Language Cannot Do Everything

Adrienne Rich, feminist and poet, died today. 

From an Atlas of the Difficult World

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are. 

I am the Only Jew

This week, Fantoft decided to add security on all its student apartment buildings with a magnetic tag that opens up the outer doors. Fine. Except for shabbat. When I’ll be stuck inside for 25 hours, chewing on the walls and banging my head against the ceiling. Or else locked outside, waiting with bovine patience for someone to come along and open the door for me.

An hour after I received the email, I was standing in front of the SiB desk, facing a girl whose jaw actually dropped open as I began to explain to her that I am a religious Jew who doesn’t use electricity for a 24-hour period every week. She smiled and nodded in sympathetic bewilderment, gave me an email to write to, and beckoned me over to the woman in charge.

“Well it’s fine. This doesn’t use electricity. It’s magnetic,” she said dismissively. “Write to the man who is in charge. NEXT!” Before I could point out to her that it probably does use electricity to open that door, and that it most certainly triggers a light, I was brushed out of the way. I decided to email the guy and see what he said.

Wednesday, without having received a response, and Friday looming ever closer, I returned to SiB to get the man in charge’s phone number. The same woman was there. Just as helpful as before.

“I don’t think there’ll be anything we can do for you.” And she was happy about it, for some reason. “You’ll have to call a friend to let you in on weekends,” she advised. No dice, lady—I can’t use a phone, either.

“Organize a time to meet them and have them let you in.” Every week, for the next three months? Seriously? Because I will want to go outside at the same time every week, and I have a friend that slavishly without a life that they can do that?

“Where is this—where is your... meeting?” Could you drip more disdain into that last word? No, lady, this is not a religious meeting, this is my apartment that I won’t be able to get in and out of for an entire day every week.

“Well, look, what do you do in your apartment during that time? Do you sit in the dark? Or do you use lights?” She was so triumphant in her mistaken proof of my inconsistency, it took me slightly aback. Then I leaned calmly towards her over the counter, and spoke in measured tones.

“You smug toad. You bask in your ignorance. You’re actually rejoicing in your mono-cultural blindness. You don’t want to know, you want to catch me out in a flaw. What possible reason has your warped mind come up with for imagining that I wouldn’t prefer to use the simple magnetic door-opener? You think you can catechize me on Judaism? Well, you complacent scumbag, I’ve spent a year and a half in the hellish cognitive dissonance of midrasha, and I’ve attended my requisite twelve years of forced fanaticism by Ner Yisrael FOF’s at the local day school, and I’ve read Potok and wept, and I don’t need you to make me cringe in question. You dare try to prove me inconsistent in religion when the dat’lash wedge on my pie chart of friends gets fatter every year? You think it’s a choice I’m making to keep shabbat? Sure it is—one on the same level as the one you make when you decide not to rob a grocery store. You think the choices I make every day about what I wear, eat, say, should all pass through your court so you can declare me religious or not? When I already judge myself incessantly? It’s fun for you to bait me? Walk off a cliff, bitch.”

Of course, I didn’t. I opened my mouth, and closed it. Because I remembered, in time, that I am the only Jew this lady ever knows she’s met. And more important than my ire, more important than my being locked indoors for 25 hours every week, even equally important with keeping shabbat, is the kiddush Hashem that I signed on for this year when I decided to be the only observant Jew in this city. So I can’t say anything that I’d like to, even though with my temper I'm the last person on earth that should have to represent anyone (forgodsake, I can't even stay silent enough to keep from posting this on my blog!). I can only try to keep my hands from trembling as I smile and respond that no, I don’t turn on lights on shabbat, I leave on one small one to read by the whole weekend long. And then, still trembling, I walked out.

I know that mine is utterly ridiculous rage. What, so this is the first time my coddled existence has come up against a lack of sympathy with my religious needs? Yes, good morning, little Miss Innocent, outside of America’s embrace of diversity and Israel’s Jewish refuge, people don’t give a flying fuck about facilitating religious observance. Do you want coffee with that newsflash? And yet I’m angry at that woman, angry at her twenty-first century Western joy that in an increasingly automated world it’s hard for Neanderthals like me to maintain our religious practice. But I left with my cool intact, rubbing my mind furiously against the internal insistence that I cannot allow a passionate intensity to take over.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Norway: Kid-Tested and Mother-Approved

The adorable apartment they rented

My parents visited me in Bergen last week. Since my dad’s the main reason I write this blog (it’s the first time since I left home six years ago that he actually has a clue of what’s going on in my life) I’m not going to fill you in on the trip in too much detail. Just that I had the most beautiful time showing my parents my life in Norway, tramping along the picturesque streets of Bergen, appreciating the cuteness of Norwegian babies and the gorgeousness of Norwegian men with my mom, and kicking back in our lovely old apartment with a 360 degree view of the fjord and Bergen sentrum.

