The most compelling parts of Tsabari’s memoir are not about her longing to leave, but about her struggle to stay. (But then again, perhaps that’s just my own bias. I have always been far more captivated, for instance, by the memoirs of those who struggle to come to terms with their religious identity than by the many accounts of those who leave Judaism, or Hasidism, or the Modern Orthodox community. I prefer memoirs about decades-long marriages to sordid sagas about devastating divorces. Is it not always harder to stay?)

For Tsabari, the struggle to stay takes many different forms. It is about learning how to fry her mother’s chicken livers and bake her chocolate yeast cake—which is first and foremost about seeing her mother’s strengths after years of being blinded by grief. It is about bringing her Canadian Christian husband home to Petah Tikva to clean out her childhood home. It is about discovering her father’s poetry and realizing that he, too, fought long and hard to master a literary language not his own. It is about researching the story of her Yemenite great-grandmother, who abandoned her toddler twin daughters and followed her husband to a strange land: “I see her walking away, shoulder trembling, tears streaming. I imagine the mountains and the spirits who lived in them looking on as the family began their journey toward a new life. The mountains had witnessed the lives of the people for centuries. They watched patterns evolving through generations, old roles taken over by new faces, new husbands replacing the dead, girls becoming mothers and mothers becoming grandmothers. Nothing ever changed, but rather shifted ever so slightly, like an ancient folk song played in a new key.”

Most poignantly, for Tsabari, learning to stay is about becoming a mother herself and recognizing that in order to stay, we cannot help but leave: “Perhaps motherhood is a series of small abandonments, in the same way that life is a series of goodbyes. We are raising our children to survive without us in the world. We are raising them to leave us, raising them to endure our own departure.” Perhaps the art of leaving is not all that different from the art of losing. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop, a poet born in Massachusetts who circumnavigated South America and traveled extensively in Brazil. The real art is not about losing or leaving, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is captured by Donald Justice, Bishop’s contemporary, a poet who stayed far closer to home: “It always comes, and when it comes they know / The knack is this: to fasten and not let go.”

Ilana Kurshan’s memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink, won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature.