E's parents were born in Harbin, on the Manchurian border between Russia and China. Her grandparents were Ukrainian Jews escaping the pogroms in Odessa. Instead of going West, like most people, they hopped on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and reached the Eastern end of the world.
Sometimes I wonder how people made those decisions, in
moments when there was a choice, about where to go. Even the decision to
leave in and of itself – what made certain people decide to leave, while most
stayed? I understand, working for an expat community and having had parents who
made choices like these, what makes people move today. But I am so curious
about these choices in the past, in a time the world was much larger and you
couldn't just get on a return flight and go back. Why did my great grandfather,
for example, decide to get on a boat to Latin American, when Israel was
literally right next door from Syria? Is this merely a difference in character,
between idealists and entrepreneurs, or in E's family's case, between
adventurers and realists? Or were these decisions simply made in the spur of
the moment: here is the boat or the train, let's go before we can't anymore,
before we change our minds?
All stories that involve some sort of displacement are rife
with series of decisions like these, intricate combinations of circumstance and
choice that end up changing lives. I met a British couple this week who told me
that her grandparents had been two of about a thousand Jews who spent the war
in the Philippines. We know that the Chinese parts of Shanghai, where the Jews
lived, were quite poor back then; I can’t even imagine what the Philippines
must have been like. They were put in a ghetto by the Japanese, much like the
Jews in Shanghai, but as opposed to Shanghai, there was no local Jewish
community or a thriving international city surrounding them. Instead, they were
on an island in the middle of the pacific, invaded by the Japanese, and
starving. After the war, this couple
went back to Germany (imagine how bad it must have been in the Philippines!),
only to leave shortly afterwards to rejoin their daughter, who went on the Kinder
Transport to London in the beginning of the war. By the time her parents
arrived, they'd been apart for ten years.
Almost two decades after E's grandparents arrived in Harbin,
her parents moved to Shanghai escaping the Japanese invasion. To this day, her
grandparents are buried in the Harbin Jewish Cemetery. Sometime in the 50s, her
father and aunt were contacted by "the Jewish organization" (JDC?)
because the Chinese government was moving the Jewish cemetery from the center
of town to the outskirts. The government was charging money from the relatives
to move the graves. E remembers her
father and aunt arguing about this, one side saying they had to pay because it
was their parents' graves for G-d's sake, the other saying that the Chinese
were probably going to keep the money and abandon the graves. Only recently,
through a project to catalogue the graves and put them on a website (done by
German students and the German government), did she find out that her
grandparents' graves where moved and are still in the new location.
In Shanghai, her
parents were part of the rather large Russian Jewish community, which numbered
several thousand at one point. This is the community that built one of two
surviving synagogues in Shanghai, Ohel Moshe. At the end of the war, her
parents moved to Israel, the only viable option for stateless refugees, who
were counted in the Chinese quota for immigration to countries like Australia
and the United States (because they were born in China).
E was born in Israel, but before she turned two, the family
moved to Japan. They had gone to Israel via Japan, and in any case had family
there (some of her father's siblings ended up there instead of Shanghai). They
had already started a business, and they invited E's father to come join them. By
then her parents, who had spent their entire lives in this giant, international
– albeit recently war-torn – city of the far east, could not get used to the
messy (and probably a bit swampy and buggy) beginning that was the founding of
Israel.
And so, E grew up in the tiny Russian Jewish community of
the outskirts of Tokyo, where they lived until she was about 15 years old. When
we met, we were having dinner at a Shanghainese restaurant, familiar food to
her having grown up with a lot of Shanghainese around, which makes sense given
where her parents moved from and around which culture and people they probably
felt at home. She describes the Tokyo-Russian community as little but uniform,
a bit closed off to other foreigners perhaps, but providing a much needed sense
of home for its own people. The language and food were Russian, and it was a
relatively liberal (the restaurant wasn't kosher, for example, and beef
stroganoff was a popular dish), rabbi-less community.
They moved to Sam Francisco in the sixties, when E was a
teenager. I imagine that after Shanghai and Tokyo, it felt the most like home. E
got married and moved to the Mid-West when her (British) husband was relocated
there for work.
By this point I realized that the results of her and my life
experience are very similar: we have both arrived to a point where we feel –
and are – foreign everywhere. The not-insignificant difference is that she
already made her adult choices (her daughter is five years older than me),
whereas I will very soon be on the brink of making those choices myself.
And so I asked her what made her stay in the Mid-West for
thirty years and raise her child there (in one place and in that
place), especially as she and her husband had the opportunity to relocate, to
work and live internationally in a viable and sustainable way. She turned to me
over the plate of sweet-fried fish (my personal favorite Shanghainese dish) and
said, "Roots". Growing up as a Westerner in East Asia, she added, you
are always an observer, never a participant. One reason why some Jews stayed
for so long, she said, is that a Jewish community does provide a healthy outlet
for belonging, one bubble in which you are a participant, and this makes
the overall experience healthier. This insight added a new level of meaning to
my work with the community, and gave it a legitimacy I had not previously
considered.
When social options
are so limited, and your identity simply cannot be tied to where your home is,
the result is a feeling of permanent detachment and you end up with a
neither-this-nor-that identity (ie, you are neither fully from your parents
culture, nor fully from your local culture). I can see how roots, community,
but above all, being able to be like everyone else (and thus being accepted by the
surrounding society) could become your central need, and the base for your
decision-making.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it. E
still feels like an outsider, not in San Francisco, but definitely in her
Mid-Western enclave where she has lived for half her life. Perhaps the point is
that though she didn’t have a choice anymore, she wanted to give her child the
option to be from somewhere.
In the Hebrew School where I teach, I am observing my kids'
identity and helping them develop it through our Shorashim project (see below).
These are the smartest, most diverse and thoughtful kids I've met. Their
standards for themselves and other people have to do with intelligence, diversity
and adaptability – for example, the ability to learn and speak languages, and
relate to people different from themselves. Though I can tell that some of them
will face minor identity crises (for example, when they realize to what degree
they are outside of the mainstream of their parent's society, and thus how
utterly not from there they are), I believe identity crises are
incredibly character-building (having gone through several myself), and that
the end result is that you become your own unique person. Once you learn to
accept that – that you just can't be Israeli or French, or whatever – you are
left with a deep understanding of what identity is and what it can mean to
different people, as well as with the ability to deeply empathize and relate to
people who are completely different from you. There is no more "comfort
zone". Your comfort zone is yourself, out in the world.
Then again, I am smart enough not to discard E's advice and
experience so quickly. It is rare for me to meet someone who is genuinely like my
kids, but two generations older. This is one of the nicer side-effects of
Jewish displacement and "wandering": the diversity it generated
really is unimaginable, endless upon endless of combinations and individual
experiences, resulting in a plethora of interesting, unique people.
We'll see; it all goes back to that initial question: how and
why do people make the choice to leave, and how do they decide where to go?