At 44, a surprisingly dangerous age, I found myself drawn back to sit in front of my old childhood home, as if an invisible hand was holding me there against my will. Having just purchased my own house, I had expected to feel joyous; but instead, was consumed by a peculiar sadness, realizing I hadn't ever felt comfortable anywhere. Growing up in a troubled secular home in Long Island during the 1960's, I often received confusing messages about what it meant to be Jewish, an unsettling combination of pride and embarrassment, and very little substance.

Time passed slowly back then. I would spend hours just watching myself in the mirror, waiting for something to happen. My parents had left Brooklyn, and moved us girls there when I was only two, my brother still a dream. We stayed for what seemed like forever. My family, for the most part, had been a failed experiment. My mother and father were both children of Russian Jewish immigrants who had ruled their roosts with a heavy hand. My guess is that my own parents fled to Long Island to run from their own families, impressed, as only the young are, with their own beauty and strength. It seems their hopes were quickly extinguished. The tumult of the three of us children soon overtook them. We were a loud family; it seemed everyone was always talking over everyone else; over the drone of the dishwasher that seemed to always be running. Anxious, I would sometimes seek refuge in my room, staring into the mirror that hung beside my bed, waiting for the day to end.

My mother was always in the middle; all conversation flowed through her, there were no other alliances. She was all we each had. My father seemed to be forever working. I knew little of my grandparents, on either side, other than that my parents seemed unusually strained when we visited them, there was much I didn't understand. My paternal grandmother would hug me with a ferocity that frightened me; I didn't think she would ever let me go. My parents always warned me not to get too close to my paternal grandfather; he had been ill they said; it could be dangerous. I couldn't understand how a hug could be dangerous.

My parent's felt we had little to complain about. The schools were good, and there were beautiful places to play. We had no fear of intruders, and kept the back door unlocked in case one of us forgot our keys. Having just lived through the emotional havoc of World War II, and then McCarthy, my mother and father had little patience for what we could find wanting. After all, they reasoned, we had escaped the fate of the Jews in Europe, who had vanished into thin air. Neither of my parents was religious by nature, but this surely must have seemed to them like some sort of divine intervention, a marvelous accident of geography. And that became the leitmotif against how everything was seen. We were lucky, they told us over and over again; that was that. But, even back then, I knew it wasn't true. Lucky people never have to talk about it.

When I finally left for college at eighteen, I knew I would never go back. I had been lonely there for a very long time. There was nothing to return to anyhow, since my parents sold the house shortly after my departure, and moved to the upper West Side of Manhattan. I think they were excited about a life without children, and relieved. In their fifties, they were surprisingly resilient, and perhaps thought they had one more chance.

Like the poor beleaguered Jews I had always heard about in Europe, my childhood home disappeared overnight. It belonged to another family now, who had changed it beyond recognition. Years later, when I first drove back to see it, I didn't recognize it at first, and then I did, and I felt sad. The new owners had painted it an ungodly green and replaced our front door with one that was more ornate, almost ostentatious, and something my parents would have never considered.Over the years, my mother had tried to keep some sense of the family intact, but geography and old strains worked against us; we remained out of touch with each other for years at a time. Parked in front of my old house, I fantasized being able to go inside; I was certain my old room was still there, and I wanted to look in the mirror again, the one that hung by my bed. We were always a troubled family, ill at ease with each other.

But, maybe I'm feeling too sorry for myself. We all leave home eventually, most of us want to. The ones who can't leave eventually admit to feeling left behind. Adam Zagajewski, one of Poland's most important poets, who later fled Communist Poland for Paris and Houston, remembers his initial leave-taking:

"My parents were good to me, they took me in joyfully each time, and I was glad to see them too, but I wasn't especially sorry to go. Home was too tame, too safe. Leaving meant abandoning routine for the unknown, for quest and adventures. As I trekked through the snow, I felt almost like Amundsen setting out for the South Pole. Your heart aches when you leave-but you also anticipate the pleasure and discoveries that await you in the great, wide, world."

