The Book Shuk

Sarah Gundle

Word Count 1659

I never felt like I belonged to my mother.

She taught me many things--to love books and black licorice; to bake a perfect lingonberry tart, and to care about Israel. She is perceptive, thoughtful, and smart. But all my life it was as if she was waiting for someone to give her permission to lay claim to motherhood, a license that never arrived. I hungered for her direction, but she didn’t feel it was “her place.” It created a taught wariness between us.

Looking back, it was when we left Israel when I was a young child that she let go of the fragile rope that bound us. Ever since then I felt adrift, like an unclaimed suitcase winding its way around a baggage claim carousel without an owner. I felt unmoored. If I didn’t belong to her, how could I belong anywhere?

The first time I had a mama bear moment and stormed into the principal’s office to avenge an injustice done to my daughter, all I could think afterward was that my mother would never have done the same for me. I had thrown decorum aside, but my mother shrank before such expressions of unbridled love.

I recently found in my mother’s attic a box of old Hebrew children’s books and records she had saved from Israel. They were carefully preserved, stacked neatly, and wrapped in tissue. I wiped a layer of dust from one of them and brought it to my nose, hoping its musty smell might feel familiar. I brought them downstairs and showed my mother.

“I remember this Alexander the zebra book, so well—he loses his stripes, remember? “I said. “I loved this book, it was my favorite. You read it to me over and over, and look it’s from “the book shuk,” how cute is that?”

My mother looked panicked, as if the books were dangerous. Maybe they were. “Put them away carefully…please.”

“I’ll put them back, I promise,” I said softly.

My senior year of high school, my parents were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. No one really noticed it was time for me to apply to college. At the time, I wasn’t unhappy about being ignored. I got away with things I would never have gotten away with had they been paying attention: parties at my dad’s house when he was away; late night assignations with my boyfriend; skipping school for spontaneous trips to the beach. The person who did notice was my college guidance counselor. “Sarah,” she said, “It’s time to get serious. Here is what I think you should do.” Her certainty brought me back to earth. That’s all it took. That fall, I applied early decision to the school she recommended; it wasn’t so much a decision as a statement: “I am still here, and I matter.” When I got in, my stomach sank when all my mother had to say was “how will you pay for it?”

My life has been dotted with such vertiginous moments—as if I’m teetering on the edge of a cliff with no railing. It is the feeling of being dropped. What do you think I should major in? Should I break up with my boyfriend because he hurt me? Should I buy a house? Will I survive my divorce? Why, if my new baby is supposed to bring me joy am I crying every day?

I never learned. I pushed her to the very edge of her high wire of anxiety more times than I can count. I would ask the question, a strident note already creeping into my voice because I knew the answer that would invariably follow: “I can’t tell you what to do.”

Sometimes I would yell or cry in frustration. “Don’t you have an opinion?” She never answered. I felt cruel. I knew my questions hit with the force of a punch, and that was just the point. I longed for her, just once, to tell me what to do. She never did.

A middle child in an austere Swedish Lutheran family, she grew up on a farm attending a two-room schoolhouse until 8th grade. They did everything by hand; she didn’t own any store-bought clothing until high school. When she was two, her mother lost a baby and sunk into a postpartum depression that no one at the time recognized. In the aftermath, my mother learned to take up as little space as possible. On those rare occasions she discussed it, her childhood seemed to me one of profound loneliness.

When my brother and I were small, it seemed the opposite: her faraway life seemed exotic and wondrous. Watching Little House on the Prairie for clues to what her life must have been like, we’d ask, “You made your own root beer?” “Were the chickens your pets?” We longed for details, but she would not discuss it.

Occasionally we received presents from her family at the holidays, wrapped in Christmas paper that made my mother blanch and my father scoff, but otherwise, we had little contact. At my grandmother’s funeral, she wanted to say the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, but she made us hide behind a tree after the service to do it.

“Why are we hiding?” my brother and I asked, exchanging puzzled looks.

“Don’t start,” my mother said, looking stricken. “No one here would understand. They don’t know Jews. It would confuse them.”

Even after all that time, at a hard moment for her, she was still trying to take up as little space as possible.

She was an unlikely Israeli. My mother met my father when she was ready to make a change. It wasn’t so much that he convinced her to give up her life and religion to start over in Israel, as that she found in him a means of escape from a life she never belonged to.

She believed him when he told her they would live there forever. For my father, immigrating to Israel was an adventure. For my mother, it was a search for meaning and a home. When he had finished his adventure, battle-weary and scarred by his service in the Yom Kippur war, he was ready to leave. But she was just beginning, a fragile shoot in the dusty soil. Only in Israel did my mother become alive.

She converted to Judaism twice, once in New York out of faith, and again in Israel, out of necessity, to comply with the Orthodox state law. We were raised without any mention of holidays other than Jewish ones. She was the parent who made sure we went to an Orthodox Jewish day school and cooked the elaborate Shabbat dinners we had every week.

After making Aliyah, my parents moved to Kfar Saba, then a small town. My father was uneasy with the gossipy claustrophobia of a tiny community, but he was only home on weekends from his army base. For my mother, it was familiar. It might have been a different landscape, language, and religion but Kfar Saba moved with the same small town natural rhythms she had grown up with. It had one important difference, though: in place of the chilly reticence of the American Midwest was the opposite: the particular let-it-all-hang-out bluntness of Israel.

Tall and lithe, with her flowing blond hair, she attracted attention, and, prying questions. Why was she here; why had she converted; and where had she bought her sandals? She bathed in people’s curiosity. It made her feel at home, but not like any home she had known before. The deep intimacy of casual encounters in Israel resonated deeply for her. It was everything she yearned for: strangers on a bus overhearing her conversation and breaking in with their opinions; the grocer weighing the cantaloupe and throwing in a couple apricots “because look at you, all skin and bones,”; the opinionated neighbors who advised her what to do when I cried and rescued her when the boiler broke. Soon she felt happier in Israel, speaking a language that felt like rocks in her mouth, then she had ever felt in America.

My brother and I made her just another Israeli mom, buying vegetables at the shuk, going on day trips to visit my father at his base, worrying about conflict brewing at the border. She belonged. Rather than receding into the background, she took up space because, in Israel, there is no choice. She learned to do it unapologetically. I don’t think it occurred to her that she would ever leave. She chose her life in Israel, then it chose her and wrapped her in its firm embrace.

When we moved back to America, I felt like I lost my mother. For years I understood her depression as the sticky residue of resentment she felt towards my father for making her leave. Removed from that place, she no longer knew who she was. But I now think there was more to it. Israel was a place of such certainty that its absence in our relationship mattered less. As my mother spiraled into depression, our tenuous bond was severed. We were like two people in an arranged marriage circling around each other: intimate, but strangers. It wasn’t just that she never recovered from leaving Israel; it was that our relationship didn’t.

That day that I found the box in the attic of the Israeli children’s books my mother lovingly read to me so many times in my childhood, I wasn’t entirely truthful with her. I did as she asked and put the box back, but I kept the Alexander the striped zebra book. The memory of my mother reading it to me in our apartment in Kfar Saba: that belongs to me, the same way that my children belong to me and will hopefully feel a greater sense of belonging in the world than I ever have. And now I read it to my youngest daughter every night. It’s her favorite, too.

Sarah is a psychologist living in Brooklyn with her two daughters. She has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. In addition to her private practice, she teaches courses on trauma and international mental health at Mount Sinai Hospital system.