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 it dawned on me that I wrote a book in English, a language I could hardly speak when I arrived in the UK. Of course, I was aware that I’d been attempting to write in English as a foreign language, but I always hesitated to dwell on it, for two main reasons. First, I simply wanted my poetry to be judged on its own merit. Second, I’ve always believed that when it comes to poetry writing, what’s really difficult is the act of writing itself. Which language one chooses to use is surely secondary. And while I still find writing in English a daily challenge, it is only difficult in the technical sense. Creatively, it has always felt utterly and entirely freeing.

Still, I wrote the essay as a way to understand why, even when my English was so weak, I attempted to experiment with it, just three months after arriving in the UK. Something unexpected happened while writing that essay: I found myself going back to my early childhood years and the way I struggled with language at that time. It was a painful experience: I thought I’d managed to leave my childhood behind, only to discover the obvious: that I had always carried it with me, no matter which language I used. Looking back now, I realise that I wrote the essay with a deep sense of anger. But what I have discovered in the short time that has passed since writing it, is that it is easier to feel angry towards a place that exists. What happened on 7 October unleashed the deepest feelings of grief, longing, despair and sadness that flowed and pulsated in such force and intensity, they formed new rivers that took with them everything I thought I’d known – about myself, about the people around me, and about the multitude ways we struggle to live in and outside of language.

*
A few months ago, I met a Ukrainian scholar over coffee, and we talked about poetry. She couldn’t understand how I was able to create in a language that is not my first tongue. For her, the thought of not writing poetry in Russian – her mother tongue – was inconceivable: she felt it was the only language in which she would ever be able to express herself in each miniscule gesture and detail. Talking to her, it struck me that I never felt I had one language in which I could express my ‘truest, deepest self’. No matter which language I use, I often struggle to find precise connections between words and reality, and I almost always feel, during one conversation or another, that what I say out loud is not nearly as accurate as what I wish I could have expressed: it is a constant struggle against what feels like the limits of language, a constant failure.

Perhaps there is something about early traumatic events that creates a fracture between reality and language. It’s as if, as a child, you experience some kind of an earthquake, or a series of earthquakes, that cause the words around you to separate, brutally, from the material objects they were integral to only a few seconds before. Suddenly, language fails to carry what happens around you, because the impact from the eruption blew the words away and all you are left with is a material world that is not only shattered but has lost all meaning.

There is a map of my childhood I keep trying to draw: a small, private space of images and words. By the time I turned five, I had already experienced several losses: a series of personal earthquakes. There are so many things I only half remember. But what I know is that from a very early age I was always acutely aware that there was some kind of a gap between language and the world around me: a fissure that kept changing – at times becoming deeper or shallower – but never completely healing.

Perhaps if language always feels difficult, it doesn’t seem like such a huge leap to move from one specific language to another, however technically challenging it might be. I believe that my interest in languages today – my need to explore not only English, but Italian and French in my writing – is because I find language difficult, not easy. And since I find it difficult, I also find it extremely interesting: a highly complex matter I need to keep studying, keep experimenting with in a continuous attempt to understand how it works.

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I grew up in the monolingual communities of the Kibbutz movement. There was one approach to religion (atheism), one political belief and practice (socialism) and one language (Hebrew). There was no other belief system, no other tongue, and yet English was always in the far background – not a real language, but the possibility of language. Sure, it was not the language of the news, or of daily communication, or of books, and it was not related to any particular person or country, because I’d never been abroad. Instead, it was a language of two opposite realms: the first one was school, where I failed at English consistently and spectacularly. The second one belonged to the world of art and dream: it was the language I couldn’t understand in films if I attempted to watch them without subtitles. And it was the language of music and movement: the words I couldn’t follow when dancing to pop songs. In other words, it was a language deeply connected to visual and sonic images. It seems to me that without realising it, I had always associated English with the creative part of the mind. It was the language of Art.

It was also, for a brief episode, the language of escape. I have erased all memories of the Gulf War, when I was a teenager, except two. The first is the thick, sickening smell of the heavy gas mask on my face: the nauseating feel of the clinging plastic material around my eyes, the sense that I could not have it on my head for another split second because I couldn’t breathe and was about to throw up. The second memory is of me and my cousin ‘translating’ Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet on the phone in between air raid sirens, when we were allowed to take the masks off. Why did we choose to do this out of all things? It must have been an effective form of distraction from reality, because we had certainly never attempted to do anything like this before. I loved Dire Straits and she was good at English, so it must have seemed like a good idea.

