Channels
Photo: AP
Packing and checking
Photo: AP

Coming home

10 years abroad is a long time – too long. Still, it isn't easy packing up and starting again

A few weeks before I and my family return to Israel after ten years in Canada, we are in the throes of packing and checking – what do we have to do about health insurance and national insurance? What about import duty, education, and finding a new place to live?

 

We are closing our lives here, gathering up the things we'll need in Israel, and I my anticipation and my worries are keeping me awake just about every night.

 

Gripped by fear

 

But the panic that struck me today was different. Today, I was overtaken by fear, a debilitating panic so powerful I couldn't even concentrate on the things I was supposed to be putting in the cardboard boxes all around me. As I watched my children playing happily in the garden, by heart suddenly started racing, and for the first time in months I asked myself, "What the hell am I doing?"

 

And my standard answer – "I'm going home" – didn't work this time. Neither did my laconic answers, the ones constantly on the tip of my tongue like a mantra and come out almost automatically. "Because my children think Canada's their home. I want their only 'home' to be in Israel."

 

Or: "Because if I don't do it now, I never will." Or: "I've got to give Israel an honest chance. We've never lived there as a family, and Israel is supposed to be heaven for families." Or a host of other answers.

 

I don’t have a lot of family left in Israel. Two sisters and their families, some uncles and cousins we see at family celebrations, and that's about it. The "glue" we all know so well is no more.

 

Even my return will not give me back the years lost, the time I wasn't by their sides. It also won't atone for feelings of regret and guilt.

 

Maybe it will be easier to mourn, and to connect to the loss. When you are far away, even the death of a parent can be considered so distant as to be unreal. When you are far away, it's amazing just how easy it is "to continue."

 

My Israel

 

I'm coming home to my beloved country, a land I love so much it hurts. My Israel makes my laugh and cry, it warms my heart and freezes me with shock and horror. My Israel gave me a stubborn root. Even if it were to be removed, nothing could replace the hole that would be left.

 

Israel is a mother, a daughter, a wise old man who has seen it all, and who sometimes dresses up in clothes that don't belong to it, adopts foreign customs that add nothing positive to the country or culture. No other country inspires its people to the same levels of anger and love, of loathing and admiration, happiness and sadness like Israel.

 

Israel's got everything, and yet the country is poor and shabby, and for some reason I am afraid that I and my children are going to live there.

 

Building tomorrow

 

Naomi Shemer wrote about a better, nicer "tomorrow." For the past year, I have been living inside songs such as "I have no other country" and "Songs from the land I love." Is the reality of my Israel to be found in these lines, or is the reality to be found in the prophecies I encounter day after day, year after year, when I sit down at my computer?

 

I want to come home so I can play a part in perfecting our society and creating that better "tomorrow" for my Israel. Over the past 10 years I have done this in a foreign country. Today, I have great dreams and faith in the power of my ability to do it all again.

 

The fear that has overtaken me came from a conversation I had with a dispirited Israel who somehow found his way to Vancouver. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands like him around the world.

 

Kosher émigrés

 

I never closed my ears to all those "dispirited Israelis". We were Israelis who went abroad for "kosher" reasons – teaching, aliyah representatives, etc. These claims allowed me to survive for several years happily and with no pangs of a guilty conscious.

 

But the years go by too quickly. Our visions of serving the country abroad dimmed as we moved on to other positions. Eventually, the years catch up with you and you begin to feel uncomfortable.

 

The Israeli I met today caused me to feel radically uncomfortable. He ran away, he harbored a deep hatred. He had been broken by life in my Israel. When I told him my entire house was for sale, that I'd just packed up my 40th box, he looked at me like I was a fool. Not crazy, not innocent.

 

My beloved awaits

 

So I packed up my kids toys and bid farewell to my distressed friend. When I heard them babbling about the squirrel running up the tree and about the fact it was cold already, I was filled with fear, so much so that I couldn't think about anything else.

 

I went in the house, stared at 40 packed boxes in the corner and a lot more to go. There are Israeli passports to renew, a huge health insurance debt to repay, and a million other things to do.

 

10 years, a fool's happiness, a little girl killed by a shell in Gaza, another Pesach abroad, a child who calls me "Mommy." And my Israel, by beloved, awaits.

 

Iris Maimon-Toledano is the coordinator of the Vancouver Jewish Federation's fight against poverty

 


פרסום ראשון: 06.20.06, 07:46
 new comment
Warning:
This will delete your current comment