The Lilith Blog

February 9, 2010 by Maya Bernstein

If I Only Had a Luge

The winter Olympics are approaching. Hooray! Something to watch on TV besides reality shows. I’m a product of the TV of the 80s. Fraggle Rock, Growing Pains, and MacGyver. Now, that’s TV. And the Olympics were always occasion for a good hot cup of cocoa, and wide-eyed dreams. Who knows, my eager ten year old self would think, unaware that even then I was too old and past my prime, that could be me one day.

In his interview with Deborah Solomon in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Vancouver-based author Douglas Coupland, speculates about his path in life. He says: “My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, ‘Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.’ And your parents are like: ‘O.K., I’ll quit my job. We’ll move to an Alpine community.’” And he concludes: “I could have been an Olympian if only my parents had bought me a luge.”

Ah. I should have known. Of course it’s our parents’ fault! Well, once we’re on the subject, if only my parents had nurtured my innate desires and abilities, I would definitely have been an Olympic swimmer. Or an actress. Or, perhaps, a concert pianist. Though yes, they bought me a piano, gave me swim lessons, and attended my school plays, they did not, negligent folk that they are, uproot our family and move to Vail. So as not to appear ungrateful, to their credit, I will concede that they did buy me a Golden Retriever, and, now, as a mother living in close quarters with messy kids, there is no way in the world I would ever consider living with a dog.

How much responsibility do parents have, especially in today’s highly specialized and competitive world, to notice and nudge their children towards a specific path in life? How do you nurture the innate talents of each child? Can you do that while attempting to also convey a system of shared values? And while providing them with the space and freedom to have a healthy childhood?

My husband, his brothers, and their wives (including me) are all in Jewish education. My mother, her sister, and her brother, her brother-in-law, her niece, nephew-in-law, daughter, son-in-law, and his mother, are all doctors. Is this good or bad? Or neutral? What does it mean? Maybe it is good to help carve your children’s career paths. Too much choice is overwhelming, and can leave you stranded, frozen, unable to choose. But how do we know if we are nurturing innate passions, or less-than-gently pushing our kids towards our own desires? And this begs the broader question: how much can parents be blamed, or credited, for the choices of their children?

Questions to ponder while watching young, lithe creatures, who have dedicated their childhoods to achieving one specific dream, fly through the air. Whose parents bought them a luge.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

January 27, 2010 by Maya Bernstein

Fertile Chaos

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I became prey to the endless array of children’s gear, clothing, and toys marketed to parents as if they would be negligent if they did not purchase it. One evening, while watching Saturday Night Live and realizing that the commercials, marketed at young parents like myself who were too tired to go out on a Saturday night, and too lazy to find a babysitter, were for Barbie Dolls and Transformers (has nothing changed???) , I took a stance, and made a definitive decision that I would never let “kids’ stuff” take over my house. Kids don’t need much, I told the magazines as I flipped through them, trying hard not to fold down the corners of pages with cute stuff I liked.

Another kid, ten dolls, a hundred books, and a billion Lego pieces later, I am often unable to find the living room carpet because of all the toys. Some were gifts, some were bought in moments of weakness at the toy store across the street on rainy days, and many were hand-me-downs, but, there’s no two ways about it; our house is bursting with kids’ stuff. And worse – it is bursting with stuff that refuses to be contained or maintained in any semblance of order.

So it is with little choice that I wage constant war. I am the general of a one-woman army fighting against a tireless team that wickedly employs the best of guerilla warfare. They’re good. They go after the tiny stuff. The Thumbelina-sized pieces of the Russian dolls. The little orange spoons from the tea-set. The littlest boot from the wooden doll’s dress-up doll. And their hiding spots are inspired. In the bowels beneath beds and cribs, inside the deep crevices between the pillows of the couch, in minuscule bags placed inside larger bags placed within boxes wrapped in blankets. How they test me!

