All of Us, We All Are Arameans

arameans_550wStuck with a plane ticket to Israel bought for her by a Polish Catholic ex-boyfriend, Eileen Pollack sets out on a hectic, solitary journey around the country, cataloging the region’s rich history, natural beauty, and troubled politics, while examining her own complicated relationship to her Jewish faith and heritage. In this darkly comic, incisive, and nuanced essay, Pollack upends the reader’s expectations as well as her own. A travel essay filled with bewilderment, outrage, humor, and faith, “All of Us, We All Are Arameans” takes us on a trip around Israel and the West Bank that few American tourists would have the chutzpah to attempt.

BUY IT ON AMAZON

BUY IT ON PLOUGSHARES

An excerpt from the essay:

Exhausted by the long flight, I took a shared van—a sherut—from the airport in Tel Aviv to the neighborhood in Jerusalem where I would be renting my room.

I schlepped my bags up three flights of stairs, the last two in the dark because Shabbat wasn’t yet over and the automatic timer didn’t give me enough time to reach the top. All I knew about the woman from whom I was renting a room was that she was a reporter for one of Israel’s English-language publications, so when the door was opened by a tanned, zaftig young woman in black Spandex shorts, a tank top, and a tattoo, I figured she must be my host.

Oh no, she said, she was only another visitor. She introduced me to her son, a heartbreakingly androgynous six-year-old with ringlets of long dark curly hair—he might have been King David as a child, strumming on his harp. Excited to have a visitor, the boy led me to the rooftop patio, where we stood surrounded by the pointy tops of slender firs davening in the breeze. Looking down, I saw the cemetery I assumed must hold the remains of the brave German-Jewish pioneers who had settled the neighborhood—why else would it have been called the German Colony? The sky turned indigo, and the woman in Spandex shorts counted one, two, three stars now visible over the Old City, which meant that Shabbat was over. My feet lifted from the roof, as if I were one of those gauzy brides in a lithograph by Chagall. Declaring the Sabbath over by counting three stars over Jerusalem felt like figuring out which direction was north by gazing out your igloo door at the candy-striped North Pole.