Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature: Excerpt
“For anyone who has ever loved deeply and been willing to take risks for the sake of love.” Rachel Barenbaum author of Atomic Anna
When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn’t perfect.
Both 23, both Jewish, they lead very different lives: she’s a secular tourist, he’s an observant immigrant. Despite their opposing outlooks on two fundamental issues-country and religion-they are determined to make it work. For the next 20 years, they root and uproot their growing family, each longing for a singular place to call home.
In Places We Left Behind, Jennifer puts her marriage under a microscope, examining commitment and compromise, faith and family while moving between prose and poetry, playing with language and form, daring the reader to read between the lines.
EXCERPT
Conjunctions
After making love in his mismatched sheets, Philippe and I tally how many times we’ve each been to Israel. I count my trips—1971, 1975, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1988, now in 1989—needing both hands.
He counts his on one hand: |||. You win, he says, as if we’re competing.
I scan his room—no posters, no mirror, no nightstand—so boyish and beautiful, especially his bed.
Tell me everything, he says, adorning me with butterfly light kisses.
My tendency to share too much too soon makes me hesitate. He already knows that I’m here despite the First Intifada or Palestinian uprising, between a job in France and graduate school in New York, to immerse in Hebrew as well as to spend time with my only sibling and extended family, and that I miss my open-minded, California-born parents in the San Francisco Bay Area, but he has no idea that I made a Jackson Pollock mess of my love life the past two years and promised my mother that I wouldn’t fall in love and stay.
No, wait, I want to know why you’re here, I say, running my fingers through his silky chestnut hair. What made you immigrate?
Israeli chutzpah, Haifa, the Mediterranean, beach, bodysurfing, falafel, spicy food. Plus, my brother plans to make aliya too.
We each have one sibling; mine immigrated to Jerusalem, my temporary home base, immediately after college a few years earlier.
And since aliya comes from the verb la’a lot, which means to go up, I went up in my Jewish observance. Tu comprends?
Do I understand that he changed his lifestyle for a country? Absolutely not.
All weekend, I study this man, admiring how his pointy nose dominates an angular face, his olive skin glistens with oily patches, and his feet have white lines underneath his sandal straps.
All weekend, he reaches for me, amorous and solicitous of my attention.
Ever since we met at a Shabbat retreat for Francophones 144 hours earlier, I haven’t stopped thinking about him, convinced my secular mother will tell me it was beshert—Yiddish for destiny—after enrolling me in a pilot French program when I was six.
Philippe fits every box on my imaginary list:
French ✔
Jewish ✔
Smart ✔
Single ✔
Sexy with a guarded smile ✔
A far cry from the men of late: one Catholic Parisian whom my sibling refused to acknowledge, one Russian married man who my parents refused to discuss, one once-upon-a-time college friend who refused to commit.
Burrowed in Philippe’s biceps, I try to block out the conjunctions: if he wasn’t Sabbath observant, and he wasn’t enrapt with his new homeland, but he is.
Never ever
When I awaken to an empty bed, I follow my nose. Odors of breakfast drift down the hall, toward the galley kitchen. As batter hits butter, hissing sounds sing.
Joyeux anniversaire, he says.
In a fitted t-shirt and floral boxers, Philippe flips crepes single handedly. A sight I’ve never seen before. No man has ever made me crepes; no Frenchman has ever made me crepes; no any-nationality man has ever made me crepes.
Summer heat and sexual desire swarm my every cell. He tells me to sit, serves me impeccably round, thin, buttery crepes. I watch his string-bean-long legs cavort in the confined space, hearing my brain croon words like stay, forever, keep him while striving to ignore the others about distance, religion, and political climate. It’s not a perfect fit, and I’m old enough to know better.
Pang
One Friday morning, we ride a bus to Hadar, a working-class neighborhood halfway down Carmel Mountain, to Shabbat shop at the souk.
Everybody says Haifa resembles San Francisco, Philippe says.
He’s never been to the City by the Bay (or to the United States for that matter), but I’ve heard many Israelis liken the two. Both share steep, windy streets and water, but all similarities end there.
Out the bus window, I glimpse a neglected port, power plant, oil refinery, and random towers next to dilapidated buildings under puffs of pollution. Incomparable vis-à-vis the fog-enveloped vermillion Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars at Little-Engine-That-Could pace, or Coit Tower aglow from miles away. A pang of homesickness stings like a hornet.
Reprinted with permission from the publisher
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Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature was released on September 5, 2023 by Vine Leaves Press
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jennifer Lang lives in Tel Aviv, where she runs israelwriterstudio.com. Her prize-winning essays appear in Baltimore Review, Under the Sun, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is an Assistant Editor at Brevity Journal, longtime yoga practitioner and instructor. Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature (9/5/23) and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses (10/15/24) are both with Vine Leaves Press.
Category: On Writing
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