After bed-time, I transform. If only I knew how to sew, I’d make myself a costume. Just call me “Super-Finder.” Or “Stuff-Buster.” Anyway, my days end under couches and tables, ear to the floor, on the war-path, obsessed with finding each toy and placing it in its proper location. I go through boxes and bags of toys, looking for missing pieces from other sets. Each night, I attempt to impose order, and each morning, they’re back at it, seemingly innocent, strewing chaos in their wake.

Is this the nature of mother and children? For them to be pushing, constantly, against whatever boundaries we have erected to define our lives? For them to endlessly challenge the structures we have imposed, until, one evening, in the midst of the chaos, exhausted, we lay ourselves down, and begin to question those very boundaries and structures? What would happen if, one evening, and perhaps the following, I left the mess? If I allowed chaos to sink its claws deeper into my skin? If I relinquished some control, and then some more, handing it over to them, so that, one day, I would have no choice but to say – it is beyond me, I cannot find it, I cannot reach it, and you must search for it yourself?

Children have a way of spreading into our corners, hiding little pieces in our deepest places. And when, on those weary evenings, we search ourselves, we often find that which we didn’t know belonged, and, in the process of striving to maintain our inner home, our very rooms expand.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

January 7, 2010 by Maya Bernstein

Up in the Air (With Children)

I used to love to fly. I would request a window seat and forget that I was in a tiny claustrophobic cabin and lose myself to the clouds, to the perspective of being in a liminal space, above life on land, and closer to the vast expanse beyond. I always travelled light; my carry-on contained a good novel, a pen, and a notebook. Airplanes represented the wide world of possibility, new languages, new vistas, the possibility of meeting kindred spirits, and adventure.

Well, that’s changed. My carry-on now contains: ten diapers, thirty wipes, two half-empty tubes of diaper cream, one thermometer, Infant’s Tylenol, Children’s Tylenol, seven hundred (broken) crayons, three hundred markers (out of which three have ink), five coloring books, three sticker books, four pacifiers, two extra pairs of socks, pants, shirts, onesies, and tights, one stuffed elephant, one stuffed dog, five squishy bath toys (don’t ask), two board books, hand sanitizer, five extra clips, four sandwiches, two plastic bags full of noodles, three cheese sticks, carrot sticks and celery sticks, apple slices, fruit leather, crumbled crackers, pretzel sticks, one sippy-cup, and two juice boxes. Though we often order a window seat, if I am lucky enough to convince my four-year-old to let me sit in it, the little one spends the entire flight on my lap pulling the window shade up, and down, up, and down, up, and down, up, and down, so that I have no choice but to vacate said seat and let my four-year-old sit there.

The hardest part is getting the little one to sleep, since one of her greatest joys in life, to quote Amy Ozols: “is wakefulness—and not simply passive wakefulness but the kind of vigorous wakefulness that makes a person like me start to question the very possibility of silence as a condition that can exist in the universe.” The process usually takes at least an hour of my telling endless stories, singing endless renditions of “Hello, Everybody” and “Mary had a Little Lamb,” and physically wrestling with my daughter to keep her lying down. During this time, I endure vicious looks from the passengers around me. It begins with a slight shifting from the people in the rows directly in front of and behind me. Then come the not-so-subtle over-the-shoulder glances. Then people clear their throats. It moves like the wave in a ripple until I feel like the entire plane is going to stand up and scream at me to just keep my kid quiet, and how dare I subject them to this torture, and shouldn’t there be a rule that children shouldn’t be allowed to fly, and that I shouldn’t be allowed to be a parent.

Ironically, it’s these same people who, before the flight, smile at the girls as they run through the airport, arms horizontal, pretending to be airplanes, and who delight in how cute they look in their fur-hooded vests. Just hope we’re not on your flight, I mutter as we pass them by.

