— Elie Wiesel, Memoirs<\/p>\n
![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/ou-images\/content\/realhomesill200.jpg\")
<\/div>\nIn the Jerusalem living-room of an elderly, Yiddish-speaking widow hangs an elaborately framed, three-dimensional rendition of a window. The carefully constructed diorama \u2013 the window is set in the yellow exterior wall of an old-fashioned, early-American-style house — is presented for your visual delectation in exquisite, lifelike detail.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a real little flower box on the window sill, full to overflowing with tiny violet-colored nasturtiums; and dark-green wooden shutters (they\u2019d come in handy against prying eyes such as yours) folding back onto the pale yellow wall. Your friend, the widow, is talking about the upcoming marriage of her great- granddaughter but you\u2019re foolishly distracted, from across the living room, by a silly desire to look in through those little windowpanes, and are finding the desire thwarted (luckily for the secretive little people having supper inside) by a long draped curtain \u2013 an actual little swath of red velvet with ivory-colored lace trimming, drawn back primly with a neat little bow.<\/p>\n
The only peek you\u2019re granted of anything inside that house is of an antique oil-lamp half-hidden behind the drapes, spilling its soft glow.<\/p>\n
The pretty picture is charming, and heartwarming. Too charming, and too heartwarming, like candy for the eyes. In its skillfully created illusory depths we get a tantalizing hint of a small world unto itself, a distant, magical realm at once frustratingly unattainable and intimately familiar.<\/p>\n
If you like thinking of yourself as someone who\u2019s immune to blatant sentimentality such as this, you might try resisting its magnetic sweetness. You might tell yourself the picture is corny, and commercial; that it crassly concretizes something better left unsaid\u2026something intangible and imaginary that should rightly elude our grasp, an ideal we sense instinctively, too true to be cheapened. You resent the artist for dipping our ideal into a tub of sugar before offering it for our consumption, but the picture catches your eye, and draws you in.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d like to gain entry, but that hidden home belongs to somebody else, some happy cozy somebody with a mother, and father, and grandparents, and brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t stop looking at that picture,\u201d I remark to the widow.<\/p>\n
\u201cAh, yes.\u201d She looks over at it fondly. \u201cI know. My daughter she gave it for my birthday.\u201d<\/p>\n
We fall silent a few moments, as we\u2019re both transported separately from her sofa to wherever the picture takes us.<\/p>\n
I say, \u201cI guess that\u2019s what home is supposed to look like.\u201d She tips her head thoughtfully to the side, and I ask, \u201cIs that what it was like in Hungary?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell\u2026.you know, I was only two when I left. In 1929. Because when my father died, she came here to Eretz Israel, my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you don\u2019t remember anything?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell\u2026I remember sitting in\u2026like a hatzer<\/i>, and my mother was there and somebody was cutting my hair. And then, in 1997, I went with my cousin.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh. You did go back?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, we was looking for the house of my mother. We was walking all around there, around the streets, trying to find her house, and asking the people but nobody knows, then comes this very old goya<\/i> (non Jew), and I ask if maybe she knows where is the street. She looks at me, and she looks at my cousin, and she says, I knew your mother. At first I don\u2019t know if to believe her. You know, this is after seventy years. Seventy-five years. So I says to her, Oh yes? You remember her name? And she looks at me and she says, Hurevitz.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWas that it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes. This was my mother\u2019s name. She says, I remember Hurevitz-nini<\/i>! That means, Hurevitz very nice lady. She sees we look like my mother, you know. She keeps saying Hurevitz-nini<\/i>! Hurevitz-nini<\/i>! She says, your mother every Friday was giving me a loaf of bread.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when you saw the house, did you remember it?<\/p>\n