Zagajewski captures the bittersweet ambivalence of a young man leaving; nostalgic, but full of joyous anticipation about what awaits him. Years later, when he is forced to leave Poland as a political exile, he is excited again about venturing out in to the larger world, noting that an "exiles's lamentations should be taken with a grain of salt-unless, of course, the émigrés in question were forced out with bayonets. But as a rule we shouldn't take their mournful sighs too much to heart, since what drove them from their home was curiosity. And they are authentically sad afterward, since real, ardent curiosity can never be sated. But most of us who live in strange cities and foreign nations left home willingly, seeking the thrill of novelty. We look back heartsick with longing--for nothing is simple and unambiguous-but we also gaze yearningly toward the future, the poles, the North Star, the Southern Cross."

Zagajewski sounds eager to leave a country he had already fallen out of love with, as I suppose I was anxious to get away from my own home when I left for school; we were both exiles. Yet, it was all I knew, all I had known, and I had underestimated the comfort of just knowing. I felt no calling to go in search of wild adventures; I had never believed the world to be a place of limitless wonder. I just knew I needed to get away, but my ambitions were vague, only half-thought-out. Yet, the act of leaving took on it's own force; I was going, knowing it was for good.

But perhaps once again, I'm indulging in useless self-pity. Maybe no one can ever go home again, at least not without sadness and regret. Michael Paterniti writes about his experience:

"Since leaving home just after college, I've returned on holidays and random weekends over the years, never really staying more than a few nights, just enough time to catch up with my friends and family before caroming back into the world. Each time, I find myself searching the manicured landscape of my suburbia, as one might face the gestures and intonations of a long-lost brother for clues as to who you must be. And then, of course, the winding roads and snaking stone walls, the beaches and swimming pools, are a map of my entire youth: my greatest mistakes and my most minute victories. There's the Little League baseball field where I played catcher as a kid emulating my only hero, the great catcher, Thurman Munson, who died in a plane crash in 1979 at roughly the same age I am now. There's the graveyard of my first kiss. There are houses, inhabited today by new families living new lives, in which my best friends once lived, where we might have wiled away the hours playing wiffle ball or football. When I pass those homes, I occasionally see a man out front raking leaves or cutting the grass-tan and firm and khaki-clad-a man who could be a father from my past, smelling faintly of gin, but now is simply someone who is a different variation of me, had I stayed in this town and kept a job in Manhattan."

Like Paterniti, I too, am drawn to my old hometown, often returning for hours at a time, waiting for inspiration, but none usually comes, and I drive away diminished, somewhat embarrassed by my own hopefulness.

A few weeks later, I return again, my optimism renewed. One night, parked in front of my old house, my attention shifted to the trees, which looked exactly as I remembered them, only taller now, more full. I began to see moving pictures in my mind, colorful and vibrant, from a long time ago. Ice-cold jets of water shooting up my legs from the lawn sprinkler, giggling in delight. Trying to pull the ratty old string on my winter sled to stop it from flying into the street, my hand burning. Blood gushing from my aching knee, refusing to stop. Rock-hard snowballs shoved down my back, my sister running away. Watching my mother when she wasn't watching us, her face creased with worry. My father always leaving; finely dressed, never bothering to look back. Adam Zagajewski writes:

"I'm intrigued by all kinds of walls; the space we inhabit isn't neutral. It shapes our existence. Landscapes enter our innermost being; they leave traces not just on our retina but on the deepest strata of our personalities. Those moments when the sky's blue gray suddenly stands revealed after a downpour stay with us, as do moments of quiet snowfall. And ideas may even join forces with the snow through our senses and our body. They cling to the walls of houses. And later the houses and bodies, the senses and ideas all vanish. But I can't rewrite Krakow's history. I can only try to regain a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised."

The trees had brought me back to both the simple joys and red-faced shame of my childhood. They brought back my mother.

