turn around and go back to the plane with a feeble explanation that there was a mistake, she wasn’t really supposed to get off—she was jostled gently from behind. She felt her feet move down the stairs with the crowd. The descent down the steps was performed only by her legs, the connection between their actions and her brain’s volition entirely severed.

  Abruptly, her legs brought her to the ground; now she was putting one foot in front of the other. She remembered a moment at the beginning of On the Road, when Kerouac’s narrator wakes up in Iowa and feels a stranger to himself, his life a haunted life, himself a ghost. His temporary disorientation, this moment of blankness and bafflement, stays with him, fueling his search for a way to get at himself, who he is capable of being. Steadying herself after the steep descent, she thought, taking her first step on the flat ground, Am I going to feel Kerouac’s hauntedness and blank incomprehension this year?

  She was on the ground, the actual soil of the Holy Land, and only felt terror. She wondered whether anyone still kissed the ground, as she remembered hearing travelers did in bygone times. She didn’t see anyone performing a sense of reverence for the sacred ground.

  Wendy felt disappointed, seeing the travelers trudging to the waiting bus. She wished for ritual, fanfare, drama, to accompany her journey.

  She took her carry-on luggage, the backpack with her laptop and her orange and green striped canvas tote bag filled with toiletries and snacks, and followed the crowd to the waiting bus, for the ride towards the airport building. The travelers proceeded to the area where they would get their passports ceremonially embossed with today’s date—the modern ritual of entry, shorn of religious import.

  She waited in the line labeled, “Holders of Foreign Passports.” There were significantly more booths open to holders of Israeli passports than foreign ones. The five lines for possessors of Israeli passports cleared rapidly, while her queue and the one next to it had five or six family groups still waiting. Wendy felt unwelcome, like a child visiting a friend’s house who sees that the mother always gives her own child more food and bigger portions of dessert. She felt the child’s stunned surprise that an adult would play favorites so obviously.

  Wendy finally reached the passport control booth. The young woman inside looked to be about twenty-five, her straight black shoulder-length hair dyed in reddish highlights, her skin the tawny color of Jews from Arabic-speaking countries. She asked questions of Wendy in routine bureaucratic language: “What is the purpose of your visit? How long do you plan to stay? Do you speak Hebrew? Are you visiting family? What is your address in Israel?”

  Wendy looked at the clerk and thought of what Lamdan had said to her: “The questions may turn back to you.” She thought about questions that would devastate her because of her profound inability to answer them. Is anything you are doing here is worthwhile or will it amount to much? Should you be here now? Who are you kidding—will you ever be able to write this kind of dissertation? How are you going to manage in a country where you don’t speak the language?

  “I plan to be in Israel for a year to do research on my dissertation.”

  “The . . . em . . . subject of this dissertation?”

  “American baalei teshuvah in Israel.”

  “Oy.” The clerk stared at Wendy. “Baalei teshuvah. They’re crazy, metoraf li’gamrei. I had this boyfriend, Aharon. We travel . . . India . . . after the army. I thought we get married. He had this—I don’t know how to say in English—havayah—at a rave. He became dati. I hate all the rules—it takes the . . . how do you say . . . ta’am, taste, from life. He in yeshiva, and his wife . . . with their second child. We were biyahad, em, together, seven years. Zeh lo fair! It should be me, his wife!”

  Wendy did not know how to respond. She had never thought her dissertation topic would touch a bureaucrat at an airport. She hadn’t thought about Israeli baalei teshuvah. Did the fact that they exist invalidate her theories that baalei teshuvah are merely another self-invention of the American Jew—Jewish piety inventing itself like Hollywood invented itself? Would she have to include footnotes and literature about Israelis to show she’d done her research homework? Do I have to worry about this now?

  The clerk stamped firmly on Wendy’s passport; she looked up and straight at Wendy’s face. “I hope zey don’t leave you when you write about them. Better luck zan me.” She smiled at Wendy, but it was a smile that faded quickly and looked impossibly tired for someone so young.

  “Thanks,” Wendy called out, not knowing what else to say.

  Wendy looked down at the date on the passport: July 17, 1996. The previous stamp, from 1987 when she’d first procured the passport, was from her trip to Israel before her senior year of high school. She hadn’t wanted to go with a group from Camp Kodimoh, the Jewish camp she’d attended for three years, because for those kids the trip was a chance to drink and hook up. She wanted to do something more meaningful and productive, so chose to spend six weeks working on a kibbutz. She had barely toured the country then, and didn’t know Jerusalem, where she’d be living, at all. Her parents, Sylvia and Arthur, had thought it a good plan: build the Jewish state, be around Jewish men. She’d only told them recently that the most interesting person on the kibbutz was a non-Jewish volunteer from Malmo, Sweden, whom she dated briefly. This trip, her parents were worried that she was going to follow the paths of her subjects and become similarly totally religious. It was so demeaning that it was easier for them to imagine her as a subservient woman with a wig and lots of kids than as someone capable of pursuing a professional career as a university professor. She was the youngest of three, and they just didn’t take her professional aspirations seriously, assuming graduate school was just a way for her to fill time till marriage and children. They assumed that, like her sister Lisa, who quit her good job at a law firm when she didn’t want to return from maternity leave, Wendy might work a bit, but only until she had kids.

  At the luggage carousel, Wendy noted the household goods on the conveyor belt. All the items—baby swings, drum sets, stereos, microwave ovens, computers—were to enhance a house, the place people live with a family. She felt conspicuously alone. Looking around at the waiting families, she knew that she wanted to fall in love and have kids one day, to have someone to make a home with. It had to be in her own way, if she met the right person and wanted to, not because it was expected of her by someone else.

  Her thoughts were diverted by a dull pain in her thigh as a large trunk suddenly rammed her. “Ow! Look where you’re going!” she yelled at the man behind her. She spied her duffel bags coming towards her and stopped massaging the ache in her thigh long enough to nab them.

  Wendy left the baggage area to go to customs, pushing a luggage cart with her two huge duffel bags, the box of books too important to trust to the mail like the other four boxes of books, and her backpack and tote bag. She made a declaration that there were no individual items worth over five hundred dollars and imagined what it might be to have diamonds or cocaine in the lining of her suitcase if she were a black marke
t smuggler. Could she be bringing anything dangerous into the country?

  Once she cleared customs, she came to the exit door and began to hear a dull roar from outside. The automatic doors parted and she began to walk through an assemblage of faces. All were in family groups, the mass of them appearing like a collage made with oil pastel crayons. The color was applied with smudges and blotches, light skinned ones here, darker swarthier groups there, blending in a crowd that was a microcosm of Israel. Ethiopian families darkest of all, Arab families with kaffiyehs and chadors, Hasidic families with black hats and wigs, secular families without any kind of hair covering save a baseball cap for the heat. The splotches of color blended together to greet their relatives returning home.

  Part of her found the family groups amusing and made her feel relieved to be alone, with no family members to embarrass her. She thought back to the teenagers going on summer tours to Israel she’d seen at the airport in New York, whose parents kept embracing them, copious tears in their eyes, not letting the kids go. Wendy felt embarrassed by so much public display of affection, thinking it as inappropriate as the adolescent variety, something that belonged in a more concealed environment, its excrescences making her recoil. Yet, she felt a pang: of all the howling, whinnying, growling noises that were being made to attract the attention of returning family members, none were for her.

  Was home only a place where you were welcomed? Robert Frost’s lines about home came to her mind—that it is the “place where/ When you have to go there / they have to take you in.”