My favourite Dire Straits’ song was Romeo and Juliet.
I had no idea what it was about but imagined it to be some kind of a deep philosophical contemplation on the nature of love. I was madly in love with the neighbour’s son at the time, so it felt particularly urgent to learn a few insights from the song that might help me get his attention. My cousin’s English was exceptional as far as I was concerned, so it was down to her to do the translation work while I listened attentively on the phone, waiting for the big revelations. I remember her translating lines like You and me, babe, how about it? Or When we made love you used to cry between one siren alarm and the next, and thinking: Seriously? Seriously?? Is that – it? I decided straight away that the practice of ‘translation’ was not that necessary after all, especially if I wished to enjoy the music. Better to imagine what the song was about – better to construct my own imagined meanings – than discovering the real ones.

Perhaps my expectation that the lyrics would add depth to the music also had to do with what I was used to when listening to many songs in Hebrew. In Israeli pop culture, it was not uncommon for a successful mainstream band to choose poetry for their lyrics. I assume it is still the case. After all, the word for song in Hebrew is the same word for Poem: שִׁיר (shiyr). The meaning of the word changes depending on the context, but it is still the same word, used as frequently in popular as in literary discourse.

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There is a map of my childhood I’ve been trying to hold but it keeps disappearing: a personal geography where nothing stands still, especially words. Language is such a private thing: it carries pain in its syntax and grammar and sounds long after the physical or emotional pain has peaked. When I started writing poetry in English, the first thing I noticed was that my language became uncharacteristically clear. As a teenager, I wrote quite a few angry poems in Hebrew, most of them incomprehensible: a stream of consciousness with no real attempt to communicate. Years later, writing in English has forced me to clarify my thinking, because there was no stream of consciousness to work with. I couldn’t pour down whatever I had in my mind on the page, because I had almost nothing in my mind when it came to English. This new way of writing has allowed me to try and construct images or ideas that were still communicative however complex, still aiming to reach a reader.

And yet, poetry is not only about the complexity of ideas and images. It is also strangely accessible. And this is another reason why I was drawn to poetry when
I arrived in London with a deep sense of pain and a sudden urge to create, to do something: it was the only artform I could afford. As an aspiring writer, you don’t need anything other than something to write with, and something to write on. Unlike most other artforms (theatre, film, music, visual arts) poetry writing does not require any special budget, instruments or materials, and unlike these artforms, it does not depend on other people (directors, performers) to bring it into life. Of course, poetry writing requires time – a lot of time – as well as an insane amount of stamina, but so do all other artforms. In other words, poetry, like language, is infinitely immediate. And it is this immediacy in a language I had already connected to the world of Art that has felt deeply and utterly stimulating from the moment I landed in the UK.

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Language carries memories into the present, but on the night of 7 October 2023, memories rushed with such intensity – wave after wave of vivid childhood scenes – that I could no longer cope with words. I needed to find a physical object: something from my childhood that I could simply hold in my hands. I spent the entire night of 7 October sitting on the floor, holding on to an old photograph I managed to find only after hours of emptying every drawer and box.

The girl sitting next to me in the picture was my best friend, my first friend, and the only person I felt safe with during my early childhood years. I didn’t acknowledge it to myself at the time. I just knew that I needed to be next to her all the time, and that as long as she was around,
I would be fine. She was a confident, charismatic child. I was shy and fearful and a bit weird: I insisted on wearing winter clothes in the height of summer, and kept addressing my cat as ‘he’ long after he had ballooned up and gave birth to three kittens. But somehow, we connected. We didn’t know, back then, that we would grow up to become artists in different countries and directions – she would pursue a career as a belly dancer; I, as a poet. But perhaps we already sensed this artistic rebellion within each other. We kept in touch until we were teenagers, long after I moved to another kibbutz. For years we would exchange letters – my handwriting chaotic, hers beautifully formed – and take long bus journeys to visit each other. Then, at some point, we lost contact completely and life continued to flow in separate directions.

For months I’ve been trying to write about the events that occurred on 7 October: on the way I found her phone number on a news website among a list of people who desperately needed help in finding their missing family members. Of the text I sent her, Hi, it’s Stav, your childhood friend. Of the message I received from her after hours of waiting, when she wrote in Hebrew: I’ve been looking for you on Facebook for years. On her devastating update: Mum is OK. Dad is missing. I spent hours on social media that day, trying to find every tiny bit of information about what was happening in Be’eri, which meant I was also exposed to posts from fellow poets in the UK, celebrating and justifying the horrific scenes. I’ve been trying to write about the day which brought the most terrible news to my friend and so far, I haven’t managed. I haven’t managed to write a word. A complete failure of working in language.

If I try to mention specific people, I feel a horrible sense of guilt that I am taking advantage of their trauma, that I’m using their reality and grief, in order to get my own work published. I don’t know how to talk about the death of people while making sure that what matters is their individuality, their life, not the way it ended. But I’m also aware that the way it ended is indeed relevant, and yet
I don’t know how to talk about that either. It is as if my mind, in an act of self-defence, is not willing to process the atrocities executed in Be’eri. At one point I decided to focus on the way I experienced the events in the UK during that day: the double horror of watching what happened in my childhood home while seeing the joyful reactions to it – the celebrations, the justifications. But this approach risked putting myself at the centre of it all, as if I had some kind of unique insight to offer, when all
I could do is carry this enormous pain. Nothing works.

