The Country I Left Still Thinks It Knows Me

I have travelled from a war-stricken country to an allegedly crime-ridden one via Addis Ababa, which, depending on how melodramatically one wishes to phrase it, means I crossed deepest, darkest Africa with hand luggage and a nervous system already trained to expect catastrophe. By the time I landed in South Africa, I was so permanently on high alert that a car backfiring could probably have caused me to draft a will.

South Africans, naturally, have done little to soothe me. They welcome you home with a kiss, a hug and a detailed breakdown of where not to drive after dark, which shopping centre has “gone downhill”, who was hijacked at a robot and why you must never, under any circumstances, leave a handbag visible in a car. Israel has sirens. South Africa has cautionary tales delivered before coffee. Both countries are extremely committed to keeping your adrenal glands employed.

The first genuine threat I encountered, however, was entirely self-inflicted. I went to my brother’s remarkable gig on Friday night and discovered a drink involving coffee-flavored tequila and Melktert liqueur. This was a catastrophic development because it tasted less like alcohol than pudding with criminal intent. I drank several because apparently one can spend years becoming wiser only to be outmanoeuvred by something served in a shot glass.

Saturday morning was educational. It has been many years since I woke up with the previous evening sitting heavily on my skull, and I had forgotten the ancient ritual of opening one eye and immediately negotiating with G-D. I remembered why I had put the brakes on that particular form of entertainment. I also remembered, with irritating clarity, that the drink was bloody delicious.

South Africa itself is having much the same effect on me: familiar, seductive and probably not entirely to be trusted.

Everywhere I go, music from the late eighties and early nineties is playing, which feels frankly targeted. One minute I am buying something mundane, the next I am twenty again, stupid with love and convinced that one particular man represented forever. In the fantasy edit, naturally, we were destined. We did not cheat, betray, manipulate, humiliate, gossip, punish, wound or generally behave like two young idiots with enormous feelings and the emotional sophistication of wet matches.

Memory is a shameless little fraud. It keeps the soundtrack, softens the lighting and throws out the evidence.

That may be the real problem with returning to your birth country. It does not just remember where you lived. It remembers versions of you that you have spent decades revising. South Africa keeps handing me old identities and waiting to see whether I still answer to them: daughter, sister, difficult, funny, too much, not enough, the one who left, the one who comes back, the one who is apparently still expected to fit a picture framed years ago.

Meanwhile, the country I chose is preparing to vote without me.

Israel goes to the polls on 27 October. Like most Israelis abroad, I cannot vote from overseas. Israel does not have general absentee voting: unless you fall into the limited categories of Israelis officially serving abroad and entitled to vote at diplomatic missions, you must be in Israel to cast your ballot. I will be in South Africa, watching from a distance as decisions are made about the country I now call home.

There is something almost perversely neat about that.

I am physically back in the country that made me, while politically absent from the country I chose. South Africa is busy reminding me who I was, while Israel is deciding what it will become, and I cannot put a slip of paper in a ballot box to have even the tiniest say in it.

For someone who has opinions recreationally, this is intolerable.

It also sharpens the question sitting underneath this entire trip: where, exactly, do I belong now?

This week I sat down with my mother and her partner to thrash out some historical misunderstandings, a genteel way of saying we invited several decades of family history to sit at the table and defend themselves. We remembered some events differently. We interpreted motives differently. We disagreed on tone, cause, effect, chronology and probably weather conditions. Family history is marvelous that way. Everyone carries the same explosion and insists theirs is the official report.

What became painfully clear is that love and acceptance are not always the same thing. I know I am loved. I am less certain that I always feel liked, understood or particularly easy to tolerate. Sometimes affection feels unconditional; other times I can practically hear the fine print rustling.

That is not entirely everybody else’s problem. Lately, I have become hypercritical to an impressive degree, even for me. I can find fault before breakfast. I can dissect a tone of voice like a forensic pathologist. I can enter a perfectly pleasant room and spot six things wrong with it before I even take out my handbag. Nobody requested this upgrade, and it does not look good by any stretch of the imagination.

There is a difficult difference between refusing to shrink yourself for other people and using “this is who I am” as diplomatic immunity. I am still working out where one ends and the other begins.

My brother and sister-in-law have not helped, because they seem disgustingly happy together. They genuinely like each other. Not just love each other in the solemn contractual sense. They laugh together, touch each other, tease each other, look for each other across a room and seem absurdly pleased that they ended up with the person they did.

It is almost ewww, frankly, although also deeply moving. A long marriage is supposed to involve asking where the charger is, who finished the milk and whether the geyser has been switched off. These two act like they still fancy each other, which feels suspiciously excessive.

Watching them makes me think about the difference between being chosen and being endured, between being known and being managed, between somebody loving you because of who you are and loving you despite a mental list of amendments they would still like to make.

And then there is the suitcase.

When I made Aliyah, I left one suitcase behind. Five years later, it is finally coming home with me, carrying the silver candlesticks my father and bonus mom gave me for my twenty-first birthday, my original Doc Martens and other archaeological evidence that I existed before I became the person I am now.

The candlesticks and the Docs delight me most. Sacred silver beside battered boots. Shabbat and stomping. Holiness and attitude. Apparently I have always contained multitudes, although at twenty-one I probably just called it getting dressed.

The suitcase has become a ridiculous symbol, which annoys me because I generally distrust objects that act like metaphors. Still, there it is: the bag I left behind when I began a new life is finally following me into it.

I am not going back to who I was, and I am not apologizing for becoming someone else either. The older I get, the less interested I am in choosing between the versions of myself that other people prefer. Some were real. Some were projections. Some were survival strategies. Some were simply twenty-one and wearing Doc Martens.

So I will take the suitcase home. I will pack the silver candlesticks beside the boots and carry both without demanding that they explain each other. I still love some memories, no longer need some arguments, understand some people differently now and am less inclined to defend or condemn parts of myself.

Perhaps that is enough. Not closure, that suspicious little word people use when they want life to behave like a filing cabinet. Just a slightly clearer sense of what is mine, what belongs to someone else’s version of me and what I no longer feel obliged to carry.

The irony is that while I am here deciding what South Africa still means to me, Israel will be deciding something rather more consequential without my vote.

The suitcase is coming home with me.

Apparently, so am I.