\u201cAh, no. Because my cousin — she was eighty-one, or eighty-two — she didn\u2019t want so much to see it and she wasn\u2019t feeling so good so in the end we didn\u2019t go with the goya<\/i>. You know my mother she was killed, soon after my wedding. She came to me for Lilah<\/i> Seder and then in the night she –\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Holocaust?\u201d As soon as I say this, I realize my mistake — she\u2019d just said they were here in Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no. Here! A few minutes\u2019 walk! After the Seder she walked back alone to Mea Shearim\u2013 she lived in Batei Ungarin — and in the morning people come to tell me, your mother she\u2019s died. The Arabs killed her. Yes. That\u2019s why I was going back. I wanted so much to see my mother\u2019s house.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stamford! Stamford, Connecticut! There was never any particular bond between me and it, but it\u2019s next door to my hometown, and that is its splendor.<\/p>\n
The book I was reading fell shut in my lap as my eyes devoured the non-descript station, which was already gliding backwards as we sped on in a flash towards Massachusetts. With its broadened, reconstructed concrete platform and standardized red-and-white signs, it had apparently undergone a major modernization and clean-up job since the days when my parents, having missed the 7:05 in Norwalk, used to screech into the old parking lot and my father, holding on to his hat, would leap out of the car in his overcoat, briefcase flying, to catch the 7:19, then stand there, dumbfounded, as it pulled out of the station. \u201cCome on, let\u2019s go!\u201d my mother would cry. \u201cWe\u2019ll get it at Greenwich!\u201d and off she would race, invariably swerving into the Greenwich station as the conductor shouted, \u201cAll aboard<\/i>!\u201d then catching sight of its tail at Scarsdale before chasing the train all the way into Manhattan. As my father, right on time, would be sitting down at his desk at 9:00 sharp, my mother (pausing only for the Highway Patrolman to write out her speeding ticket) would be racing back home on the Merritt Parkway to get the children off to school.<\/p>\n
I went back to The Jewish Star<\/i> by S. B. Unsdorfer, keeping my eyes peeled for the New Canaan Safeway, historic site of my mother\u2019s weekly shopping trips some forty years before. Yet the next stop was Darien. What in the world<\/i>\u2026? How could this have happened? How in the world had I missed my hometown?<\/p>\n
Darien earned its reputation for anti-Jewish discrimination in a famous 1940s novel, but it could never compete with friendly New Canaan\u2019s sleeker, subtler brand of anti-Semitism. With bafflement and longing there I sat, staring out at the lushly tree-shaded streets with their shuttered old early-American houses appearing and vanishing as we flew on by. Unlike Israel, which must accommodate the global ingathering of the exiles, the land of my birth — thanks to strict residential zoning laws \u2013 must be one of the only inhabited spots on earth that gets prettier with time.<\/p>\n
If anyone in my compartment (a few of them looked suspiciously like wrinkled, much-expanded versions of my classmates from elementary school) noticed the middle-aged passenger with forehead pressed to the glass, hoping in vain for a familiar landmark, surely they would never have surmised — from her poignant pantomime of devotion \u2013 how much she still hated that place. For in my own hometown, I was always a stranger in a strange land.<\/p>\n
But how can you not retain a deep love for the magical world of your hometown \u2013 no matter how much it marginalized you \u2013 in which the ordinary was always extraordinary, because all your senses as a child were undefended and wholly alive?<\/p>\n
There was a considerable waiting period at the station, Because of the poor light provided by the old-fashioned gas lamps, the SS men were particularly strict and vigilant…<\/i><\/p>\n
It was not the first time I left Stupava in a packed train. At one time, Stupava was a popular picnic spot, whose beautiful woods and romantic canoe lake attracted many a youngster out for a Sunday excursion\u2026.[The] fuller the train, the merrier our home-going. But those days were gone forever, when the Jew enjoyed the same rights and privileges, the same natural delights as his gentile neighbor. How everything had changed!<\/p>\n
Somberly we crouched in silence, not even daring to think. Father sat at the window, mother on the seat opposite, and I on the floor between them. What a pitiful sight\u2026.When we were just about to go over the \u201cRed Bridge,\u201d Father gave Mother a reassuring nod.<\/p>\n
Who among us did not know the Red Bridge? It was at this spot where passengers would normally rise from their seats, pull their luggage from the racks, and get ready to step out happily at Bratislava. To us the Red Bridge was part of what we affectionately called home\u2026<\/p>\n
