Finally Adjusting (Article# 69) 12/27/2007

Each time I travel I remind myself that this is what I wanted to be doing. Snowed in while in Chicago. Flying 11,000+ miles in a 3 day period. Flying the wrong direction on a fast day (I flew from Baltimore to LA and added 3 hours to my fast). This is what I asked for, so I should enjoy it.

I was happy to get home on Friday. With the influx of holiday visitors and college students on winter break, getting a seat on the plane was apparently a nice challenge. There were absolutely no empty seats on our plane and there was a waiting list for the plane following ours that was scheduled to land in Israel on Friday afternoon.

People have been asking if we are feeling a lot stronger about ourselves now that we are well into year two in Israel and are more comfortable with how things work. In certain ways they are right.

One of the treats of my recent trips has been the change I encountered in dealing with the El Al crews, both on land and in the air. I know that I look American, there is no question about that. My Hebrew is accented and I also don’t always understand what they are saying.

Lately, instead of asking me if I prefer Hebrew or English (as they used to), I find the El Al staff speaking to me in Hebrew as if they instinctively understand that I am capable of it. I cannot imagine what it is that gives them that impression, but there must be something that gives them the message that I am Israeli and not a tourist.

On the other hand, because we had such a traumatic year last year, a year in which we spent a significant amount of time focusing only on ourselves, there are many parts of year two in which we are still novices.

I have found that most olim (immigrants) who came in the same time period as us seem to have made more friends in their communities. I could be wrong, but they seem to have made their “place” in the fabric of the community a bit more firmly than we have.

I don’t think it is our fault. There is simply no way to take yourself out of the community for several months and expect to have made the bonds that those families who had always been here enjoy. We were so focused inwardly for such a long time that we haven’t put in the hard time in making friends.

We are still struggling with making Hebrew an every day part of our lives. Aliza needs my help to type a simple paper for school. I still don’t understand the news on the radio or in the paper.

That these things take time is not a new message for us. That we have adjusted to a couple of moves in our lives and one more should be manageable is also another optimistic attitude we understand. But it doesn’t make the here and now any more palatable when we run into a brick wall of frustration.

But we keep moving forward, one step at a time. When we are frustrated we try to remind ourselves that we really are still at the beginning of a (hopefully very) long journey and we try to cut ourselves a little slack. When we aren’t frustrated we just try to kick back and enjoy the moment and hope that the non frustrating moments continue to overwhelm the frustrating moments.

In the original draft of this article, I ended here. After looking at it for two days, I felt it wasn’t enough.

I think I have begun to mentally edit out “the bad stuff” of late – almost since the time we came back to Israel in the spring. It had been such a difficult period for us and I could see a certain unhappiness or depression within myself that had nothing to do with being in Israel and everything to do with the trying circumstances of the prior 6 months or so.

So I edited out the darker parts of my thoughts, attributing them to feelings that came not because of the issues we face from our Aliyah, but to issues we faced in our family that rose out of our personal crisis. I think I subconsciously didn’t want to taint the picture (so to speak).

Yet as I read what I have written here, I can see that it is somewhat sugar coated and I am not really putting the difficulties we (or I should really say I) face on a daily basis.

The kids ARE doing very well. They all have friends and plans and have done tremendously in acclimating to a totally foreign place and culture. Their Hebrew is tremendous and they have an innate sense of how things work here that (it feels like) I will never gain.

Goldie has undeniably reached a tremendous high in living here. When talking about our lives in the USA, she constantly says that she misses the people but not the place. She, who has had the most difficult path of all of us, is content. Even she is having her adjustment issues, but they are all expected.

Finally there is me. Of all the people in the family, I am definitely having the hardest time of late. While I understand intellectually the sources of my difficulty, that does not make it any easier.

While our kids and Goldie have all made great strides in their Hebrew, I have not made much progress at all. Part of it comes from the fact that I did not attend any Ulpan class since I started work just 3 days after we got here. So I still cannot read the paper or understand the news on the radio.

When we first got here, this was no big deal – it was even expected. Since it was expected, it didn’t bother me in the least. So it did not make much of a difference in my life. Yet here I am, 17 months later, and I still feel as if I don’t have a clue. (I am not talking about speaking Hebrew in person – in that area – as I wrote above – I am pretty comfortable and confident)

I can see everyone else’s personal growth and it frustrates me. I have even gotten to the point where I find myself turning the radio off when the news comes on because it makes me angry to listen to the gibberish. It is the same gibberish as it was the first day, but I feel that I should understand it by now and the fact that I cannot is discouraging.

I don’t understand things like the school system. We go to parent/teacher conferences and I understand what the teachers are saying, but the whole method of education is so foreign to me that I haven’t even got a clue what to expect from the kids, and certainly don’t know enough to really understand if they are doing well or not.

I cannot imagine how my grandparents and great grandparents felt when they came to the USA. I came here reading and speaking Hebrew. They literally knew nothing of English and were coming to a frontier society where there was literally a minimal orthodox Jewish community and no Jewish schools to speak of (in Toledo, Ohio and Chicago).

On the other hand, Goldie (who does homework with them and knows more of their routine than I do) says that she does not feel as disengaged from the education process as I do. She thinks I am reacting more to my discomfort with the language and dealing with the teachers or understanding the weekly class newsletters than to an actual problem.

I also miss my friends and the comfort with which I was able to interact with everyone. I feel as if I used to fit in better, mostly because I knew what was expected of me and also because I felt like an insider and not an outsider.

These are not abnormal feelings. Many people I speak to have felt the same way. It is a normal part of the transition and now that some of the “new car smell” has worn off of the Aliyah experience, we are definitely going through more periods of angst. Normal, but sometimes overwhelming.