The book begins with a woman and a suitcase getting off a train and looking for a home. It ends with the woman and the suitcase dragging each other back to the train, continuing the search.
What do we know about looking for a home? We’ve all heard the Arik Einstein song with the clichéd refrain “Take a wife and build her a home.” But what about when a woman looks for a home, what is she looking for? She’s probably looking for herself. We are smart enough to beware of clichés, but also to recognize the grain of reality in them. Take me, for example. I am a woman.
And it happened that I myself was a home once; a small human lived inside me and then it came out of me into other worlds. I saw what a baby looks like when it first enters the world. Crying, searching. A boy without a home for the first time. Groping, not understanding how it is that he was expelled from the womb. A home is always something temporary pretending to be permanent. What utter human heartbreak it is to be born.
When you leave home, you find that it is impossible to return. In my reflections on immigration, books and relocation, I went back to scenes in Hebrew literature where someone leaves or returns home. The most famous is the scene from a story by S.Y. Agnon that begins with a man who returns to find his house locked. Anyone brave or crazy enough to leave home and then to return to it discovers this truth. Once you leave home there is really no going back. The world goes on without you. You also continue on to other places. When you try to go back, you need to understand that in the best case scenario, you start over. In the worst case, you start over in front of a locked house.
And what about someone who doesn’t leave home? It seems to me that she also discovers that it is impossible to go back. This is the strange thing that happens in the book as well. It is not clear in Maya’s book whether we are seeing a series of moving an apartment or a series of searching for home.
The intention is to ask: Is the woman in this book moving between apartments like we move between stages, seasons, ages, different identities we had, or are we seeing someone who is searching? Does she have “something” in the world, and each time we are seeing it crumble, disappear, become dangerous, or simply no longer fitting, or are we seeing someone who always has nothing? She has no home and is trying to have one?
This question also permeates the title of the book – Homebound. There is a double meaning here because “homebound” is both the way or the journey home and also the inability to leave home. For example, this term is used to describe an elderly or ill person who is unable to leave their home, and is therefore “homebound.” My thinking on searching for a home is that it is a process where you are perpetually both homeless and homebound. You don’t have “something,” and maybe it’s all you have.
It’s an unsettling time to be thinking about home. When I looked at the pictures in the book I thought of the burned out houses in the Gaza Envelope, the bombed houses on the northern border, the possible houses of immigration, and the phrase “safe space” that is a complete fallacy – something you only need when you have no space and no safety. All the pictures from Gaza are pictures of houses upon houses in ruins. It will take decades to build a roof for everyone who has become homeless in recent months.
On the other hand, the discourse about a home whose very essence is violence is also rising. It was not for nothing that Ben-Gvir’s election slogan was “Who’s this house’s owner” meaning who is the landlord here. The idea is to make ours a home out of ownership, out of violence, a home that exists only if you have someone, real or imagined, to kick out of it. 1
But this message is a lie. It is a moral and illusory falsehood. All the violence in the world cannot make us forget how much we all are guests in this world; for how long and how far we will have to keep moving; and when we do return home, we will find it locked.
I have thought a lot about the ending of the book. About the woman returning to the train, with her suitcase. One of the book’s readers, Maya’s daughter Alma, explained that at the end “the story ends and the woman gets on the train because she is going home.” This is a reading where the whole journey takes place when there is another home in the background that remains out of the frame; there is The Home to return to. This is an amazing way to read the ending, but I don’t think there was another home other than the ones we see. However, despite everything, and even though the ending remains uncertain, she does not return to the starting point. For me, every one of the houses she had in the book – was hers.
She was inside it, in its essence, she was literally homebound to it. Maybe the truth is that, like the woman in the book, we only have any home until we don’t. And the only constant is the way home. The road between and from homes. The journey along which you search to call something home. The ability to believe that something is home. The ability to be inside, even when you know it’s not really forever. Like the smile of the cat in Alice in Wonderland, which is just a cat’s smile. That’s what home is. Home is just the promise of a home.
It may be disappointing. And yet, it can a beautiful home.
Going back cautiously to that cliché, I don’t know what men are looking for when they are looking for a home, but I do think that when a woman is looking for a home, there is a real sense that she is looking to be close to herself. I know that at least in my own journey, which, like the journey in the book, is sometimes a dream and sometimes a nightmare, I am always looking for the way back to myself.
On a journey like that, you need supplies: an apple, a notebook, a bottle of water. You need to dream. You need art. You need grace. You need good friends who will accompany you along it. It’s been about a decade that Maya has been part of my way home, and we travel to each other, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. And this is just the beginning. Each of us, on this separate and connected path home, again and again and again.
Footnotes
- 1 More on the metaphor of the home in relation to the last round of elections and the question of ownership, see Dr. Avi-ram Tzoreff, https://www.vidc.org/detail/a-built-destroyed-and-then-built-again-home-binationalism-as-a-safe-shelter ↑
