ISSN: 0845-4450 Issue 31
Immigration was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me; it shook and rattled most aspects of my identity and at times left me scrambling to reconfigure my world and myself, with no anchor points available. It was a painful – at times trying to the core – experience, and yet I know that I am lucky, oh so very lucky, to be of the first generation of immigrants who can regularly afford to go back and maintain relations with a place that was once home.
Immigration allowed me to have two homes, the familiar one of childhood, which I have rejected politically and personally but still visit annually, and the new one of adulthood, the one I am painstakingly building each and everyday. But the process has also left me homeless: not wanting to ever belong ideologically, as overwhelmingly as I did before, and yet not being able to let go of the idea that having a home means belonging. As I move through my new life, in both new and old homelands, I am constantly watching from the outside in. With my filmmaker’s eye and my critic’s mind I encounter new, fresh and often prickly observations.
When I left, email was so new that I could correspond only with my mother – at the time a university employee. In the first two years I would write and receive dozens of snail mail letters each week. Two university degrees, two countries, and five cities later, I email to friends the world over, and in my circles very few people are not connected electronically. A hand written letter is a rarity, and my fine motor writing skills have been significantly reduced. Developments in the internet make it possible for me to listen to the radio, read the papers, and even watch the TV news from back there. When I am on my yearly visits I can send letters, post images, and even video clips of my activities in no time at all. Physical distances supposedly shrink through the virtual spaces of the internet, and the speed and ease of digital technology. But to my mind, the experience of the self (at any given point of time or place) is much more dependant on the particulars of one’s environment than virtual spaces lead us to believe.
I am from Israel, an intense, passionate, culturally vibrant, and politically messed up place. I live in Canada, a pleasant, solid, and mostly sane country. My family is entirely in Israel, and my yearly visits are composed of family time, visits with friends, research, and political activism. Back in Canada I have time to write essays, produce videos, and generally process what I experience there. Naturally, my experience of being on different continents, communicating with my other universe – albeit at digital speed – is quite dramatically distinct, based on where I am at any given time. For almost ten years now I have been sending communal letters to my friends. When I am in Israel, I send letters to a list of some seventy friends, mostly in North America, but some in Europe and elsewhere. Once or twice a year I send letters to my Israeli friends and family about my experiences in North America or while I travel. Over the years I have developed a format that combines personal observations, reports, and political/historical analysis. My friends in North America, in particular, find the letters to provide a unique perspective on events that the news media often obscures rather than highlights. Here is an example from a recent visit: