Questioning Return - Beth Kissileff

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was born, and its title was similarly lifted from the speech patterns of Devorah’s newly religious cohort. Wendy’s magnum opus-in-progress was titled “It Was Basherte”: Narrative and Self-Identity in the Lives of Newly Religious American Jews.” Little did Debby Distler know, back when she left for Israel before college, that she was going to inspire her kid sister’s friend to spend a year studying people like her.

      There was something at stake for Wendy in writing this dissertation, different from her senior thesis. Wendy was curious about whether Debby, or other returnees, had changed at all. Her scholarship came with a sense of nosiness and voyeurism, wanting to snoop into corners of belief that their adherents would prefer to leave untouched and unexamined. But still she had to know: Was there something left behind, some remainder of who Debby had been before, or was it all as covered as her naturally strawberry blonde hair? This driven inquisitiveness, the need to know if anyone can really change, went beyond the professional.

      What Wendy wanted above all, what every graduate student desired, was to know whether all this effort, all this seemingly endless deferral of anything besides graduate school, would ever pay off. Would she work hard at her dissertation, get a series of one-year jobs, and then end up living with her parents and going to law school? She hoped only that if she kept going, continued on the path she’d set down—following the steps, courses, research, dissertation idea, fellowships—she would have a sense, eventually, of the rightness of it all. But if she were entirely sure, there would be no room for new possibilities. She had to hope that going forth into the unknown would lead to something good.

      A decisive moment. A moment when the viewer realized she was seeing something that was there, actual, but not able to be seen without the photographer’s lens. Wendy Goldberg hoped, in writing her dissertation in Jerusalem this year, to perform a similar feat.

       ONE

       Holders of Foreign Passports

      Home is a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

      —ZACH BRAFF, Garden State motion picture

      Wendy stepped off the plane. She was at the top of a flight of stairs, looking into blinding sunlight and palm trees.

      She hadn’t anticipated this: to live for a year in a place with palm trees, tall and swaying, their tops absurdly high, not necessary for a utilitarian purpose, but solely decorative, like the absurd pink crests on an exotic flamingo, sitting on one leg, rising above the water. Flamboyant—that was the word for these trees, their grandiose plumes alerting you to their presence, so different from the modest and decorous trees of the home of Wendy’s parents on Raleigh Street in New Bay, New York. Foliage there blended in, giving evidence that there was a gardener in the background whose job was to contain the wildness of nature, keep botanical growth in proportion.

      Were these trees, fifteen or twenty feet high, even real? Maybe they were only an exotic projection of what tourists wanted to see when they got off the plane?

      What else here would surprise her? She knew intellectually that in Israel the climate and topography would be entirely different. It still felt so unsettling to actually be in this place, to realize how changed her surroundings were from what she was used to.

      The heat. When she left New York last night, the summer evening had a cool undercurrent to it. In Tel Aviv, the middle-of-the-day humidity showed no signs of abating; it asssaulted her with its denseness.

      The light here was different, somehow sharper, bringing objects into clearer focus. Were she in a movie, the lenses would shift now; all would be in Technicolor, highlighted, distinct from the black and white of her last few weeks at her parents’ house and, after she had closed down her Princeton apartment, a short reprieve from them visiting her grandmother Essie.

      This year, there were no classes to dictate how to spend her days, no students with papers needing to be graded. And no family to ask that she come home for Hanukkah or a nephew’s birthday. She breathed in the humid summer air, and it actually felt refreshing.

      Waiting her turn to gingerly tread the steep metal steps, Wendy began the slow passage off the plane, shuffling behind other passengers.

      She looked down. It was a long way to the ground.

      Wendy was seized with a sudden feeling of vertigo. What if I fall? Can I make it down these steps? She felt her heart constricting, the flow of blood to it getting smaller, more limited, as though fear might make it stop and harden suddenly, to become a great stone sitting in her chest.

      She couldn’t go down the steps. As she was panicking—picturing how she would turn around and go back to the plane with a feeble explanation that there was a mistake, she wasn’t really supposed to get off—she was jostled gently from behind. She felt her feet move down the stairs with the crowd. The descent down the steps was performed only by her legs, the connection between their actions and her brain’s volition entirely severed.

      Abruptly, her legs brought her to the ground; now she was putting one foot in front of the other. She remembered a moment at the beginning of On the Road, when Kerouac’s narrator wakes up in Iowa and feels a stranger to himself, his life a haunted life, himself a ghost. His temporary disorientation, this moment of blankness and bafflement, stays with him, fueling his search for a way to get at himself, who he is capable of being. Steadying herself after the steep descent, she thought, taking her first step on the flat ground, Am I going to feel Kerouac’s hauntedness and blank incomprehension this year?

      She was on the ground, the actual soil of the Holy Land, and only felt terror. She wondered whether anyone still kissed the ground, as she remembered hearing travelers did in bygone times. She didn’t see anyone performing a sense of reverence for the sacred ground.

      Wendy felt disappointed, seeing the travelers trudging to the waiting bus. She wished for ritual, fanfare, drama, to accompany her journey.

      She took her carry-on luggage, the backpack with her laptop and her orange and green striped canvas tote bag filled with toiletries and snacks, and followed the crowd to the waiting bus, for the ride towards the airport building. The travelers proceeded to the area where they would get their passports ceremonially embossed with today’s date—the modern ritual of entry, shorn of religious import.

      She waited in the line labeled, “Holders of Foreign Passports.” There were significantly more booths open to holders of Israeli passports than foreign ones. The five lines for possessors of Israeli passports cleared rapidly, while her queue and the one next to it had five or six family groups still waiting. Wendy felt unwelcome, like a child visiting a friend’s house who sees that the mother always gives her own child more food and bigger portions of dessert. She felt the child’s stunned surprise that an adult would play favorites so obviously.

      Wendy finally reached the passport control booth. The young woman inside looked to be about twenty-five, her straight black shoulder-length hair dyed in reddish highlights, her skin the tawny color of Jews from Arabic-speaking countries. She asked questions of Wendy in routine bureaucratic language: “What is the purpose of your visit? How long do you plan to stay? Do you speak Hebrew? Are you visiting family? What is your address in Israel?”

      Wendy looked at the clerk and thought of what Lamdan had said to her: “The questions may turn back to you.” She thought about questions that would devastate her because of her profound inability to answer them. Is anything you are doing here is worthwhile or will it amount to much? Should you be here now? Who are you kidding—will you ever be able to write this kind of dissertation? How are you going to manage in a country where you don’t speak the language?

      “I plan to be in Israel for a year to do research on my dissertation.”

      “The . . . em . . . subject of this dissertation?”

      “American baalei teshuvah in

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