“We all wanted a relationship like your mom and dad’s,” a cousin once told me.
Years later, Sean would sometimes grab my hands while I cooked, grumpy about something, and despite my protests would spin me around our kitchen in Vancouver while singing Otis Redding or Percy Sledge, until my frown turned into a smile, into joy and delight. And I’d think, All this time I was looking for my father in quiet, shy boys, but it was the boisterous, loud one who ended up giving me echoes of my parents’ relationship, the kind of love I grew up watching and wishing for myself.
∙ ∙ ∙
With my pen I wander between thoughts
Pick through the riches of language
Join together forgotten words
into verse
Unravel the tangle
—HAIM TSABARI, “False Spring,” 1959
* * *
—
WHEN I BEGAN writing about my father, I decided to revisit his poetry, perhaps take on the challenge of translating parts of it into English. I was nervous, afraid I might not like the book as much as I used to, now that I was older, more critical.
I also worried that I wouldn’t be able to do his poetry justice. My father’s language represented an era when Hebrew was fresh in people’s mouths. A dead language for seventeen centuries, it was revived to serve a purpose: to unite Jews from disparate places who had no way of communicating but through the language of prayer. My father’s generation reclaimed Hebrew as a language of poetry, finding ways to describe the ordinary, the secular, and the profane in words once considered sacred. In his poetry, my father fused modern Hebrew with words borrowed from the Bible, using antiquated phrasing and style, which lent the text a distinct, singular quality, making it near impossible to translate.
I studied my father’s poetry, hoping that it would give me answers, that it would click and unlock, like a Japanese puzzle box. Maybe I’d see something that had been there all along, waiting to be revealed, the way my mother’s memories were waiting for me to dust them off.
Eventually, something new did emerge. I could see my father as a young man: he smokes and drinks, falls in love but hesitates; he wants to write; he’s full of doubt. In one poem, he hears whispers telling him to burn it all, a voice that says, “A poet’s craft is an artist’s realm / not for you, son of Yemen.” That line broke my heart. I knew there were no published Yemeni poets in Israel at the time. Our celebrated poets were all Ashkenazi. Afikim, the publishing house that had released his book, was founded in 1964 by a collective of Yemeni authors and scholars, some of them friends of my father’s, who wanted to provide a platform for Yemeni authors to showcase their work. It was their response to the hegemony, their way to carve their own space in Israel’s literary landscape.
As I immersed myself in the poetic journal of my father’s youth, it brought him down from the pedestal I’d placed him on. He became someone I could identify with, someone I could understand.
* * *
—
OVER THE YEARS, as the days of his absence grew longer than his time in my life—his memory a large, blinding, orbiting moon, and my longings for him new and reclaimed with every milestone he missed—I had reversed the promise my father made to me on his sickbed and vowed to publish a book in his honor. Along the way, I took some detours, moved across the world, stopped writing, and then started to write in another language. By the time the book I had dedicated to him was published, I was closer to the age he was when he died. I was proud of my accomplishment and imagined he would have been too, but a part of me was filled with trepidation and guilt: What would he think of my abandoning the language he loved so much? The language he breathed and dreamed in, the ink that flowed in his blood? Hebrew was the language of his poetry, the language of my childhood, with him. How would he feel about me writing in a foreign tongue whose words meant nothing to him? Would he be disappointed?
My father had built himself up from nothing, made a life for himself out of sheer determination and willpower, with no help from anyone. Shortly before his death, when he was in his early forties, he too decided to follow his passion, fulfill a fantasy that had been dormant for years, and signed up to study Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. He never made it. In hard times, as I put myself through writing school with student loans, working as a waitress and a housecleaner (although, unlike him, I had some support, from Sean), I thought of him, drew strength from his perseverance. I anxiously, senselessly wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted my dead father to recognize what it meant for me to write in English, to acknowledge that in choosing a second language, I had to commit to working harder than anyone else, to producing awful work, to coming last.
English was a place I fled to, an act of reinvention that echoed the anonymity and freedom I had felt when migrating to a new country, eliciting the same exhilarating thrill of stepping outside my comfort zone. I imagine my father must have felt something similar writing poetry in Hebrew, a language that was his native tongue, but not his mother’s tongue. A language his parents spoke poorly and his mother couldn’t read. A broken link between them, as English is—would have been—between us.
Losing him was the end and the beginning of everything, the cosmic explosion of my little universe. It was the reason I left my home, my family, and my language, and ran away from anything that threatened to tether me down, anything that could break me if it suddenly vanished, which, of course, was anything worth having. It was that loss that gave me permission to act as though I had nothing to lose and to make the mistakes he wasn’t there to witness, but also the strength to eventually turn my life around and the inspiration, writing aside, to try (and sometimes fail) to be kind and give back, to strive for goodness, which may have been my father’s true bequest, the thing that would truly make him proud.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
IN MY FAVORITE picture of us, I’m wearing his hat. He’s standing behind me in his dark glasses, hugging me, my hands crossed over his, pale against his dark skin. I don’t remember when it was taken, or who took the picture. The feeling of his hands in mine.