*
I have heard theories that a certain generation of children who grew up together in a kibbutz are more like siblings than friends because they spent their entire childhood together – not only days but nights too. I never really agreed with these theories which always felt simplistic to me, ignoring – as so often when it comes to social science – the complexity of individuals, of each child and their own entirely unique story. And I have long believed that if there was any lesson to be learned from the Kibbutz past experiment in radical socialism, it is that individuality always breaks through. Even if you take a group of children and raise them together from infancy under the same roof, values and beliefs, still they would turn out as beautifully and furiously different from one another as possible. And yet now, even though I haven’t been in touch with my childhood friend for years, every time we speak, every time I hear her voice, I feel this deepest, warmest sensation, the one that tells me in no stronger terms: you are home. And despite everything that has happened, I hear her voice and immediately feel protected, as if I’m in the presence of someone who knows me most deeply, all the way from the earliest of childhood landscapes, the one in which words only begin to breathe and fall into form: you are home.

And also, you are home. By now, I have experienced major events in English: pregnancies, births, raising children, emergency stays in hospitals, moving cities, houses and jobs, and during all this time, the continuous attempts to study and write. Because I was never able to study in the UK, poetry writing has become more and more significant over the years: not only a form of creating but a way of studying: first the English language, and then everything else I could draw in. English is not a foreign language anymore. Instead, what remains of its foreignness is that it feels infinite: a matter that keeps expanding from one hour to the next. Not a single day passes without me having to check the meaning of one word or another in the dictionary. And because I keep learning new words, I experience English as a language that forces me to be alert, to constantly move between sound and meaning. Even during these most difficult months when I’ve kept having this painful, persistent realisation that everything’s changed, English has remained an endless field that keeps expanding around me and taking me with it – still the closest thing to living in a language in which I feel fully awake.

*
It’s past midnight. Just as I thought I’ve finally completed working on my essay, I receive a message from my childhood friend. She sends me a picture another friend has just posted on his Facebook page. In the picture there are nine children sitting close together on a green and red wooden ladder in our nursery playground. In most of the pictures from my childhood, you can find me staring at the camera with no particular facial expression. But here, I’m smiling, even laughing. We’re all laughing. The nursery teacher stands tall next to us, beaming with pride and the warmest of smiles. It is clearly a happy moment in the afternoon sun, and I suddenly miss them all so much. After all these months of mourning I’m still not able to process what happened in Be’eri. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that the strong beautiful woman in the picture, our nursery teacher, was one of the many people killed on 7 October. One day I will have to find a way to say more, because carrying this deep sadness with no idea of how to express it has been very hard. Language is such a difficult matter, but I will have to keep wrestling with it, keep looking for words.

*
There are so many ways to leave a country. When
I embarked on the plane to London, I left with the stubborn, youthful determination of never looking back. But it only now occurs to me that the process of leaving never ends. For months I’ve been running on the concrete pathways of Be’eri, again and again in my dreams. There is a map of my childhood in which I know all the directions: a lucid, intimate geography of longing and pain. In the dream it is always summer and I’m always running towards my childhood friend’s home. Running towards my childhood. Maybe this is what I do. Running towards and from. When I left for the UK, I thought I could throw my first language away as if hurling a bag full of stones into the Mediterranean’s furious waves. And yet, it turned out that I inadvertently carried quite a lot of it with me after all, because one of the few things I insisted on carrying with me on the plane was my guitar.

Here is the thing about my guitar. I’ve always found it quite difficult to sit still for a long time, which is a bit of an issue if you’re aiming to write for a significant part of your day. My solution to this, in the last few years, has been to play the guitar while in the process of working on my poems. I’ll start writing a poem, and as soon as
I get stuck or a bit restless, I’ll play the guitar (badly, it must be said) while reading and rereading the poem in progress, thinking how to move forward. By now it is impossible for me to write without reaching for the guitar at one point or another. It’s one of the reasons I never work in libraries or cafes. But one thing that happens while I play, is that I often create or improvise fractions of songs. It is a rather unconscious process – the singing has neither quality nor depth, yet it is in Hebrew: a truly broken stream of consciousness.

Perhaps, after all, some kind of interaction between languages has always taken place when I work: one language that is almost too painful for me to hold outside of the unconscious, and another in which I can write with, in which I can play with words. Two languages that briefly touch and separate, like a circular activity initiated from some primary source or a single word that oscillates between two meanings, as if continuously moving between Song and Poem.