LITMIR.BIZ

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li’gamrei. I had this boyfriend, Aharon. We travel . . . India . . . after the army. I thought we get married. He had this—I don’t know how to say in English—havayah—at a rave. He became dati. I hate all the rules—it takes the . . . how do you say . . . ta’am, taste, from life. He in yeshiva, and his wife . . . with their second child. We were biyahad, em, together, seven years. Zeh lo fair! It should be me, his wife!”

      Wendy did not know how to respond. She had never thought her dissertation topic would touch a bureaucrat at an airport. She hadn’t thought about Israeli baalei teshuvah. Did the fact that they exist invalidate her theories that baalei teshuvah are merely another self-invention of the American Jew—Jewish piety inventing itself like Hollywood invented itself? Would she have to include footnotes and literature about Israelis to show she’d done her research homework? Do I have to worry about this now?

      The clerk stamped firmly on Wendy’s passport; she looked up and straight at Wendy’s face. “I hope zey don’t leave you when you write about them. Better luck zan me.” She smiled at Wendy, but it was a smile that faded quickly and looked impossibly tired for someone so young.

      “Thanks,” Wendy called out, not knowing what else to say.

      Wendy looked down at the date on the passport: July 17, 1996. The previous stamp, from 1987 when she’d first procured the passport, was from her trip to Israel before her senior year of high school. She hadn’t wanted to go with a group from Camp Kodimoh, the Jewish camp she’d attended for three years, because for those kids the trip was a chance to drink and hook up. She wanted to do something more meaningful and productive, so chose to spend six weeks working on a kibbutz. She had barely toured the country then, and didn’t know Jerusalem, where she’d be living, at all. Her parents, Sylvia and Arthur, had thought it a good plan: build the Jewish state, be around Jewish men. She’d only told them recently that the most interesting person on the kibbutz was a non-Jewish volunteer from Malmo, Sweden, whom she dated briefly. This trip, her parents were worried that she was going to follow the paths of her subjects and become similarly totally religious. It was so demeaning that it was easier for them to imagine her as a subservient woman with a wig and lots of kids than as someone capable of pursuing a professional career as a university professor. She was the youngest of three, and they just didn’t take her professional aspirations seriously, assuming graduate school was just a way for her to fill time till marriage and children. They assumed that, like her sister Lisa, who quit her good job at a law firm when she didn’t want to return from maternity leave, Wendy might work a bit, but only until she had kids.

      At the luggage carousel, Wendy noted the household goods on the conveyor belt. All the items—baby swings, drum sets, stereos, microwave ovens, computers—were to enhance a house, the place people live with a family. She felt conspicuously alone. Looking around at the waiting families, she knew that she wanted to fall in love and have kids one day, to have someone to make a home with. It had to be in her own way, if she met the right person and wanted to, not because it was expected of her by someone else.

      Her thoughts were diverted by a dull pain in her thigh as a large trunk suddenly rammed her. “Ow! Look where you’re going!” she yelled at the man behind her. She spied her duffel bags coming towards her and stopped massaging the ache in her thigh long enough to nab them.

      Wendy left the baggage area to go to customs, pushing a luggage cart with her two huge duffel bags, the box of books too important to trust to the mail like the other four boxes of books, and her backpack and tote bag. She made a declaration that there were no individual items worth over five hundred dollars and imagined what it might be to have diamonds or cocaine in the lining of her suitcase if she were a black market smuggler. Could she be bringing anything dangerous into the country?

      Once she cleared customs, she came to the exit door and began to hear a dull roar from outside. The automatic doors parted and she began to walk through an assemblage of faces. All were in family groups, the mass of them appearing like a collage made with oil pastel crayons. The color was applied with smudges and blotches, light skinned ones here, darker swarthier groups there, blending in a crowd that was a microcosm of Israel. Ethiopian families darkest of all, Arab families with kaffiyehs and chadors, Hasidic families with black hats and wigs, secular families without any kind of hair covering save a baseball cap for the heat. The splotches of color blended together to greet their relatives returning home.

      Part of her found the family groups amusing and made her feel relieved to be alone, with no family members to embarrass her. She thought back to the teenagers going on summer tours to Israel she’d seen at the airport in New York, whose parents kept embracing them, copious tears in their eyes, not letting the kids go. Wendy felt embarrassed by so much public display of affection, thinking it as inappropriate as the adolescent variety, something that belonged in a more concealed environment, its excrescences making her recoil. Yet, she felt a pang: of all the howling, whinnying, growling noises that were being made to attract the attention of returning family members, none were for her.

      Was home only a place where you were welcomed? Robert Frost’s lines about home came to her mind—that it is the “place where/ When you have to go there / they have to take you in.”

      Would anyone take her in this year? Who would be her friends? She knew that part of the Fulbright fellowship was meeting with the others once a month and presenting their work to each other. She always had things in common with other future academics: similar priorities and values, a shared frame of reference, even a knowledge of the quirks and flamboyancies of the most prominent senior people in each field. It was easier, Wendy generally found, to be friends with someone who shared something in common with you—someone who knew someone you knew, had been to the same school or camp, knew a place you did. She remembered one of her friends telling her as she left Princeton, “Maybe you will find the best friend you’ve ever had there.”

      She was again jostled by someone at her side. She knew that, somewhere in the airport, there was a shared cab to Jerusalem, but wasn’t sure how to find it. Wendy was dazed, blinking in the bright summer sun, trying to find her way; but there were tears in her eyes. From the intensity of the sun? From exhaustion at not having slept well on the plane? Or from a larger anxiety about what she was doing here at all?

      “Do you know where you’re going?” a familiar voice asked.

      “No,” Wendy responded, turning to see Professor Lamdan, now pushing an airport luggage cart filled with suitcases and boxes of Little Tykes and Fisher Price toys, gifts for his grandchildren. She noted his six blue numbers on the forearm that carefully gripped the cart, and asked why she was feeling sorry for herself. How, she wondered, had Lamdan figured out where he was going?

      She looked at him gratefully and said, “I’m looking for a shared cab to Jerusalem.”

      “Come, it’s over here,” he said gesturing. “It must be a bit overwhelming to be here for the first time. For me, every time, it’s a miracle. The Gemara says the air of Eretz Yisrael makes one wise.” He stopped and paused for breath, his intake of the molecules of the Holy Land’s air slow and careful.

      She followed after him, pushing her own off-kilter cart—the heaviness of the duffel bags making her progress forward an exercise in awkwardness—and marveling at the dignity in his gait. He looked weak, because he was so physically skinny, yet strong, striding in front of her, pushing his luggage cart. What did it cost him, that single-mindedness of putting one foot in front of the other? Maybe it was indeed heroic to keep going, no matter what.

      Having followed Lamdan, putting his one foot in front of the other, she and he were at the end of the path from the airport to the parking area, where cars were everywhere, horns honking. He maneuvered his cart in front of the van they would share, spoke to the driver in Hebrew, and gestured at Wendy, indicating she was coming also. She stood next to him, catching only the words “yofee,” “fine,” and “Yerushalayim,” Jerusalem. The driver yanked their bags off the luggage carts and heaved them to the storage area in the rear of the van. Lamdan gestured to Wendy to get in. There were three rows of seats—the back one had a mother and two young children in it; her older two were in the middle row. Lamdan got in

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