We recently flew to Montreal, via Denver, and our bags decided they’d rather ski west than east. As I railed against fate, and argued with the guy in India hired to tell me he was sorry for the inconvenience, I couldn’t help but notice that my daughters weren’t fazed. They were wide-eyed, busy with playing with new toys, connecting to their grandparents, gasping at the frigid air, gaping at the snow, and listening intently to the sounds of French on the radio. They had traveled, and this was an adventure. And so I hung up the phone, put the girls in borrowed boots, and took them sledding beneath the cloudless sky.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

December 17, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Searching

I’ve spent the past month searching for a new nanny. Albina, our beloved babysitter, who had lived three doors away, moved. She doesn’t drive, and now lives just far enough away to have rendered me mad with searching for a chauffeur for our nanny, and then distraught that I am not an upper-class lady in Victorian England, able to afford a nurse, nanny, governess, maid, gardener, cook, butler, footmen, and chauffeur, all of whom, I have convinced myself in the course of this upheaval, I need.

One night while lying in bed, after two weeks of conducting interviews, subjecting my daughters to new faces every day, staying home from work, sending friends to spy in the park, and coming up empty, I burst into tears. My husband bolted up in bed and asked what was wrong. “I miss Albina,” I sobbed. We had finally found our groove together, she and I. My children loved her. She took care of our plants. She cooked us home-made blintzes and French fries, baked apples and squash, and a pea soup that my picky daughters would eat when they would eat nothing else. She spontaneously cleaned things – our porch, the garage, the floors. And she was the best newborn care nurse I’d ever met, bathing the children in strange Russian herbs, and swaddling them so that they had no choice but to sleep for hours. My husband tried to reassure me. He had never really connected with Albina; he couldn’t communicate with her in Russian, and found her aloof and reserved. “We’ll find someone else, and the children will learn to love her too. Don’t worry.” And he gave me a kiss, rolled over, and immediately fell back asleep, oblivious to my tortured state, my unappeasable angst.

Last week, I finally hired someone. The kids are delighted. Our new babysitter is Portuguese, but speaks fluent English. I am mourning the loss of a beloved second language in our home, but my older daughter, whose Russian I admit has deteriorated with her preschool attendance, is delighted to have someone she can understand. Our new babysitter brings her toddler daughter on the days she works for us. My need to hire someone, and the fact that she comes so highly recommended from a friend, and that she drives, and can help with carpool, has outweighed this detail. This, for me, was a distressing decision, but my little one asks every day for her new little friend; she loves spending those days with a buddy, someone with whom to play in the park, eat lunch, and color.

Why is it that the transition has been harder for me than for anyone else in my family? Who is our nanny really for?

I work part-time – a decision I made for emotional, intellectual, financial, and sanity reasons. But, despite what I thought before I birthed my children, I can’t help but feel that the primary responsibility to care for their daily needs is on my shoulders. What I’ve realized over the course of the past month, in searching for a replacement for Albina, is that I am, in some strange way, searching for a replacement of myself. I am looking both to replicate myself for my children, and to bring someone into my home who makes me feel cared for. Someone to seamlessly take my place when I rush out of the house at seven-thirty in the morning, and quietly relinquish it when I return in the darkness of suppertime. And more. I want someone who will cook for me when I’m tired and hungry. I want another mother in my home, a mother who fills in my gaps, who has a green thumb and can darn socks, but who doesn’t threaten to replace me. This is a delicate, intricate, trembling balance of power, of identities. It has taken me years to establish. And now, bereft, I am the one in mourning, having lost a piece of myself.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

November 25, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

House of Straw

While spending time at my parent’s house with my daughters recently, I reacquainted myself with some of my favorite childhood books. My parents have a stash that weren’t subject to today’s politically correct sensors. My older daughter delighted in Maurice Sendak’s The Night Kitchen, which tells the story of a little boy who has a dream, who stay up all night mixing “milk in the batter, milk in the batter.” It goes without saying that the boy is naked in his dream, and that the illustrations are anatomically correct. Some books I didn’t let her read, like another Sendak book that still terrifies me, Outside Over There, about goblins who kidnap a baby while the big sister is in charge.

