Either Shmuli picked it up the same way—watching his father do it over and over again—or the repetition worked its way so deep into Itzhak’s muscle memory that it reached the genes, reached the DNA itself, and he passed it along to his son so that his son had no chance to resist it.
The first time Shmuli sat the same way, the kitchen in Plovdiv was long forgotten, as were the ones in Yaffo and in Tel Aviv. Now they sat in a dining room in Buenos Aires, where Shmuli, a chubby and happy seven-year-old, adopted another one of the facets of his life that would shape who he was: Spanish.
God, Spanish. Imagine if Shmuli had not crossed the border into Argentina and discovered Spanish. It wasn’t so much that Shmuli thought in Spanish, it was that his whole world was colored by it, its sentences flowing like rivers, its sounds the only music Shmuli could move to. Sure, he knew Hebrew. Passably anyway. But to know a language was not to be in that language, not necessarily. And if Shmuli had been raised in Tel Aviv instead of Buenos Aires, he would not have had the language which he loved so dearly that he’d run out at sixteen and gotten it imprinted onto his skin, to his parents’ deep chagrin, to the rolling taking place in his grandparents’ graves.
Yes, he spoke English too. Well enough that he sometimes made a little money online by writing American kids’ essays for them (a racket born out of a slow summer break in January, while kids in the northern hemisphere shivered in their boots on their way to school), well enough that he was on that plane on the way to an American university. But without Spanish, the Shmuli that had come to exist because of mere luck, because of his ancestors’ survival, would not truly be Shmuli. He’d be some other kid. One who couldn’t reach across the airplane aisle like he was doing now and helping the old lady fill out her customs form.
* * *
Shmuli’s parents had lived some extra risk too, but rather than experiencing it while fleeing, they’d chosen to take themselves out of harm’s way when they left Israel and its wars. A beautiful place, sure, but why subject children to that? They could take their children away without clamping a hand over their gasping little mouths. They had come from somewhere else, kind of, and felt no loyalty to the land. Appreciation, sure. But the world was wide, and so Itzhak and Dehlia took their two children and their few belongings and they went.
* * *
What a difference the verbs made, Shmuli thought, as the plane touched down. Fleeing, leaving, moving. The world seemed to have very different reactions to each, somehow hating people more the less choice they had.
If you had options and chose the United States, could afford the visas and the tuition, you were the right kind of immigrant. If the only choice you had was to leave or die, to maybe die in the act of leaving, to live a harder life than everyone else in the new country, well, then, you were a scourge.
This was the source of Shmuli’s trepidations: a country that would be angered by his existence, by his ancestors’ unwillingness to remain in one place. A country that would not understand that the borders his ancestors had crossed were yes, yes, yes, crucial and all that: but they were more than that. They’d made him who he was.
Plenty of people would find his story fascinating and welcome him with open arms. Even those people who were pissed that he’d come wouldn’t recognize him, because of the color of his skin, because of his lack of accent, because they couldn’t point to one place on the map and say, that, that’s the place you should return to.
But they might have hated his grandparents. Huddled on a boat across the Caspian Sea, hidden under blankets across the Syrian Desert. How could Shmuli live in this place with people who might hate his ancestors’ survival?
* * *
Anyway, in the history of his family, a crossed border had always been the right move, complicated though it might have been. So Shmuli was looking forward to how this move might change him. How would it add to this unique person who existed unmatched in the world.
He stepped forward in line, his hand clutching his manila envelope of documents, nervous, as if he was getting away with something. He eyed the three agents assigned to his side of the arrival hall, trying to suss out kindness within them. There was a chance, he knew, that they could turn him away. Find him suspicious for one reason or another, despite the visa, despite the envelope. They had that power, though Shmuli knew they were much more likely to use it if his passport said Syria instead of Argentina, if his skin were darker, his English not as good.
Would it always feel like that, in this country? Like he was getting away with something?
* * *
Sixty years earlier, Shmuli’s maternal grandmother, Deborah, had felt that way too. Even after her family had left the ma’abara, and the recency of her arrival, or its origin, could not be so easily discovered by the others. Still the feeling seemed to follow her like a stench, like an extra limb growing from the side of her head, drawing leers. From the camp to Jerusalem to the kibbutz to Tel Aviv.
“I knew nothing of the journey,” she wanted to tell them. “I know nothing of that other place.” They had, most of them, crossed borders. But it seemed to matter which ones, and how. She had lived in the camps on the outskirts of the city, and they had not, so she must have been broken in some way, less deserving of this place this Jewish diaspora had fled to (and in doing so had caused others to flee).
The immense flood of people had slowed by then, some even pouring back out to wherever it was they’d come from, or to a third place, like Deborah’s daughter would eventually do. The camps had all shut down too, and Deborah knew that a lot of the feeling was simply that: a feeling. Still, it felt like she was getting away with something. Like her parents had broken some infallible law of humanity and were on land that was not meant for them. It was meant for some other Jewish family, one who’d survived the Holocaust, one who’d come from a more Jewish place. The right kind of immigrant, if any.
This might have been why, when Itzhak and Dehlia, years later, announced they were going to Argentina, Deborah didn’t hesitate to say she would follow them across the world.
* * *
Shmuli stepped forward in line. A little boy who’d probably been awake too long was wailing at his mother’s side, tugging at her hand, yelling that one syllable that children in almost every language seemed to have deep within them: “Ma!” Several people, likely as tired and worn down by the day as the child was, cast dirty glances at the mother, who was attempting to juggle the carriage, her purse, the passports, a half-eaten sleeve of cookies.
He wanted to reach out and offer a hand, though those immigration lines always felt so disapproving, like the rules had all changed and any one of your actions could be punished. Plus, she was at the other end of the line, making it hard for him to simply tuck his manila folder under his arm and provide her with some momentary respite.
It felt wrong not to be able to help, like a cramp or an itch he couldn’t scratch, and so he looked away from the mother, scanned the other faces in line. There was something great about the US, how difficult it was to know if someone was local or foreign by appearance alone. Looking at the line for residents, at the foreign line, at the customs agents themselves, it was impossible to distinguish between them with any clarity.