Returning to Jerusalem

Montefiore Hotel,

Jerusalem

We’re staying diagonally across the street from the apartment in which we lived for 32 years.  The eucalyptus trees in the garden of the Bezalel Academy, which we saw from our old apartment and which we can now see from our hotel window, look the same, although I suppose they've grown taller in the four years we’ve been away. 

On the surface little has changed.  I walk down the same streets, pass the same buildings, and unfailingly bump into someone I know.  It’s as if we had never left.  Yet I feel very different from the time when we lived here.  All the time we’ve been here, I’ve felt like a ghost, insubstantial, unable to effect change.  Once an actor strutting on the stage, I’m now relegated to the audience.  A guest in our hotel asked if I’m a tourist and I didn’t know how to answer.  How can a man who’s lived in a city for 36 years consider himself a tourist?  Yet I’m clearly not a resident.  “A visitor” is closest to my status now, but that doesn’t seem quite right either.  So far – and we haven’t yet been here a week – if I haven’t felt like a ghost or an actor banished from the stage, I feel as if I’m in a dream, like the dreams I used to have for a year or two after we moved back to America, when would dream I was walking down its streets.  Now I’m actually doing so.

Last Friday, our third full day in Jerusalem, I walked to the florist where I used to buy Shabbat flowers.  Avi, the young man who always served me, greeted me effusively.  I asked about his children.  There were two, a boy and a girl, ages 4 and 2, when we left Jerusalem in 2008.  In the meantime they've been joined by three siblings.  Avi looked the same, but now he is the father of five.

As always, I pointed out the combination of flowers I wanted, and he cut, trimmed, and arranged them, interspersing them with greens, and as always the arrangement was beautiful, elegant and understated.  I could never obtain that in Brooklyn without paying a fortune for it.  Avi charged me 30 shekels, about eight dollars, for the flowers, but the pleasure of buying them from him was free.  As I left his shop I felt both happy at having seen him at last and sad that I can no longer do so as a matter of course.  

My interaction with Avi illustrates the joy and melancholy I've felt ever since we arrived.  I'm joyful when we meet our old friends, but I'm sad when I consider that the beauty and romance of living here are gone forever, except in memory and in dreams.