Mother looked down into the peaceful river\u2026. Father, as if reading her thoughts, interrupted her. \u201cMammele,\u201d he said tenderly. \u201cShall we go in by tramcar or shall I hire a taxi?\u201d<\/p>\n
That is the question he would normally have asked\u2026.It was meant as a joke to cheer her up but\u2026she looked straight into my father\u2019s face, sighed deeply,[and] no sound came from her trembling lips\u2026When the train roared past her birthplace, her tears rolled down fast. It was goodbye Bratislava\u2026.Goodbye to the house and home forever.<\/p>\n
Late in the evening our train stopped at Leopoldov\u2026.The SS quickly surrounded the two coaches\u2026 \u201cAnyone attempting to get up will be shot immediately!\u201d they yelled.<\/p>\n
But when it came to this cousin, it was especially odd. \u201cI feel so at home here,\u201d she kept saying as the wedding day approached. \u201cI don\u2019t really want to leave,\u201d she repeated, boarding the plane back to California. Yet this was a young woman who had married a non-Jew precisely, she had told us at the time, because she wanted out from her Jewish-ness. Being Jewish, she said, had always been one big mystery, anyway.<\/p>\n
At first the hotel seemed ok, even sort of quaint, but it didn\u2019t take long for her to notice its grungy state of disrepair, and that it was never really cleaned, and that her fellow lodgers were the sort of lost and lonely people with whom she\u2019d never before been associated. In the course of apartment-hunting, it became apparent, as well, that while the decent one-room rentals were way beyond her budget, all the affordable ones were dumps. At some point she decided to share. But after a few weeks of searching for roommates, it began to seem that finding the right roommate was not unlike finding a husband, and would take no less miraculous a splitting of the sea.<\/p>\n
She still liked her job as a yeshiva\u2019s public relations director, and sometimes, busy at work, she\u2019d forget where she\u2019d be going home to at the end of the day. On her way back to the hotel, she\u2019d check the real estate listings and the classified ads, pick up some groceries, then pass through the dimly lit lobby with its weird cast of characters before taking the elevator up to the 3rd floor. She\u2019d unlock the door, turn around, and face the dingy, small room, with its view of somebody\u2019s shut window in the building next door.<\/p>\n
She shared one wall with someone who always had a television on.<\/p>\n
Months passed. She said that without a place of her own, a safe refuge where she could retreat and touch base, she was developing an insecurity at the core that she\u2019d never before experienced. \u201cI think my personality\u2019s disintegrating,\u201d she said with a laugh during one of our occasional long-distance calls. \u201cI\u2019m not sure who I am anymore. And I\u2019m not even an adolescent.\u201d<\/p>\n
We fell out of touch. Then my grandson turned three and a present arrived from America. It was a game of cards.<\/p>\n
Half the deck consisted of pictures of animals: grizzly bear, polar bear, lion, giraffe. Hippo, bird, frog, snake. A worm and a dog, a bumblebee and a cat. A whale, a horse-fly and a gorilla. A spider. A butterfly. A goldfish. A turtle.<\/p>\n
The point was to match up each of these with a card from the other half of the deck. There was a picture of a dark cave, and another of a sunlit jungle. A nest holding three speckled blue eggs. A swamp and a spider-web. A fish-bowl filled with water. A hole in the sand, a honeycomb. A flower in bloom, a doghouse, an ocean. An ice floe, a pink pillow. A horse\u2019s tail. A turtle.<\/p>\n
I called my friend in New York. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty eloquent.\u201d I said. \u201cI get the message.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIsn\u2019t that why you sent that game? Because every creature comes with a home?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, wow, I didn\u2019t even think of it. Isn\u2019t that funny, I guess it\u2019s on my mind. Yeah. We all want to go home. It\u2019s designed right into our genes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The house I grew up in was surrounded by acres and acres of woods, meadow and wild field. As I turned now into our rocky old driveway, I realized with a start that it wasn\u2019t rocky anymore, and — to my horror \u2013 that a totally unfamiliar house was standing imperiously right there where trees should have been, at the entrance to the driveway. Most disorienting of all, this tidy, black-topped driveway didn\u2019t continue on through the woods towards our ivy-covered house, but simply came to a stop a few yards from the street. Where in the world was our driveway? My daughter asked if maybe I\u2019d made a mistake.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course not!\u201d I snapped. I backed out, drove up and down the hilly old road a few times to see if some other entryway had somehow come into being, then pulled back in to the now-truncated driveway. \u201cWait here,\u201d I said, getting out of the car and slamming the door.<\/p>\n
