Questioning Return. Beth Kissileff
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Название: Questioning Return

Автор: Beth Kissileff

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Политические детективы

Серия:

isbn: 9781942134244

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