In A Promised Land

by Geoffrey Clarfield (March 2012)

When I was twenty six years old I went to Jerusalem to learn Hebrew. I arrived at Ben Gurion airport on the humid coastal plain, where a taxi from the Jewish Agency had been designated to collect me and a number of other potential immigrants to the Jewish State. An elderly volunteer of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) greeted us. He checked the list of arrivals and then made sure we were all in the cab for the trip up to the capital city.

Within an hour we had arrived in Jerusalem. The air was clear, the humidity low and the whole city seemed to be glowing, or even on fire, from the masses of Jerusalem stone that were in evidence in all buildings. We were ushered in to the entrance of the language school dormitory and shown to our rooms.

Four people to a room, men and women in separate rooms but not in separate parts of the building. It was a long rectangular building of two floors probably built during the British Mandate or even earlier during the Ottoman period. The corridors were long and wide and the rooves high as was the custom of the Turks who had been there just a few years before the British arrived with their Balfour declaration and a mandate for a Jewish state. We all ate in a cafeteria and studied in classes based on levels of fluency. I was at the second level since I knew the alphabet, could read and write but did not communicate easily or effectively.

Who were these Jewish youth who had decided to try to live in the land of Israel in the year of 1979, just six years after the Yom Kippur war?

Then there were the orthodox returnees, a born again lawyer from New York and an orthodox Cambridge graduate from the UK who regularly offered to come and kosher the kitchens of each of us who were to move into private apartments once the course was over.

Who could be surprised when after a few weeks it became clear that most of these Jewish youths were not really here for the same reasons that I was, that is, to learn the language of the Jews and to see what contribution they could make to the Jewish state. Most of them were individuals at a turning point in their life, young adults who had not found themselves or, who were looking for that significant other that they had not found in their home countries. I did not understand it at the time, but they had all come to Jerusalem to redeem themselves in some way, as if despite the secularism of their project and the age, some deep Biblical paradigm was invoked to give meaning to their search for permanent happiness. In retrospect I was not as different as I thought. I had come to explore the rebirth of the Jewish people in their own homeland in the unconscious hope that perhaps I too would be transformed.

Was I really in the same boat as this colorful, vibrant group of new immigrants to the Jewish State? Perhaps I was. But I am not sure when I look back at it many years later. Before I came to Jerusalem I had met an Israeli girl my age in Canada and we had begun a serious relationship. She wanted to visit L.A. before she came home to live with me. I knew that I would hate L.A. so I went off to study Hebrew. She was set to return in eight weeks. All around me panic-stricken youth were coupling and mating at lightning speed.

The Turk and the half-nude Austrian girl soon were a couple. The other English girl found someone too. The Argentinean woman was negotiating an affair with a married Israeli man. A Hungarian man and a Romanian woman fell deeply in love despite the fact that they communicated in rudimentary Hebrew, while an Algerian born francophone teamed up with a woman who had recently escaped from the mullahs in Teheran. He and I shared a fascination with early medieval European music and the music of North Africa.

Most evenings, I would sit in the enclosed courtyard of our student residence, under lemon trees, chatting in French with the Algerian night watchman comparing the finer points of the singers featured on Radio Cairo, Damascus and Amman, while sipping Turkish coffee. I lived in this limbo like existence for eight weeks, on friendly terms with everyone, but a growing enigma in the eyes of my fellow students and roommates.

The English girl got pregnant and returned to England. Her boyfriend would come and visit her from Ramallah. No one had noticed her condition until it was too late. Sami and his girlfriend announced their engagement. One person broke her arm and walked around with a sling. Some started trying to get jobs and prepare for the move out into the wider society. Our teachers taught us simple grammar and vocabulary but nothing about Israeli daily life or culture or how to get a job.

The food was adequate, the administrators below average, the place was clean and in the middle of a slum. It was run by the Jewish Agency and staffed by poorly paid employees. Each day in the late afternoon, young women from the slums would walk by the school in revealing outfits, hoping to catch the eye of a new immigrant, hoping against hope that some dashing man from the Diaspora would whisk them out of poverty.

The nightwatchman stared at her in disbelief, as did my other classmates. It finally dawned on me that they really had not believed my story. To them I was just one more Jewish refugee in Zion, either a real refugee from the antisemitic juntas of Argentina or an emotional one, fleeing the emotional challenges and contradictions of suburban North American Jewish life at that time.

I assumed that they thought my story was the sublimated version of their anxious coupling. As far as I was concerned, I was just one more of a few boys from a nice Toronto suburb intrigued by the tragedy of Jewish homelessness and the possibility of contributing to the normalization of Jewish life in the national homeland.

My girlfriend, who the following year became my wife, toured the place with me and was emotionally quite shaken. She had been born in Israel and although she had known war, family and friends had always surrounded her. She had had schoolmates and friends who had escaped from Yemen, Morocco, Hungary in 56 but she had never been a refugee, never been separated from her family, without siblings, parents, aunts or uncles. She had always known the language and culture of daily life and had never had to leave everything behind.

During my eight weeks at the language school I had felt alone. It was the time before cell phones, before the internet, a time when a five minute long distance call cost an arm and a leg, and you only did it once or twice a year and when you did you would often yell on the phone out of excitement and fear that you may not be heard at the other end.

I had been without family, had felt disoriented and childish because I did not speak the language and lived without a network or a social support system to see me through. Like my fellow students, I was more or less cut off from the outside world and dependent on my teachers and the sullen administrators who ran the place. Moods being infective, I could easily identify with the anxiety of these immigrants who desperately needed someone to cling to, someone to hold in the middle of the night and with whom to fantasize a normal future.

My career as an anthropologist began with this intense bit of fieldwork. I had somehow chosen to live the life of a homeless, Jewish immigrant in a foreign land. I am convinced that to some degree I relived the fears and hopes of my grandparents, when they stepped off the boat in Halifax in the late nineteenth century, hoping to enter the promised land that they had been told lay across the Ocean. I have never forgotten that feeling of loneliness and isolation.

Many years later a Polish Jewish immigrant friend of mine, a doctor who had moved to Canada told me that immigration is like a psychiatric disorder. In a new culture everything that was once familiar is wrong and everything that is unfamiliar is right. That is how I felt as I struggled to learn in a new language in a new country with no friends or family from my childhood to speak to or with whom to share the experience. It was a humbling and most worthwhile lesson. It changed me forever.

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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