Relocation, not Exile

As many of you already know, I've left -- temporarily -- New York and my couch there for the warmer and sunnier shores of another not-quite-capital city, Tel Aviv. I will be here for the next three months and am hoping that the local couch would make me much more productive -- as both a blogster and a dissertator (I brought a suitcase full of books and research materials with me and, to my great relief, the airline did not lose it).

In the last few days in New York, I had some serious pre-travel jitters. I hadn’t traveled outside of the US for almost ten years (I’m not counting my two trips to Canada: despite border control, different currency, and their funny dialect, it did not feel too much like “abroad”). Somehow, in New York I feel pretty cosmopolitan, but as soon as I booked my flight, I began feeling like an uncouth hick going to a metropolis whose language I didn’t speak and whose customs I didn’t understand. On the other hand, for three-quarters of my flight here I felt guilty and imperialistic for speaking English to my German flight attendants. But then I remembered that I am not an American and English is not my first language and therefore the “parochial Yankee” stereotype does not apply to me. But then, when entering Israel, I was reminded that some might see me as a “ubiquitous Russian” – I heard a muted sigh of disappointment from the passport-control officer when she, after having interrogated me in Russian (!), found no excuse not to let me in. This was one of those days when I really resented notions of nations, states, citizenship, silly ideas of self-determination and longed for the worldwide spoken Esperanto.

This feeling mostly passed as I recovered from sleep deprivation. I also realized that between my Russian, English, and rudimentary Hebrew (for now I can only recognize “tuna” in “טונה” and “chips” in “צ'יפס” and say – timidly – “thank you,” “excuse me,” and “please”) I’ll be okay, if still a foreigner. After all, I am almost like the natives – I am a Jew – albeit a lot paler. And this is the thing that astonishes me the most: almost everyone I encounter (three out of four people, I am told, and probably even more here in Tel Aviv) is Jewish. After a lifetime of knowing you belong to a minority – and often a despised or feared one – it is really hard to wrap your head around the fact that it can be otherwise. I wonder whether Sabras – native-born Israelis – truly comprehend the uniqueness of their situation and, also, whether any minority person rejoining her people from the diaspora will be in the same awe I am.

And speaking of group solidarity: Today is the Holocaust Remembrance Day here in Israel. I went outside just before 10 AM to see and participate in one of the public commemorations of the day. Exactly at 10, sirens went on around the entire country and everyone and everything stopped. Traffic halted, drivers got out of their cars, people got up from their café tables or froze on the sidewalks. For two minutes, there was no sound or movement. It was dead silent, except for the sirens, eerie, and very moving – even for me, usually skeptical of collective action.

And here are a few more, more mundane, observations:

1. Cheese, bread, and produce taste WAY better than in the US.
2. Tap water, comparing to New York, sucks. Some say it has a foul taste. I won’t go this far, but it does have some funky, not in a good way, flavor.
3. That is probably why Israelis drink so much bottled water and every so often on the streets you see these cagey looking depositories for bottle recycling. Otherwise, recycling is nonexistent; everything else – cans, paper, glass bottles – goes into trash. When CAG jokingly suggested that it all must be going to the Negev (a desert in the south probably half the size of the entire country), our friends without a smile confirmed it.
4. Falafel sandwiches are stuffed with pickles, sauerkraut, and French fries.
5. There is no skim milk and ultra-light cigarettes here. Apparently, living healthy stops at 1% and “blue label,” respectively.

It’s been only a week since I arrived and I clearly haven’t done much but sleep, eat, and drink. I am still waiting for my sociological instincts to come back completely, but hopefully it won’t be too long.