Then there were those books that I decided were worth the read, but that needed some on-the-spot, parental re-writing. My parents’ library’s version of the Three Little Pigs fell into that category. Did you know that the original mother pig sent away her children because she didn’t have the means to care for them? That it was a maudlin and traumatic farewell? And that each little pig set out on his own, and the first two, who built houses of straw and sticks respectively, were actually eaten by the Big Bad Wolf? Contrary to my memory, they didn’t escape to their older brother’s House of Bricks? And that the third little pig, after outsmarting the wolf in the apple orchard and the county fair, captured the wolf and ate him? Ate him? Need I remind you what the wolf had recently eaten?

Luckily, I thought, my four-year-old will not notice if I revise the story slightly. After all, I am quite experienced in such editing. The older brother in Tiki Tiki Tembo? Well, it’s not that he was never quite the same again after he spent too long in the well; he merely had to rest in bed for a few days, and learn to be a better listener. The family members in The Carrot Seed? They’re pretty harsh, so I soften their language a bit – “I’m not sure it will grow,” they say, instead of the definitive “it won’t come up.” I was confident I could appropriately re-work Three Little Pigs. Little did I know that my daughter’s grandparents had been reading her the book surreptitiously, word for word. When I attempted to deviate from the text, she carefully corrected me: No, the wolf eats the piggy, Mama. Then she wanted me to read the book again, the right way this time.

So much from shielding her from the winds that blow down Houses of Straw. And why is it that I was the one trembling after each reading, while she, resilient, asked for more?

You would think that I would have learned by now that, as parents, we are defenseless against the raging winds when they choose to blow. We painstakingly build our houses, confident they are made of bricks, and when the wolf shows up, unannounced and uninvited, he huffs and he puffs and he blows that house down. Maybe our children should be exposed to these stories from an early age. Will this help prepare them? Will this help them learn that the challenge actually lies in how we respond to those raging winds, how we choose to continue our stories, and build anew, once the illusion of solid structure has crumbled around us?

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

November 6, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Stolen

Today I bought a new bike. The used one I’ve been riding ever since I moved to the Bay Area was so heavy that I could hardly lift it up the five steep stairs required to mount the train, which I take to commute to work. I got tired of watching other commuters lift their bikes with one hand while sipping their lattes. And I got tired of waiting for my bike to be stolen.

Bikes are my path to free. I ride to go, to get places, and to feel the wind. I’ve ridden for as long as I can remember, and I remember vividly that moment that my father first let go and sent me flying down the hill, the weight of him behind me suddenly gone, the exhilarating fear of being on my own a sudden and ample identity. When my family lived in Israel when I was in middle school, I learned to ride with no hands, and would cruise the hills of Jerusalem, arms dangling, breathing the sweet air, and the speed. Once, while riding home, my shoelace got stuck in the chain, and the cute boy who lived down the block and was always outside dribbling a soccer ball cut it free with his pocket knife; I wore the shoelace as a bracelet for months.

My bikes have a history of being stolen just before I need to figure out how to get rid of them. Mac, named for MacGyver, the pink and white bike I rode in Jerusalem, ended up on the back of an unmarked truck piled with goods. I saw the truck taking off down the block on my way home one day, and chased it for a while. Then I watched it until the bike faded into a sky indistinguishable from the hills. Nora, my orange folding bike which I rode while living in Germany, was stolen when my friend borrowed it. She called the police, frantic, to report: “mein Fahrrad war stolen!.” Their response was to correct her grammar – “mein Fahrrad ist gestollen worden,” and wish her luck. When I was in college, my bike was stolen by the campus police, to teach me a lesson. I was always locking it up in the wrong places. I got a lecture, and a number tattooed onto the belly of the bike. There are thefts in these thefts, and also gifts, propelling me on to the next adventure.

