This Blog

I created this blog three years ago when we moved to California to unpack my adjustment to California. I was born in London. I spent most of my adult life in New York City and was fiercely proud of my identity as a New Yorker. I lived through 9/11; I lived through the 2002 blackout, hurricane Floyd, hurricane Irene, Super Storm Sandy, the COVID lockdown and the summer of 2020. Along the way, I discovered that I had become an American and formalized that identity by becoming a citizen. I met Amanda, a proud fourth-generation New Yorker; we got married on a beach on the Brooklyn side of East River next to the Manhattan Bridge so that we could invite the city to be a guest at our wedding.

And then, we moved to California so Amanda could perform a service to the city of New York. We’re still fiercely proud New Yorkers; we’re making sure our daughter grows up proud of her heritage and status as a fifth-generation New Yorker (she was born in a hospital close to the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge). However my accent has not changed at all in almost a quarter of a century living in New York City, so when I encounter people in California, and they ask me where I’m from, the answer they’re looking for is not my adoptive hometown. They’re asking me about the country in which I acquired the accent with which I speak. The result is a feeling of dissonance and a reminder of loss. I originally conceived this blog as a place to write about that journey, and I still may.

However, my identity did not start with my birthplace. My father came to London as a child refugee from Hitler when he was 14 years old. My paternal family had lived in Vienna for at least three generations: my father’s paternal family came there from what is now Czechia, and his maternal family came there from Hungary.

My mother was born in Abadan in Iran. When she was 10, her extended maternal family moved to Israel. As a result, I have a large extended family in a country I’ve never lived in but feels like a home that never will quite be home but whose sights, sounds and aromas resonate within me with the warmth of the fondest memories of childhood. It’s a country whose language I do not speak. However, when I hear it spoken around me, my brain hears decades-old echoes of emotions originating in the feelings of safety and security of my earliest life. It’s a country that, whenever I visit, causes me to be thrilled by the vibrancy of the modern country that is the living, breathing civilization of the Jewish people.

I do not see it through rose-tinted glasses. In a normal Western country, I’m politically a creature of the center-right. However, just as this is true in the distorted context of my adoptive country, my political home, if I lived in Israel, would be on the left.

Above all else, Israel is my family’s home (and not just of my maternal family; a few years ago, I had the great joy of reconnecting with the children of my father’s first cousin, Suzie (as he knew her), who made her home after the war in Jerusalem).

I have never lived in Israel. I am not Israeli; however, I understand my family’s home in ways that are lost to many people in my adoptive country. I found early in my American journey that I had a useful perspective that came from being a person who was not born here but came here from a country that was as close to the US as one could get (the nation that unwillingly gave birth to the United States) without actually being itself, American. This perspective of coming from somewhere very close allowed me to see my adoptive home on its own terms while having enough distance to recognize and question what is exceptional about it. It has allowed me to understand it in ways that may be hard for a native-born American. I might write more about that perspective in this blog if I keep my current resolution to write more. However, right now, I might have a similar helpful in-between perspective about the country that is my family’s home and the current situation.

This is a very long way to say that I’m about to start writing in this blog about topics with a much broader range than I originally conceived of when I created it. However, I don’t think I need to make any changes to it. I think its title is still just right.