Questioning Return. Beth Kissileff

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      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 market 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.”

      Would anyone take her in this СКАЧАТЬ