* * *
—
HE WROTE TO me from his hospital bed a few days before he died. The folded lines are worn, the paper crumpled and thin. With his graceful stroke, his black pen, in his lyrical style, he writes, “My love, my precious, my smart, my beautiful. I miss you and I will see you soon.”
THE ART OF STAYING
MY DAUGHTER IS LEARNING about the passing of time, about the cyclical ways of the year. She’s two and a half. Her memory doesn’t span long. The future isn’t vast and open yet. It’s that glorious stage in life where there is only the moment, a mindset we spend much of our adult lives trying to re-access.
“When can I go trick-or-treating again?” she wants to know.
We are lying on the futon in her room, facing each other, limbs and breath entwined, a sweet moment, joyous, relaxed. “First we’ll have Hanukkah and Christmas,” I say. “Then it will be winter and it will snow, then Passover, then your birthday—you’ll be three! Then summer, and we will go swimming, and then it’s going to be fall again, and Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, and then you will go trick-or-treating.”
“And then we’ll be done?” she asks, eyes round.
Done? Yeah, she’s definitely not getting it yet.
“No,” I say and repeat the whole thing again.
“And then we’ll be done?”
“No.” I laugh. “Then you’ll be five and six and seven…” I count for a while, and then stop to inhale deeply. “Until you are a hundred!”
“And then what?”
I hesitate, not quite ready for that conversation. “Then you will be a savta!” I say.
But to her, Savta is my mother’s name, not the Hebrew word for “grandmother.” Her face crumbles and she begins to cry.
“Oh no! What’s wrong?”
She sobs into me, inconsolable. “I don’t want to be someone else. I want to be me.”
I try to repair the damage, explain what I meant, soothe her until she trusts that she’s not going to lose herself and become someone else. Two and a half years in this body and already her attachment to it is so strong, her fear of losing herself so great. I think of my reluctance for years to become a mother, for fear of having to give up the life I had made for myself, for fear of losing my individuality.
I didn’t want to become someone else. I wanted to be me.
* * *
—
I AM A descendant of a bad mother. The worst kind. A mother who left. A mother—if you ask my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts—who was a selfish, horrible person. She had to be, because how else could you explain her actions? That mother was my great-grandmother Shama. Widowed twice by the time she was thirty, she deserted my grandmother and her twin sister in Yemen and moved to Israel with her third husband, never to see her twin daughters again.
I am also a descendant of good mothers. My grandmother Salha, or Esther, as she was called in Hebrew—abandoned at the tender age of two, married at twelve—carried her infant daughter, my aunt Rivka, as she walked the desert with my grandfather and his other wife for months, overcoming hunger, diseases, and adversities, all the way from their home in North Yemen to Aden. There, they boarded a boat to Port Said in Egypt, and then another one, filled with cattle, to Haifa. She raised six children in a new country while working as a maid and a laundress at the homes of the wealthy Ashkenazi to help support her family.
My mother also raised six children; the youngest was only two when my father passed away. My mother, with her eighth-grade education and no profession other than cleaning, cooking, baking, laundering, shopping, vacuuming, folding, washing, hugging, raised us on her own through grief, depression, and financial hardship.
The black-and-white family portrait I used to gaze at in my grandmother’s house in Sha’ariya now hangs in my mother’s new fifth-floor apartment. In it, my four-year-old mother is still sulking. It is a facial expression she carried into adulthood, childlike and endearing—an expression I remember from my grandmother’s face, and one I sometimes see reflected in the mirror. Lately, my daughter has been mimicking it; her lips stick out in an exaggerated pout and her forehead wrinkles. It’s an adorable gesture of discontent, honest in its rawness. “Look, Ima, I have your frown,” she says.
These days, the similarities between me, my mother, and my grandmother, which I was loath to acknowledge as a surly adolescent, are a source of comfort. That likeness tells me I belong somewhere; I am a link on the lineage chain, a branch on the family tree. After years of feeling rootless and adrift, I take solace in knowing I can trace my history, my characteristics, back to them, to that little Yemeni neighborhood in Petah Tikva, to that mountainous village in North Yemen.
Like my mother and my grandmother, I am stubborn and argumentative, take too much space, and love to be right. My mother used to be a troublemaker in school, once running between the tables to avoid being spanked by a teacher, until she reached the open window and leaped out. As a student, I was infamous for being a pest; a teacher once announced to the class that if she ever suffered a heart attack, it would be my fault. I reflect on it sometimes when I watch my daughter’s spectacular tantrums, often carried out in airport terminals, supermarket aisles, and subway platforms.
But the line ends—or begins—with a broken link. A chain that hangs loose, a tree missing a branch. Nobody alive today knew my great-grandmother, has even seen her picture. Rumor has it that my grandmother is the spitting image of her mother, as fair and as beautiful as she was, but we can’t know for sure, and my grandmother, who never forgave her mother for leaving, did not care to hear it. There must be other qualities we inherited, that survived throughout the years, through famine, wars, and migration, a gene pattern we can trace back to my great-grandmother. Maybe it’s our slight lisp, which I can detect only when I hear my voice on tape, or those childbearing hips that my mother and grandmother put to good use. The witty retorts, the hot temper, that pouting. How deeply we love our men. How deeply we love our children.