Mornings, as I pedal into the day, my daughters’ cries for hugs and maks (our onomatopoeia for kisses) are weights upon my back. As I stand to pedal hard into the wind, the sunshine bright upon my face, I realize that I no longer soar free, alone. They have stolen that bike, the light bike I can lift on my shoulders, and take far away. They have gifted me with a weightier, more cautious vehicle, an added weight that I no wonder struggle to lift upon the train. Now, they run behind me. Soon they’ll let go, and mount their own bikes, and I, panting behind them, then stranded, weightless, will learn to set them free.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

October 23, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Happy

Michelle Obama is hula-hooping for health on the South Lawn of the White House. Jamie Oliver’s going to teach obese America how to cook their vegetables, and eat them too. Herbivores, frugivores, and locavores are putting their stakes in the ground, amidst the moist dirt of organically grown slow food.

Meanwhile, my 20-month-old daughter went to synagogue over the holiday of Simchat Torah and learned the word “candy.” We were spending the holiday with my parents, and my girls were dressed in traditional New York Jewish holiday autumn glory, patent-leather shoes and red wool coats. On the way to synagogue, I noticed that other children on the sidewalk were carrying big plastic bags (luckily for them, they don’t live in Palo Alto, where plastic bags are illegal; I considered hauling them back West by the thousands, to sell on the sly at Whole Foods).

On the way home from synagogue, those children’s bags were full, Halloween-like, with candy. Lollipops, chocolates, sucking candies, soft candies, Fruit Roll Ups, Gushers, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, Craisins, York Peppermint Patties, Snickers, M&Ms, gum, Jelly Bellies, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Luckily, being from Palo Alto, we were limited to our pockets.

This is not solely a New York phenomenon. When my oldest daughter was a young toddler, at our local synagogue, a kind-hearted older kid gave her a lollipop and opened it for her, in the course of the two minutes I’d turned my back. I was aghast, and immediately took the lollipop away. Tragic crying ensued. I decided that this attempt to shield my child from the relentless world of synagogue sweets was futile. I gave her back the lollipop. She sucked on it with wide eyes and a tear-stained face, then pulled the lollipop from her mouth, smiled, and said, for the first time, “Happy.”

Rabbi Eleazer of Worms, who, in the 12th century, formalized the ritual of putting honey on the slates of Jewish children attending Heder for the first time, would be delighted. This is one approach to teaching children how to love Judaism. My younger daughter hears the word “Torah” and immediately says “candy.” My older daughter learned to associate shul with “Happy” at a tender age.

But is this really what we want to teach our children? To associate religion with empty calories and fleeting sweetness, which leaves in its wake sticky fingers and an aching tummy, which must be later toned with hula-hooping? Shouldn’t we instead be serving them nutrient-rich, filling, and fulfilling foods? Isn’t that what we hope our Judaism provides us and our children? Something substantial and substantive?

And yet. I love the autumn in New York. And there is something especially magical about being in my parent’s Sukkah, especially, on a cold, brisk morning, for breakfast. And there’s no Sukkot breakfast like Entemann’s Crumb-Topped Donuts, freshly baked in the Bronx. As I took a bite one morning this past trip, my flax seed and oatmeal thousands of miles away in sunny California, I couldn’t help but smile, and mumble through the powdered crumbs, “Happy.”

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

September 16, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Chicken Soup

My foray into vegetarianism began in 8th grade, and, if I correctly recall, had something to do with a dead squirrel. It was a year of rebellion for me: I got kicked out of class for the first time; cut class for the first time; and even joined an illicit “pizza group,” composed of me and a bunch of guys who would call the local pizzeria from the school’s pay phone every week, and share a pie behind the school cafeteria. My proclamation that I would no longer eat meat was, according to my parents, part of a “phase,” and my mother continued to serve chicken soup and brisket every week on Shabbat.

