Israeli culture shock after aliyah explored in new book
Sitting in my living room in Gush Etzion, reading about Sasson living in America while longing for Israel, made for a painful read.
By RIVKAH LAMBERT ADLERUpdated: JUNE 17, 2021 14:59DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH, where the author finds herself stuck despite wanting to live in Israel, lies underwater from flooding of the Allegheny River (top) and Monongahela River, 1995.(photo credit: REUTERS)
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a dozen books about longing for a life in Israel, written by Jews who eventually made aliyah. Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home by Dorit Sasson is a darker echo of those stories because Sasson is, for now, stuck in the US.As a young woman, Sasson made aliyah from America. She wrote her first memoir, Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces, about her time in the IDF.Nearly two decades later, after the privatization of her family’s kibbutz, her Israeli husband was unable to find honorable work there. In pursuit of a better life, or at least a financially stable one, the Sasson family relocated to Dorit’s native America.That’s the backstory.Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home is actually a heartrending tale of reconciling feelings of home when you live in one place and long for another.Sitting in my living room in Gush Etzion, reading about Sasson living in America while longing for Israel, made for a painful read. Her struggle resonated very personally, reminding me of the years I desperately wanted to make aliyah but couldn’t leave the US yet.Sasson precisely captures the way new immigrants are often entranced by their earliest interactions with Israeli culture.“When I first saw shiva unfold as a new immigrant and IDF soldier,” she writes, “I was struck by the public display of mourning. Strangers and mere acquaintances aren’t seen as disruptors to the grieving process, for in Israel, no matter how diverse or big the community is, there’s a strong sense of yahad, or togetherness, that brings people together under the most tragic and difficult of circumstances.”In a subsequent chapter, she connects her earlier impressions of shiva to the experience she had years later, when she and her husband returned to Israel for the shiva of her mother-in-law. She writes how it is a “...reminder that for Israelis, personal bereavement is not personal, it’s a community experience. In its own way, this experience is bringing me closer to Israel.”The time spent back in Israel during the shiva period served another purpose. “For me it’s now clear that Israel, while not the country of my birth, is the country of my heart,” she writes.
Her vivid descriptions of the way she feels being back in America remind me of what I experience every time I return to the US for a visit. Sasson identifies it as reverse culture shock; it’s a level of unease experienced by people who return to their former home, after living in another culture for an extended period of time.Even the transition back to speaking English full-time is disorienting for Sasson. “And yet, while I speak English as any native American would, my preference for Hebrew is clear. I worked hard to build my life there, and I had to earn my fluency and place in Israeli culture. In many ways, this has made me feel more loyal to Israel than I can or will ever feel to America.”Her prose enchants in places, such as when she describes meeting a new Hebrew-speaking friend in Pittsburgh: “Nadine eloquently holds her end of the conversation, Hebrew rolling off her tongue like diamonds into my palm.”Although it’s clear she’s trying very hard to reconcile herself to the reality that her physical life is centered in Pittsburgh, now and for the foreseeable future, Sasson fails to convince the reader that she’s made peace with it.Throughout the book, she adds layer after layer to her portrait of a soul in disharmony with its surroundings. In passages such as these, Sasson openly shares her distress with the sympathetic reader:“I grieve over what I don’t have here: a tribe.”“Saying yes to Pittsburgh means Israel isn’t in the cards for us. And I still feel that Israel, our heart home, is where we need to be. Time will tell if I will outgrow these feelings.”“Every time I light our Shabbat candles on Friday night in our Pittsburgh kitchen, I’ll close my eyes and remember this holy moment. Remember that I’m not alone, that the light of our candles will connect us to Israel, no matter what our zip code is. For now, this spiritual zip code is the one I will carry in my heart.”And, most gut-wrenching of all, “At what point does love for one’s country become so powerful that nothing else matters?”The book is vivid and heartfelt, documenting the painstaking journey of wrestling with two identities and the courage it took Sasson to give up her Israeli home and return to America as a “foreigner.” It’s a book that highlights the very specific anguish of feeling that one is, very simply, living in the wrong place.SAND AND STEEL By Dorit SassonMascot Books296 pages; $16.95Available now for preorder