The first night, I took them to Godt Brød. As I joked around with the cashier, showing off my Norwegian for my mom, his fellow worker behind the counter came over. The first guy beckoned to me. “Look, she’s an American, speaking Norwegian.”

“Yeah, and her name is Hannah.” It was Anita’s son, Evan. Nothing emphasizes Bergen’s tiny size like running into people you know every few hours. Then we bumped into one of my students at Rimi, and the impression was complete.

We went to Café Opera with Anita, and I had that shocking feeling you get when two worlds collide. You see, Anita only met me this year, and sees mature competence, confidence, and creativity (I hope!), where my parents see an adorable yet precocious six-year-old. I didn’t realize how much I regress around my parents until thrust into the presence of a third party, where my character played a funny tug-of-war between its mature self and the kid my parents see me as.

Laundry list: We saw Gamlehaugen, the Fantoft Stavkirk, Kunst gallery, Hanseatisk Museum, Bryggen, the Bergen Domkirk, Fløyen...  while hiking up Fløyen, exclaiming at the beauty of its lushly green trails, we passed a passel of men in their seventies, sturdily hiking up. They enjoyed our presence, offering the tidbit that Prince Charles and Camilla had been up on Fløyen only yesterday—apparently all English speakers should care about British royalty.

I bought kaviar in a tube for my Abba, and brunøst for my Ima. Easy enough to know what they’d each like. They, in turn, brought me Trader Joe's in a suitcase. Sometimes food is love. 

Friday we took the train into Oslo, passing the breathtaking views of fjord and fjell that astound every passenger. One of the best parts of the weekend was introducing my parents to the Oslo Jewish community—to the shlichot who have so comfortably hosted me again and again, and the Norwegian-Israelis who have so warmly welcomed me into the fold. Shabbat dinner at the shlichot we ate with a Tunisian man who had lived in Israel then fallen in love with a Norwegian, and his two sons. The conversation surged through three languages as per usual (only very briefly did my mother and the man speak French, so it really doesn’t count). At one point, discussing the chazzan, my mother asked what he does the rest of the week. Inbar’s answer: “byom shani, hu oseh havdalah bagan.” Hehehe.

Sunday morning my Abba left for the airport. My Ima and I went down to Oslo harbor for tickets on the ferry. It was only when buying them that we realized daylight savings had happened and we’d missed an hour! Luckily, my Abba left in plenty of time, and Oslo airport is small.

The outside of 5 Draggefjelltrappen

We took the ferry to the new opera house, moved through the Munch museum (vastly prefer “Anxiety” and “Despair” to “The Scream,” now that I’ve seen all three, and a silent landscape of snow-heaped firs to those—who knew Munch could paint calm solitude as well as feverish modern angst?), speedwalked the Botanical gardens, and sat for a pleasant while on the Bygdøy shore watching the kayakers after circling around the open-air model Viking village. On the ferry ride back, a father placed his toddler son on the railing near us. The boy was so deliciously cute, waving and calling “mama” to his mother on the lower deck. When he began to stomp on the captain’s roof, the father gently told him, “ikke bang bang.” What a sweet kid, and how perfectly did it exemplify the Norwegian family dynamic.

 

My parents gone, I’ve been feverishly rushing to catch up with everything. Though this morning I did take off for a gorgeous hike up Landås and across to Ulriken. The mud drying in the sun smelled like Monongahela National Park in West Virginia. Vaguely sweet and clean, with the hum of bees accompanying it even when no bees flew. I kept sniffing and thinking of berries. Back home I launched into my frenzy of work: I have to clean for pesach, pack for London, plan my trip to Copenhagen in May, catch up and get ahead on grading and class preparation for the next few weeks, and see the friends I haven’t seen for the past week and won’t see for the next two. Life is deliciously full of good things.

Ready for rain

Alas, the view atop Fløyen

At the top of Karl Johan. Check out that hat.

Showing my appreciation for Wigeland

I may have taught my parents a proper love for Freia

At Akershus Fort, overlooking Oslo's fjord

Bergen the Beautiful