The Lilith Blog

In his article “Siberia II” in last week’s New Yorker, Ian Frazier packs his readers into his dilapidated van, and takes them for a ride across Siberia. He describes the numerous places he visited on his summer-long trek in August, 2001, including Irkutsk, the Paris of Russia, its famous Lake Baikal, which, as Frazier describes, “reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land,” and Birobidzhan – “a swamp in the middle of nowhere,” which, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties under Stalin, was an attempted Jewish homeland, occupied by many thousands of Jews, including Americans, and which now has a Jewish population of less than four percent.

His description of a detour to one city in particular, Blagoveshchensk , which means “annunciation,” and which is separated from the Chinese city of Heihe only by the Amur river, across which pagodas are visible, struck me as particularly poignant. He writes: “The benign and hopeful sunniness of Blagoveshchensk reminded me somehow of Palo Alto, California. Blagoveshchensk and other Amur River cities could be the Golden East, as California was the Golden West. Or maybe this notion was just my homesick imagination.” Now, I have been living in Palo Alto, CA for almost five years, and must admit that I’ve never perceived its sunniness as “benign and hopeful.” Its predictable weather – a few months of chilly rain in the “winter,” followed, and preceded by, months and months of humid-less bright sunny days – has struck me as lacking diversity, even oppressive.

Instead of appreciating where I am, I’ve found myself missing, irrationally, the places I’ve lived before. I come to appreciate each place I have lived only when I have moved away. When I lived in Frankfurt, Germany, my neighborhood reminded me of Jerusalem’s German colony, and my apartment, with its bathroom light-switch outside the bathroom, and its trisim – Israeli shutters – made me feel immediately, albeit ironically, at home. When I moved from Frankfurt to Boston, the Charles River reminded me of the Main; I would bike around it, experiencing Frankfurt’s body of water for the first time. Palo Alto’s tree-lined streets, which seem constantly to be shedding their crunchy leaves, no matter the season, make me miss the glorious New England autumn. And the Bay Area’s clusters of Eucalyptus trees and their perfumed aura make my heart yearn, desperately, for Jerusalem.

Frazier’s piece struck a chord in me, because it affirmed that, perhaps, for the rest of my life, the places I live will remind me of the homes I’ve once had, and, especially, the homes of my childhood. And yet, these very homes, surrounded by their light and smells, will be the childhood homes, the soul-homes, of my children. One day, they will be travelling somewhere, and, like Frazier, will yearn for the “sun and blue sky and reddish-gold tint” of their first home in Northern California, their “mother-home,” which, to their mother, is a foreign land.

–Maya Bernstein

I recently finished reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I did skim, quite liberally, many of his more philosophical chapters, which tend to begin with a question like, “What is Power” and end, fifteen pages later, with the conclusion that, “Power is Power.” Overall, though, I loved each page, and loved the experience of sinking, fully, into a rich novel, living each day with the shadows of Prince Bolkonsky, Pierre, Princess Marya, and, of course, Natasha, by my side.

Natasha, a spirited girl, full of vigor and passion and potential, marries happily at the end of the book. She is something of a feminist, insisting on nursing her own children, “in spite of the opposition…who revolted against her suckling the child.” But, Tolstoy writes, when she marries, she “abandons at once all her accomplishments,” for “she had absolutely no time to indulge herself in these things.” In embracing, fully, her home life, she must abandon the passions, talents, and pursuits that had defined her as a full human being.

In my own home, which my husband and I have worked hard to make a space of equals, there is no question that, with time and children, the daily decisions, big and small, have become, more and more, my responsibility. It has been my choice – albeit a choice that seems straight out of Tolstoy’s philosophical chapters, a choice that has felt, to some extent, inevitable, dictated by some Greater Force, making me “subordinate to certain laws…[such as] gravity,” Maternal Love, Responsibility, and, perhaps Guilt, laws with which I did not quarrel “once [I] had learned them.”

A friend recently shared his winking outlook on the subject. He claims that his wife makes all of the small decisions – like where to live, where to send the children to school, what home to buy – and he makes all of the big decisions – like who God is, world peace, and how to split the atom. Another friend often refers to his wife as the “CEO” of their household, and refers any questions he receives from me to her. My husband mused that, in the male view, the woman can be CEO of the home since The Man, secretly, perceives himself as President of the Board. In Israel, where it is incumbent upon all couples to take a religious course before they marry, the woman is often referred to as the “Minister of the Interior,” and the man as the “Foreign Minister.”

Can we have it all? One might have expected that our society would have changed more since Natasha decided to stay at home, nurse her children, and stop singing. Is it inevitable that, in embracing our roles as wives and mothers, we abandon, or significantly modify, or, even, simply forget, our personal dreams?

–Maya Bernstein