She was forever walking too fast, way ahead of me, and I would try my best to catch her with my words, with my stories. I wanted to believe in her, I think we all did, except for my baby brother, who decided early on she was too far out of reach. My older sister was her favorite; she never married and stayed embedded in my mother's daily woes for decades, long after my brother and I had gone. The poet Sharon Olds has written beautifully about the middle child's ability to escape the grasp of an overbearing mother; whereas the firstborn often gets stuck, but I don't remember wanting to get away. I wanted more of her, always. I guess she wanted more too. I would catch her staring out the kitchen window, her hands lost in suds, looking upward to the stars as if she were looking for spirits from a world eclipsed. Perhaps she was. Exile is mostly a condition of the mind, and cut off from her family and friends, and the noisy streets of Brooklyn, she must have felt a terrible aloneness. Sometimes she would start to sing Yiddish songs, her voice wavering, and I would cry. Although she was standing close enough to me for me to touch her, I had trouble getting her attention; lost in her own pain, she would forget to turn around.

I think the monotony of running the house, day in and day out, wore my mother down. Like other women, especially of that time, she felt forced to repeat the same chores over and over again, an endless circle of nothingness. Author Mary Gordon tells of moving in with her grandmother after her father's premature death; a stern woman whose entire world revolved around caring for the house:

"My grandmother had no interest in having a good time-that is, in doing anything that would result only in pleasure-and her house proclaimed this, as it proclaimed everything about her, her house was her body, and like her body, was honorable, daunting, reassuring, defended, castigated, harsh, embellished, dark. I can't imagine how she lived, that is to say how she didn't die of the endless labor her life entailed. Nine children. It's easy either to romanticize her or utterly push her aside."

In stark contrast, Mary Gordon's father refused to waste any time or mental energy on the house they lived in:

"My father would never have shopped for furniture. He took pride in ignoring his surroundings. To care about things like furniture would have been proof of an interior life. To shop with his bride to be would have made him feel both emasculated and declassed"

My own father had little patience for the trivialities of home living, he seemed to view it as somehow beneath him; what was important lay outside, away from us. My mother seemed to accept this early on. She had the three of us for comfort; it would have to do. We were eager listeners, hungry for her attention. My father was restless and irritable, something she never got used to; it often seemed like things might twist out of control. One night, while watching the Academy Awards, my father appeared by my door, his face gloomier than usual. He began rapidly turning the light switch on and off, faster and faster; his face distorted, the television picture a blur. I begged him to stop, but he wouldn't, continuing to flick the light switch on and off. My mother yelled, but he kept on doing it, pretending to be a movie star giving an acceptance speech, muttering, "thank you, thank you," over and over again. I remember thinking I would never be able to like him, not even in memory.

My father's behavior that night frightened me. I realize now he was probably just jealous. A born loner, he was unable to immerse himself in anyone else's world; and watching my mother and I enraptured by the Awards show must have rattled him; he worked himself into an unstoppable frenzy.

On better days my father was often a gifted storyteller. He could pull you in with his voice alone, which would rise and fall at precise moments, making what he was saying sound more interesting than it probably was. For the most part, he didn't respect the attention of children, reserving most of his charm for business; he was an ace salesman.

His silence about his past always made me suspicious. Later on, I was able to put together a few bits and pieces; it sounded dismal. My father was the fourth of five children, of a mother who pitted one sibling against the next, and had little praise or affection for any of them. His father was timid and frail; overwhelmed by the maneuverings of his wife, and a country that didn't seem to live up to it's promise. My father hated the aura of victimhood that surrounded his family, and fled early, believing if he moved fast enough, he might be able to outrun them.

But no one can run away from their own family, not for long. The mirror doesn't allow it. Each day, he would rise to look at the ugly lines gathering around his throat, and watch his hair thinning and turning prematurely gray, just as his father's had. By the time he was fifty, he was tired, tired of running. I think he was looking for somewhere to return to, but he didn't know where to go. He had never belonged to any family, his parents or my own. It was around then that he decided to spend a few weeks in Israel, drawn there for reasons he probably couldn't articulate. This was unusual for him, he never vacationed; it would mean leaving his business untended, which frightened him. He had always told me dramatic stories about Israel. It seemed to excite him in a way few other things did; how so much could come of so little. Like most Jews, I suppose, it gave him hope. When I was a little kid, he would show me pictures of young handsome Israeli soldiers, guns casually slung over their shoulders, and mutter to himself, "Imagine that, a Jewish kid with a gun," looking proud and embarrassed at the same time.