What if some traits skip a generation or two? What if my great-grandmother has something to do with my wanderlust, my itchy feet, my commitment issues? My ambivalence about motherhood and raising children? Sometimes I wonder, dreadfully, what if that great-grandmother I never knew is the woman I resemble most?
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
I FIRST IMAGINED leaving when my daughter was three days old. The midwives said that this was normal. Baby blues. Not even postpartum depression. Just ordinary, nothing-to-worry-about, hormone-induced turmoil. I was healing from a difficult birth, bleeding and sore, my breasts hurt and I was crying a lot and it felt like grief. And sometime during that third day (notorious, apparently, for its bouts of weepiness and anguish), I thought, What if I just take off? As if nothing happened? What if I could have my old life back? I glanced at Sean, who seemed to have a handle on this whole parenthood thing. He slipped into this role so easily. Early on in our relationship, during a carefree backpacking trip we now think of as our honeymoon, I had marveled as he held his hands up to a woman carrying a baby while she stepped off a boat in Malaysia. She beamed with gratitude and passed the infant to him. I watched him rocking our newborn baby. The two of them would be happy together, without me. They’d be better off.
This was three weeks before my fortieth birthday, a month after I published my first book. It took me years to find the right person, a few more to warm up to the idea of motherhood, and even then, it was with hesitation. The determining factor was that I couldn’t envision not having a family, despite trying to give in to the idea of living child-free. Sean never pushed, but he never indulged my occasional childless fantasies either; it was clear to me that he wanted a family. Once we decided to try in earnest, it took a couple more years—due to Sean’s impossible sailing schedule and my lazy thyroid—to conceive. We were thrilled and terrified.
In my first trimester and not yet showing, the fetus still a genderless secret in my belly, Sean and I were at a birthday party at a bar in Jaffa’s flea market: a table set in a curving alley, painted warm amber by the soft beam of the streetlamp. I was having an intimate conversation with a man I had gone to high school with who happened to be there. Gal was handsome and charming and successful. He was living with a girlfriend in Jaffa, not far from there. “Any kids?” I asked, and he shook his head no.
“I always knew I didn’t want kids,” he said. And I blurted, without thinking, “Yeah, I never really wanted them either.” It was mostly true, yet there was life inside my uterus, and my words felt like a betrayal. My baby might hear me, might feel unwanted. I was not yet a mother and already I had failed. Then Sean, who was chatting with our friend Omer, turned to me and said, “Omer’s wife is pregnant too!” I froze, and took longer than necessary to turn back to Gal. From his face, I knew that he had heard, that he’d reached the obvious conclusion, that my words had puzzled him. I couldn’t explain it, so I didn’t.
Three weeks before my due date, I sat with my midwife in my Toronto kitchen. “You’re not doing a reading in Guelph three days before you’re supposed to give birth,” she said.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “This is important. I just launched my first book.”
“You’ll never get the first days with your baby again,” she said. “Nothing is more important than that.”
But I hadn’t given birth yet, hadn’t met my baby. I almost resented hearing that my biggest achievement yet—an event I had dreamed of since childhood—could so easily be dismissed, outshined by this tiny creature in my belly.
I used to think love was the biggest entrapment of all, that nothing steals your freedom like a long-term, committed relationship. I was
wrong. Motherhood was the one thing in my life I couldn’t walk away from. I could not think of anything scarier.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
GROWING UP, THE story of my great-grandmother—the short version, that is—was one I heard often. My grandmother found no use or joy in storytelling, but the tale of her abandonment had shaped her life. It was the one story she never tired of relating, her hit song, her signature piece. My mother would mention it too, but mostly to boost her own image in our minds. “Can you believe it?” she would ask, incredulous. “Walking away from your two-year-old daughters? You’re lucky you have such a good mother.”
As far as I could tell, there was nothing more to the story, until a chance meeting at a restaurant in Varanasi, India, changed everything. I was twenty-two. A year earlier I had boarded a plane to India with a one-way ticket from Israel and still hadn’t returned. One evening, while dining at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the murky Ganges River, I recognized Yifat from across the room: a beautiful, petite girl with the kind of typical Yemeni appearance I had often envied (once I gave up wanting to look more Ashkenazi)—her skin darker than mine, her hair in spirally, tight curls. She was my aunt’s next-door neighbor in Sha’ariya. We had exchanged a few words in the past, played in a group of kids in the neighborhood. Politely, I crossed the room to greet her.
Over the next few weeks, Yifat and I kept running into each other, likely following the same route as other travelers. Then, in the airport in New Delhi, waiting for my flight home, I saw her again, frantically rummaging through her backpack. Her travel companion recognized me from across the terminal and beamed. He strode toward me and said, “Your cousin doesn’t have enough rupees for the departure fee. Do you have some that she can borrow?”
The Art of Leaving Page 26