Where and What and When is Home?

I am originally from the suburbs of Chicago, and that place will always remain beloved and, fundamentally, home to me. But as my disabilities have become more complex, the logistics of reaching and staying in my childhood home have become less reasonable, safe, or viable. I see my family now most often on neutral ground – places that are fun to visit but are not home. These days, Brooklyn is home.

For me, as a Stoic who has also lived in Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas, and France, I am fine with this arrangement. But as a historian, I am also acutely aware of the powerfully human and emotional significance of home.

When a person makes a choice to transfer locations for a job, that privilege often accords them the label of ‘expat.’ If they are working over a laptop in a different country for six months, they are a ‘digital nomad.’ There are ‘golden visas’ for sale from certain countries today if you have the capital and anxiety to procure one. 

But history makes it very clear that when permanence and a lack of choice is involved for immigrants, refugees, and survivors, there is a lot of nuance around the concept of home, and thoughtfulness about that nuance is critical.

We have seen it when Native Americans were forcibly marched off of the homelands where they had lived for countless generations to make way for white settlers and removed to small, near-barren reservations, their languages and cultures banned as their children were put in boarding schools and they succumbed to disease that decimated their populations.

We have seen it in Ireland with the Great Famine, both hunger and coordinated colonial persecution, leading to mass death and mass emigration whose effects can be felt around the world to this day. We have seen it in Palestine, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Mexico, in Southeast Asia.

And, to be certain, we have seen it in the deliberate destruction of European Jewry, first with labeling and asset seizure and expulsions, and then with the Shoah’s viciously efficient machinery of murder.

These histories are not interchangeable, and historians do real damage when we pretend otherwise. Each of these iterations of trauma, pain, and desperation all have their own causes, perpetrators, losses, legal questions, and moral inheritances. But they do have one painful thing in common: when people are forced from home, home does not become a soft idea. It becomes sharper. It becomes memory, land, language, law, grief, religion, food, family, documents, graves, keys, names, and the stubborn human refusal to be told that what was taken no longer matters.

Where people undergo violence, disease, and other circumstances that leave them no other choice but to leave home, home feels most strikingly like home. Where people attempt to return home and are met with villages and cities that no longer know them, sold or forgotten heirlooms and belongings, renamed and reallocated businesses, different languages and faiths, hostility, and even violence… then home can very stubbornly feel like home.

This is why the preservation and restoration of indigenous lands, languages, cultures, religions, and faith traditions around the world, and not just in movies or books, is so important. It’s why museums and governments must return looted cultural and personal artifacts of all sorts when provenance is proven, without undue defensiveness. It’s why taking accountability for past genocidal actions and atrocities, even when no survivors remain, is essential. It’s why policies and ideas like right to return and especially Aliyah, and with the global establishment of rich and welcomed diaspora communities is so crucial.

It’s because home isn’t always the same forever, and you can’t always go back to the home you left, but everyone deserves a home, a good home, a fitting home. 

A homeland.