When he returned from Israel, he said little. He showed me some pictures of my mother and himself, standing in front of the usual tourist sites, his face somber, and my mother faintly smiling. Like so many Jews, he had little sense of his own history, and he felt lost there, it simply wasn't home. The streets were too narrow, the language harsh, and many of the small towns seemed dirty; small farm animals roaming the streets right near the concession stands where they would buy fruit. He yearned for the familiarity of New York. It seemed he was from elsewhere, and elsewhere before that.

During the early 1960's, the young Andre Aciman and his parents were among the few remaining Jewish families in Alexandria, Egypt, before being forced to flee the growing anti-Semitism of Nasser's regime. The Aciman family had been receiving threatening anonymous letters, and the police were frequently coming by to inspect their home; they knew they were no longer safe. Decades later, Aciman tries to make sense of that time, and all he lost, and how it ultimately came to define him:

"Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss. In fact, the act of recording the loss is the ultimate homecoming, inasmuch as the act of recording one's inability to find one's home on going back to it becomes a homecoming as well. Reading about this paradox is a homecoming. Musing and trying to sort out this paradox is a homecoming. In Proust, even showing how everything is always in the wrong place whenever we go looking for it in the right place is ultimately a way of finding the right thing for the wrong reasons in the right place at the wrong time-which-all told, is very much a homecoming as well."

Like my father, it seems Aciman was also from elsewhere, and elsewhere before that. Both men had no address, other than their own uneasiness.

Older now, I'm angrier than I used to be; believing what belongs to me has been stolen, and I want what's mine returned. Wherever I am, another part of me is trying to bring to life something my parent's couldn't. It's as if my soul has been splintered, but like an autistic, I can't find the language to express my own wants. Lillian Rubin writes about losing language, the language of her birth:

"But giving up the language that greeted me at birth, that framed my world from infancy through early childhood, wasn't quite as simple as I had imagined. I don't just mean that it was hard to learn English, that was true, but far easier than the psychological feat necessary to abandon my mother tongue since, in the shift from Yiddish to English, the world, for a time, lost much of it's color and meaning. For a language is more than its words and syntax; it's a way of thinking about the world, of meeting it, of being in it. When we learn a language, we absorb its aura-it's rhythms, it's color, it's emotion, it's lightness and darkness, and it's subtleties of expression and meaning. To give it up means relinquishing a part of ourselves, the part that experienced the world through that language."

My mother had always boasted that she spoke Yiddish fluently, but she only spoke it to my father; it was their secret language. Yet, every now and then, she would tell me Yiddish tales in English, the same stories her mother had told her. She would say the line in English first, then in Yiddish, so I could hear the distinction. Her voice trembled when she spoke in Yiddish, it was her mother's language, and her own. By the time I reached my teenage years, the stories stopped. I guess I grew tired of them. Only one remains with me. It was about a boy, unjustly waiting in a prison cell, knowing he is to be hung the next morning. His mother visits him and begs him not to give up hope, promising to find a way to save him. She tells him that even as the rope is pulled around his neck, he is not to despair, but think of her and remember her pledge; she will rescue him. My mother would always burst into tears at the last line of the tale, saying it in Yiddish first, then somberly in English, "And he died with a smile on his face." My mother loved this story; she was touched by the child's faith in his mother's ability to help him. He had never given up hope, but I had. I knew early on she couldn't save me. My family never felt safe, ever.

When I left, I sought refuge everywhere, in whom I married, in what I did, even in how I drove. I disliked risks of any kind. In reading I found an unexpected exhilaration; books were safe and dangerous at the same time, and I read and read and read. I began to write my own stories and review other people's books, content to disappear into other lives. Mary Gordon recalls discovering reading as a young girl:

"The world of ideas was mine. I belonged there; I could inhabit any region of it. My body, both overexcited and repressed from all that reading, would insist on movement. I would run down the hill toward Riverside Drive and let the wind bite into me, hear the buzz of cars and watch the lights come on across the river."

