Home and Homelesness

"It’s because you’re finally feeling at home." Variations on this remark have been made by friends and relatives seeking to explain why my blogging has dwindled somewhat in recent months. Perhaps they’re right. The longer you spend in one place, the more its quirks and idiosyncrasies appear less, well, quirky and idiosyncratic. But “feeling at home” isn’t something to be taken lightly. Acclimation is not the same as assimilation. I have been in Israel for nearly a year now, and while I love my life here, anxiety over the question of “home” abides.

Yesterday I read a short yet powerful essay by Edward Said, entitled “Mind of Winter” (Harper's, Sept. 1987). I must admit, since my days as a Comparative Literature major on an often frustratingly politically correct, hyper-liberal Northern California college campus, I’ve shied away from reading Said because of his politics (and the politics in service of which his theory is often deployed). Plus, invoking reflections on exile by a self-proclaimed disenfranchised Palestinian seems ironic coming from a North American Jewish girl living in Israel, but, if you’ll excuse the pun, his words hit close to home.

Let’s be clear. This is no sob story. I am the farthest thing from a refugee, and I’ve hardly earned the requisite political or historical stripes to deserve the tragic-turned-glamorous title of “exile.” But living abroad this past year, living in another language and another climate (both social and environmental), has made me think more carefully about what home means, and more specifically, what home means to me.

I still bristle when people ask me when I "made aliyah," or, conversely, when I plan to “return to Canada” (which I left at the age of eighteen), or to Chicago (to which I have no plans to return). “Where’s home?” others have asked. I generally shrug, smile, and say something like, “for now I’m happy here.”

But do I really need an answer? That is, do I need one answer?

Said suggests that being homeless translates into the ability to be at home everywhere. Exile is as productive as it is painful. It both enervates and empowers. More importantly, exile carries with it moral promise, the capacity to cross borders to a broader worldview. It is not merely a privileged site for individual self-reflection but an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life. For instance, exile may be understood as the opposite of nationalism. Nationalism, the assertion of belonging to a specific place, people, heritage, even destiny, “fends off the ravages of exile.” It is the antidote to estrangement, a kind of being in the plural. Exile, by contrast, is being in the singular. It means loneliness. But also independence.

Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century Saxon monk, expressed the blessing and curse of exile with these hauntingly beautiful words:

“The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

The ability to see “the entire worlds as a foreign land” is the ability to see everything in a fresh light. Daily habits, expressions and activities in the new environment always take place against the memory of these same things in another environment. New and old are vivid, actual. I have experienced this time and again here in Israel. The most banal events -- taking the bus, filling a prescription, buying cheese (all cataloged in this blog..."catabloged"?) -- suddenly become more interesting… at times hilarious. The way "we" do things “at home” is no longer taken for granted. Said suggests, “There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension…. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be."

Of course, as much as this experience makes us stronger, it is also unsettling. Hugo of St. Victor suggests that “perfection” is a heavy cross to bear. In the end, exile is the opposite of being satisfied, placid, secure. On the one hand, by crossing borders into unfamiliar territory one begins to be at home everywhere. On the other hand, one will never be at home anywhere. When I’m here, I labeled Canadian (or American)…yet growing up in Canada I always felt that part of me was in Israel, where my relatives lived. Here in Israel, I find myself longing for the politeness and order of North America. When I’m there, I miss the directness and the warmth of Israel. A question mark looms over the word "home."

I agree with Said that this sense of simultaneous comfort and discomfort – home and homelessness – carries a moral imperative. Seeing the world as foreign involves the capacity to critique each and every space we inhabit. Theodor Adorno summed up this idea up with a lovely paradox: "It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home."

I suppose this anxiety of home and homelessness is what drives my interest in Jewish literature, the quintessential literature of exile. After reading Said’s article, a poem came to mind by the wild child of Yiddish poetry, Peretz Markish:

I don’t know, if I’m at home

Or I’m away —

I’m running!...

My shirt is undone,

No bridle restrains me,

I’m nobody’s, I’m stray,

Without a beginning, without an end…

My body is foam,

It smells of wind;

My name is: “now”…

I throw up my arms,

They reach the world from end to end,

I leave my eyes alone,

They drink the world from bottom up!

With eyes open, with shirt undone,

With arms extended, —

I don’t know, if I have a home

Or have an away,

If I’m a beginning, or an end…