When my husband and I began dating seriously, we had long discussions about the values of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, and concluded that vegetarianism was an important extension of the philosophy we believed was underlying the system. Kashrut is part of an overall scheme of enhancing awareness; its focus is the relationship between the external and internal worlds. The Torah’s injunction not to eat certain animals and not to mix milk and meat could be understood as an imperative to be hyper-conscious of what, and how, we consume what is beyond us and make it our own. In keeping with the interpretation of Rav Kook, who argued that the Torah’s ideal was that all human beings be vegetarian, with our sensitivity to environmental factors, and with our shared desire to accumulate as little “stuff” as possible (kosher kitchens include two sets of everything – pots & pans, cutlery, sponges, sometimes sinks – to keep meat and dairy separate), we decided to keep a vegetarian kosher home.

Everything began to subtly unravel when kids came into the picture. When I was pregnant, I learned that, in terms of satisfying my appetite, one piece of chicken equaled at least three pints of ice cream. I started cooking chicken on Friday nights in aluminum pans. We ate on paper, convincing ourselves that it was temporary. When the kids were born and we visited my parents, I watched with wide eyes as they shoveled meatballs and schnitzel , meatloaf and stuffed cabbage into their mouths, as if they were starving. Friday night chicken dinners on throw-away dishes became our norm. One year, my parents visited for Thanksgiving, and my mother convinced us to make turkey. We bought a mammoth aluminum pan and a real knife, which, after devouring the bird, we subsequently wrapped in red tape and stuck it in the back of a drawer with plastic ice-pop holders.

This week marked another landmark in our losing battle; I decided to make chicken soup. You can’t do that in a tin foil pan. The kids have had nasty stomach flus, and, after three days of their losing fluids and refusing to eat anything, I decided that it was my responsibility as their Jewish mother to make a big pot of chicken soup. I borrowed a pot and a ladle from a friend, and improvised on my mother’s recipe. In went the chicken, the onion, the carrots, the sweet potato. I realized I had no celery, and the vegetarian in me was already raging. Something green! Something must go in the pot to reveal that this is a chicken soup de resistance, a pot of fluid cooked by someone who believes in vegetables! In went the droopy green beans from last week’s farmer’s market. In went the forgotten cauliflower from the back of the fridge. In went the turmeric. Yes, turmeric. I lowered the flame and took a whiff, a blushing bride, a novice once again. My first chicken soup.

The kids refused to eat it. My mother was aghast that I put cauliflower in chicken soup. It’s supposed to be a clear broth! That’s the whole point! Have I taught you nothing? My husband and I didn’t think it was too bad. As we sat and ate bowl after paper bowl with our little plastic spoons, the kids asleep and dreaming of kneidelach, I said to my husband: we should really buy our own pot and ladle. Maybe a bowl and a soup spoon or two, while we’re at it. He grunted from the kitchen, where he was trying to fit the enormous pot into the fridge, and muttered something about Tupperware.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

September 8, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Back To School

Ah – crisp September – You are most welcome here! O Chill in the Air, Dear Crunch of the Apple, Ye Shavings of Sharpened Pencils.

This time of year has taken on precious new meaning for me in motherhood: it marks the return of blessed routine. This year, our eldest daughter started Pre-K, a joyous occasion, marked by nightly readings of Knuffle Bunny Too, and the purchase of a pair of shoes that are two sizes too big, to compensate for the fact that all summer long her sandals were two sizes too small.

But, alas, each gain comes with loss. The summer days, their lazy, lingering, twilight evenings are gone. And the introduction of school marks the return of normal work-life for parents, and the incorporation of a new parent into the house – the teacher – creating a sometimes vicious love-triangle. We know that at some point in our daughter’s schooling, it is of course inevitable that she will come home with information that we disagree with, and may even conflict on a profound level with our beliefs and practices.