But the books all ended, and my initial excitement in many of them would often give way to disappointment. I found myself thinking more about my own family, remembering how often my parents were fighting off some kind of darkness. Now that darkness was my own.

Jonathan Rosen talks about the strange combination of optimism and pessimism that permeated his childhood home. His mother's family had come here early enough to escape the brunt of the Nazi terror. His father's parents were murdered by the Nazis in the forests outside Poland, leaving his father an orphan at fourteen. Rosen struggles to understand how his mother was spared the intense pain his father must endure:

"But perhaps reconciliation isn't necessary. Why can't the two live together in my mind-if not integrated, then at least, in the manner of the Talmud, side by side, a point and a counterpoint? Why should they, any more than the body and the soul, be separated?"

Rosen bore witness to his father's ongoing battle with sorrow that sometimes threatened to overtake him; he had lost so much so young. Yet, their household was not morbid, but filled with lively conversation. His mother a writer, his father a professor of comparative literature, they urged him to ask them questions, and read, and write, and find his own answers. They had great hopes for his future. He became the repository of both their lives, the next link in the chain. I have no knowledge of my past; I can't connect myself to anything beyond my parents, my community ended with them. It isn't enough.

My mother and father both relinquished much of their heritage; yet I think they each did so for very different reasons. For my mother, I think she began to connect Judaism with the sternness of her mother, who kept a meticulous kosher home, and labored tirelessly to keep the five of them from surrendering to the poverty that was all around them; the Depression had struck, there was fear everywhere. Feisty back then, I think my mother disliked the somberness of the synagogue; particularly the men there, who seemed grossly pompous, and were always frowning. As for God, she felt his presence, but not in temple. She believed he lived on the moon, and when she looked to the sky each night, she saw him smiling. When her father died of a heart attack at 49, she was almost 20, and soon married and left with my father. I don't think she saw God again after that, not even in her children's faces.

I think my father related Judaism to being born on the wrong team, one that just keeps on losing; sort of like an unlucky break. A born pragmatist, he didn't want to be defeated by anyone; he just didn't see the point. He seemed to always be trying to stay a step ahead of the train he imagined to be coming at him. I think he saw the synagogue as a place where men went when they were broken; like his father, who couldn't seem to figure out a way to make ends meet. My father wanted no part of that. He wanted to take America on, and relished the idea of simply walking into a new life. As for God, I don't think he thought about it much.

As for myself, I feel old and tired. Like my father, I sometimes feel too, that perhaps I have been born on the wrong squad, and like my mother, I find the somber faces of the men in synagogue disturbing. As for God, I never saw him in the moon, or the stars, or anyplace else, and at the darkest hour of my life, fighting for my own survival in a hospital bed, I was unable to pray, but could only rant and rave in anger. I dislike rituals of any kind, and refuse even the appearance of conformity. Yet, when I take long walks, I feel drawn to the trees, much as I did as a kid, and still love watching the leaves blow, sometimes without warning. Alone, I'm forced to admit to myself that I have missed much; I feel incomplete. I regret that I never knew my grandparents well, and know so little about them. All four of them were fluent in Yiddish, a language as foreign to me as Sanskrit, and I mourn that loss, and the richness it might have provided. Although I've read much on the Holocaust, I know little of the story of the Jewish people before that, and find myself wanting to remember what both my parents needed to forget. Middle-age forces us to begin to make an accounting of who we are, who we were, who we still want to be; and I worry that I have little to pass on to my own little boy; other than regret. So maybe that's why now, without even always remembering how I got there, I find myself frequently parked in front of my old house. Waiting. Waiting for somebody to come home.

References:

Aciman, Andre. False Papers Essays on Exile and Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000.

Gordon, Mary. Seeing through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. New York: Scribner, 2000.

Paterniti, Michael. Driving Mr. Albert: A trip across America with Einstein. New York: The Dial Press, 2000.

Rosen, Jonathan. The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000.

Rubin, Lillian B. Tangled Lives: Daughters, Mothers and the Crucible of Aging. New York: Beacon Press, 2000.Zagajewski, Adam. Another Beauty. Translated by Clare Cavanagh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

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