Opinion The place that will take you in
Family histories in the modern world are stories of uprooting,exile,and wandering....
Now about to circle back to London after 30 years,Ive been thinking about my familys odyssey. We lose sight of the long arc of things in the rapid ricocheting of modern life. This is just one story among many,with its measure of joy and tragedy,and I recount these events not because I find anything exceptional in them but rather because I believe the pain of displacement amounts to a modern pathology.
Ill begin in South Africa,where I recently went to the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It was a perfect winters morning on the high plateau,still and luminous. On a wall,beneath pines,there is a plaque inscribed to the memory of my mother,who was born there in 1929.
In Africa,it is your forefathers graves that identify your land. On that principle,it seems right that my mother be remembered in Johannesburg. Her parents are buried in that cemetery,as is her grandfather. I have a photo of him,chin jutting,suit impeccably pressed,in full tycoon pose; a South African Henry Ford.
Fortunes come and go. His went,which is another story. Well before that happened,my mother enjoyed the fruits of his entrepreneurship. Then love of a young doctor,my father,lifted her from that comfortable cocoon into the cold and the rationing of post-war London.
She made the best of it. Uprooting is hard. The surface current of her English life appeared smooth at times,but in the depths the tug of African sun and light never abated. She abhorred the damp. Hers was the land of avocado trees and dry heat. In her latter years she spent more time in South Africa. It was her souls home,another reason for putting the plaque there rather than in London.
Where is home? For Robert Frost,Home is the place where,when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in. Its Something you somehow havent to deserve.
My mother knew South Africa would always take her in.
You can live somewhere for decades and still in your heart its no more than an encampment,a place for the night,detached from collective destiny. Across the world today millions are bivouacked,dreaming of return. The inverse is also true: home can sink its roots in little time,as if in a revelation. But that is rarer than lingering exile.
I myself have wandered and found at last a home in New York. Its the place that will take me in.
Standing in the cool air of that Johannesburg cemetery beside the grave of my great-grandfather Isaac,who left Lithuania as a boy for South Africa,I wondered at our restlessness and at the depressive family gene transposed across continents. I wondered at the bonds of the heart,the bones of forefathers and the beauty of the world.
And now I move on again to Europe to continue this column from there. For me,it is also a return to something deep and unresolved. Reading James Salters haunting novel A Sport and a Pastime,full of the twinned formality and sensuality of France,I encountered this passage: Life is composed of certain basic elements, he says. Of course,there are a lot of impurities,thats whats misleading. …What Im saying may sound mystical,but in everybody,Ame,in all of us,theres the desire to find those elements somehow …
Technology is wondrous but also multiplies the impurities. In the end we must go back to the things birth,death,love and beauty that spoke to me on that South African plateau. And we must each discover and render the elemental in our own lives.
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