When I was in fifth grade, in the mid 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was raging. I asked my mother what AIDS meant, and my understanding after that conversation was that it was a terrible sickness one could get if one was married, at the same time, to multiple people. At the time, I was learning about Jacob at school. The teacher explained that he married Leah, and then Rachel, and then Bilhah, and then Zilpah. Well, I put two and two together, raised my eager little hand, and asked “Why didn’t Jacob get AIDS?” Let’s just say that the teacher didn’t appreciate the question. A diatribe of “that’s a STUPID question, how could you ask such a thing, etc.” ensued. My parents talked to the teacher, but, ultimately, it appeased them more than it helped me. I had learned my lesson – sometimes the worlds of school and home don’t align.

When our daughter came home from Chabad last year and pronounced that all boys wear kippot, we gently told her that some Jewish boys wear kippot, and some don’t, and some Jewish girls do too. She countered with – “but Morah (Teacher) told me that only boys do,” and when we said, yes, some boys do, but some don’t, and some girls do too, she burst into tears.

Can we trust our children to sift through conflicting information? And – at what age, if any, is it appropriate to tell a child that her teacher may have been mistaken? That her teacher shared one perspective, but there may be others? Is home-schooling the only answer? Or is this how children learn that there is a complex, multi-faceted universe of truths, facts, beliefs, and opinions out there? Maybe our job is to hold them as they cry, mourning each year the coming of September, and the annual loss of innocent simplicity it brings in its autumnal wake.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

August 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Homesick

In his article “Siberia II” in last week’s New Yorker, Ian Frazier packs his readers into his dilapidated van, and takes them for a ride across Siberia. He describes the numerous places he visited on his summer-long trek in August, 2001, including Irkutsk, the Paris of Russia, its famous Lake Baikal, which, as Frazier describes, “reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land,” and Birobidzhan – “a swamp in the middle of nowhere,” which, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties under Stalin, was an attempted Jewish homeland, occupied by many thousands of Jews, including Americans, and which now has a Jewish population of less than four percent.

His description of a detour to one city in particular, Blagoveshchensk , which means “annunciation,” and which is separated from the Chinese city of Heihe only by the Amur river, across which pagodas are visible, struck me as particularly poignant. He writes: “The benign and hopeful sunniness of Blagoveshchensk reminded me somehow of Palo Alto, California. Blagoveshchensk and other Amur River cities could be the Golden East, as California was the Golden West. Or maybe this notion was just my homesick imagination.” Now, I have been living in Palo Alto, CA for almost five years, and must admit that I’ve never perceived its sunniness as “benign and hopeful.” Its predictable weather – a few months of chilly rain in the “winter,” followed, and preceded by, months and months of humid-less bright sunny days – has struck me as lacking diversity, even oppressive.

Instead of appreciating where I am, I’ve found myself missing, irrationally, the places I’ve lived before. I come to appreciate each place I have lived only when I have moved away. When I lived in Frankfurt, Germany, my neighborhood reminded me of Jerusalem’s German colony, and my apartment, with its bathroom light-switch outside the bathroom, and its trisim – Israeli shutters – made me feel immediately, albeit ironically, at home. When I moved from Frankfurt to Boston, the Charles River reminded me of the Main; I would bike around it, experiencing Frankfurt’s body of water for the first time. Palo Alto’s tree-lined streets, which seem constantly to be shedding their crunchy leaves, no matter the season, make me miss the glorious New England autumn. And the Bay Area’s clusters of Eucalyptus trees and their perfumed aura make my heart yearn, desperately, for Jerusalem.

Frazier’s piece struck a chord in me, because it affirmed that, perhaps, for the rest of my life, the places I live will remind me of the homes I’ve once had, and, especially, the homes of my childhood. And yet, these very homes, surrounded by their light and smells, will be the childhood homes, the soul-homes, of my children. One day, they will be travelling somewhere, and, like Frazier, will yearn for the “sun and blue sky and reddish-gold tint” of their first home in Northern California, their “mother-home,” which, to their mother, is a foreign land.

–Maya Bernstein