Running towards My Childhood

There are so many ways to leave a country. Some leave after years of hesitations but keep coming back. Many are forced to flee. Others never really leave, forming their own expat communities wherever they find themselves. And then, there are those – forever outsiders in their own country – who feel an odd sense of relief by finally leaving and becoming official outsiders – foreigners – in a different land. When I left Israel, I slammed the country’s door with such force, you could hear the mountains shaking and the waves of the Mediterranean crashing on the shores in response. I didn’t want to look back or take anything with me apart from my guitar and a few favourite clothes. All I wished was to go as fast and as far as I could, and this, to an extent, included leaving the only language I could speak. Or at least, that’s how it felt then. Because there was another small thing I slipped in my suitcase before I left, and on the night of 7 October 2023 – almost twenty years to the day since I moved to the UK – I urgently needed to find it. Suddenly, it became my most treasured possession: a picture of me and my best friend, aged four, sitting with my cat on the concrete path in Kibbutz Be’eri, our childhood home.

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In 2022, I wrote an essay for PN Review: ‘Running Between Languages’. It was written shortly after the publication of my debut poetry collection. The fact was that it was only after the book was published that ...