\u201cMommy, wait!\u201d<\/p>\n
Into the woods I ran, determined. \u201cDon\u2019t worry! I\u2019ll be right back!\u201d<\/p>\n
I have no idea how long the following episode took; my sense of time dissolved as I set foot into those woods. The world I knew so well, the world I knew like the back of my hand, had vanished! I was instantly enclosed in the dappled sunlight and silence of woods both familiar and unfamiliar. Vegetation had grown up over and obliterated the driveway that once was. I saw all around me the poison-ivy leaves that had been the main danger of my childhood, but I didn\u2019t care, I just kept plunging on desperately through the underbrush. Was there nothing left at all of the kingdom in my mind?<\/p>\n
All at once there was a clearing, then another unfamiliar house, which I couldn\u2019t bear to look at. I was standing on the curb of a street, a new street altogether! I was in the middle of a housing development! A house here, a house there! I kept going forward in the direction I knew I had to go\u2026something familiar was drawing me\u2026when something told me to look straight up and all of a sudden, framed on one side by the long branch of an oak tree and on the other side by a towering pine, there was a piece of sky I knew so well, and the very same clouds \u2013 my clouds! — floating overhead! I was standing under the tall old oak tree where I used to swing.<\/p>\n
In a few weeks, to a large extent, we\u2019ll be moving for seven days out of our Jerusalem apartment and into the small succa<\/i> that my husband and son will build on our porch. What would it have been like when I was growing up if once a year, we had shifted our lives\u2019 focus in this fashion from the big, stone, ivy-covered house to a small, very Jewish succa out on the front lawn? What message would have come through to me \u2013 from its walls made for dismantling, and roof not meant for protection from rain, or sun, or the passage of time?<\/p>\n
For the bear and the turtle, the bumblebee and the worm, the instinctive desire to go home is fully satisfied by a safe physical shelter perfectly consistent with that creature\u2019s unique personality. For a Jew, it\u2019s precisely because the succa<\/i> in all its bright loveliness is temporary, flimsy, insubstantial, vulnerable, that he finds himself most profoundly at home when he finds himself within its walls.<\/p>\n
It was erev<\/i> Yom Kippur when we ran into each other in Geulah. She was shopping for\u00a0succah<\/i>\u00a0decorations. \u201cHey!\u201d I exclaimed happily. \u201cYou found an apartment!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d she said, \u201cnot quite. I\u2019m getting this stuff for the family I\u2019m going to.\u201d She explained that nothing had come through in time for the chagim<\/i>, but she was hopeful. There were some good prospects. I must have made a sympathetic face because she cut me off sharply. \u201cOh, I\u2019m just fine, don\u2019t worry. I think I\u2019m better prepared for this chag<\/i> than anyone else around. You know you can have a house, and a husband, and children, but what are we supposed to realize right now? That there\u2019s no such thing as home in olam ha ze<\/i> (this world).\u201d She grinned. \u201cRight? Well, in Jerusalem I can sit in somebody else\u2019s succa<\/i> with somebody else\u2019s family, but if I have Hashem in mind, I\u2019m like a turtle with its house on its back. I\u2019ll look up through the schach<\/i>, and see the stars, and say Hashem, in this moment I\u2019m at home forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
Sarah Shapiro’s most recent books are<\/i> “Wish I Were Here” [Artscroll], and<\/i> “The Mother in Our Lives”[Targum\/Feldheim]. This article is a chapter from<\/i> “Wish I Were Here”, reprinted with the author’s permission. Sarah Shapiro teaches writing in Israel and the United States.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI always wanted a real homewith flowers on the windowsill.\u201d— Carol King, popular song from the 1970sWithin hours of first breathing the cattle car\u2019s nauseating air, we began to feel at home. \u201cHome\u201d was the edge of the wooden plank I sat on. — Elie Wiesel, Memoirs In the Jerusalem living-room of an elderly, Yiddish-speaking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":42336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-growth"],"yoast_head":"\n