Tuesday, 24 January 2006 - 2:39 AM

Well, it looks as if Suzanne is going through the pangs of homesickness. To be honest, I went through the same thing. It was around the time that Mount St. Helens starting farting out ash again on the beautiful Portland horizon. From that point on, I really couldn't wait to get home, at least to visit.

It was also around the time when the ulpan started going downhill for me. I couldn't take the idea of people who were so much dumber than I (not claiming to be so smart, folks) were in charge of my everyday activities and did not make decisions that I felt were reasonable or logical to any degree.

Then, I had to go home to sell my car before making Aliyah officially. I spent an entire month in the US going from one state to the next visiting family and friends. It turns out that I love and miss Israel when I am not with her even more than I miss my family and friends when I am not with them.

It would appear that we shall soon see if it is the same with Suzanne...

Of course, I would always prefer that the beautiful, interesting, and intelligent American girls would stay closer to me here in Israel, but you can't always get what you want, as the Stones used to say (not that I listen to the Stones...)

Sleeps very close to smelly, gross roommate,
Eric

Oh, and when describing our actually third-world Tel Aviv central Bus Station, Suzanne forgot to mention the high percentage of migrant workers from Thailand and the Philipines. This is the place to go if your granny needs a caretaker while you are off in Eilat, tanning your already olive tush. Very interesting there, indeed.

Wednesday, 25 January 2006 - 8:58 PM

Okay, it's time for my two cents too.

First of all, Suzanne's granny is no more likely to go to Tel Aviv than she is to try to be the first Jew on the Moon. In fact, the old girl doesn't spend two seconds a year thinking about Israel, and at age 82 does well enough just getting out to the doctor to "Krech" about her aches and pains.

The realiity of what Suzanne is going through isn't just the fact that she misses relatives. She's steeped in a Weltenschaung that is so different from what she's living with right now, and she recognizes it - at least tacitly. It would very difficult for a person who has grown up the way she did to trash it all for a life of needless privation in a land where she would always be treated as a foreigner. She has to recognize that, especially so when being treated like crap by people miles beneath her.

Even living in squalor here, she'd be doing better than she is right now. And there are plenty of committed Jews in this country to find a niche. Suzanne doesn't have to live in a town with only 10,000 Jews. Granted, there are only about 270,000 in Chicago, but that's enough to find a place in the community that's just as spiritually satisfying as Eretz Y'Israel regardless of stripe or color.

There are other factors that would induce anyone of common sensibility to come back here to play out a life: the chance to get an education in her first language; the chance to be with family who aren't going ever to go to Israel to visit and won't be alive much longer anyway; the chance to see nieces and nephews and to have children who have cousins who they are going to see and know after us old folks are in the shroud. Why live a solitary existence in a land where life is played out from the bottom? It just doesn't calculate. Suzanne is smart enough to recognize it.

You can't presume that because you went through some measure of "homesickness" that the experience Suzanne is having is one whit like yours. Her upbringing was probably a world apart from yours - unless you tell me you were raised in Scarsdale or Westport or Kings Point or in a townhouse off of Madison Avenue or the like in a six bedroom house. Call it snooty, and your justified. But it's not, really. It creates a mind-set that is never excised from a person's consciousness who grew up in that fashion. It's not petty bourgeois. Define it as you like, but it is a way of looking at the world that most cannot even imagine. Suzanne understands it at least tacitly and maybe even focally.

Each time I leave, Chicago is tugging my sleeve. Chicago is my kind of town. Maybe that's where it's at. Sunning your tush on the beach at Eilat doesn't cut it for a lifetime. That's the long view. That's where it is from a 60 year old's standpoint.


Dad

Wednesday, 8 February 2006 - 11:31 PM

If anyone really liked that idea of a co-op they should eMail. The concept is SHALOM BAYIS, the halachic permission for the desacration of G-d's name to preserve marriage.

I left Morristown yeshiva for the second time, I thought I would hide this here.

The Lakefront is nostalgiac, I don't know when it crosses over to be holy.

If you like Suzanne's blog there is a whole world just like it "Orhodox Anarachy" www.jewschool.com