A few years ago I read a book called This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters. I started crying somewhere on page 3 and couldn't stop until I put the book down a few days later. Reading women authors from all over the world, all kinds of backgrounds talk about their and history of home was one of the most beautiful things I had ever witnessed. This text is inspired by them - my own attempt at defining home, understanding how it makes me feel. Regardless of how it makes you feel, I couldn't recommend Kahn and McMasters' anthology enough - go read it as fast as you can!
Not-at-homeness is a very odd feeling to describe. A mild discomfort, almost like you could make something out from the corner of your eye without quite catching it. It’s something you get used to, a scratchy blanket on a bed that it’s your own or some label rubbing against the skin at your collar - just a little, little enough that after a few sustained hours you might just forget about it.
I would start with the unwilligness to take your coat and shoes off when you come in, or the reluctance to be naked anywhere other than the shower with the door closed, even if you’re alone. It’s an almost imperceptible constraint in the way you handle the space around you, not quite occupying it fully because you feel like you might not be welcome in it, like it belongs to somebody else - if not somebody in particular, then at least somebody who is not you.
Some would argue it’s an almost pathological feeling for me to have: I was raised in a family of Polish Jews whose history has consisted of persecution at every stop, in every country, and whose children have all (so far) left the France they were raised in as soon as they came of age, encouraged by parents who thought the only home for Jews was Israel.
It isn’t just a history I know of from books - when your grandparents are holocaust survivors, you learn to look twice before accepting a country’s hospitality. And when you live in Europe, where you might inadvertently walk into a museum built on Jewish massacres (like the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid where, amazed by the extent of the collection, I joked about marrying the family heir before looking them up and finding out they were Hitler’s financier), or live in a country that’s kicked Jews out to seize their assets (as you almost definitely will), it takes trust not to spend your life looking over your shoulder, wondering when and how it might happen again.
There’s a song we chant every year at Passover, at the very end of the Seder, before everybody goes off to digest a matza that will almost definitely constipate them for the rest of the week. The song goes like this:
“Leshanah habaah beYerushalayim!”
In my family, we repeat it like a chant, starting off from a whisper and growing to a scream, from crouching under the table to jumping up, so it goes something like:
“Leshanah habaah leshanah habaah leshanah habaah be Yerushalayim; Leshanah habaah leshanah habaah leshanah habaah be Yerushalayim; LESHANABA LESHANABA LESHANABA BEYERUSHALAYIM!”
It means “Next year, we’ll be in Jerusalem” and it’s an exuberant chant, and we’ve sung it every year without fail even though most of the time we’re just a few hours away from Jerusalem and there would be nothing stopping us from having our Seder there if we wanted to.
But we sing it because Jerusalem is also an idea, because where we really want to be next year is at peace (literally and figuratively), what we really want from home is respite, and the reason I didn’t feel at home for so long was probably that I had never given myself that.
Respite: that thing you get when somebody says, give yourself a break, and for some reason it makes you cry uncontrollably; or that eerie quiet moment when everybody’s just left your flat after a dinner party, you’ve cleaned everything up and now the only thing left to do is lie down or maybe take a bath if that tickles your fancy, because you’ve done what you needed for others and now you have the rest of time just for you.
And return: some essential place that’s at the heart of you and of which you are the heart. I understood some part of it, because I can relate my Jewish lack of trust in nation-states to my personal lack of respite, but I never knew how to fully relate to it - return to what? Ideologically, religiously, I couldn’t return to how I was raised because I stopped identifying with it before I had even turned 18, and that made the idea of coming back to anything inauthentic, hypocritical even.
So I moved to London and I built for myself what I’ll call dwellings, rather than homes, because even though they were filled with my stuff (and god knows I have a lot of that), they always felt alien, haphazard, a bit like I never really believed it wouldn’t all fall down eventually (by it I mean myself, although as I write this I am reminded of the way Tel Aviv looked 5 years ago, every building hastily put together with no concern for aesthetics because 1. the most important thing about buildings was survival and 2. we might all be blown up at any moment’s notice, both of which principles I can certainly also apply to myself).
The weird thing about the places I lived in for my first few years in London was how quickly I outgrew them - physically, because my love for clothes, books and general ownership of things was never a secret, but metaphorically because I grew tired of them, impatient, starting the hunt for a new flat just months after having moved in.
Then two moves happened. In Paris, we left the family apartment in which we had lived for 10 years to move into a new place. In London, I moved from my first post-university flat into an idyllic, garden-level apartment in St John’s Wood.
The first of these was a true seismic shift: 10 years is a long time to live in one place. I had grown from a child to an adult in that house; my youngest brother had never lived anywhere else. We had lived so much inside of it that it felt eerie, almost absurd to try to call another place our family home after that - and yet, as soon as the unboxing was over, that’s exactly what it felt like.
To this day, I don’t know where kitchenware is nor can I ever find the right sheets for my bed when I arrive, but my room feels so quintessentially like me, and the common places like us, that home just means being in a space that I recognise.
The second move was one of convenience: my sister lived near Baker Street, my new job would be based out of Marylebone, so moving to St John’s Wood felt like the mature thing to do.
My father came to help me build my furniture. One day we took a break and went for lunch at an American-style diner that, to our great chagrin, wasn’t as kosher as its website professed it to be. I don’t know why we spoke about religion or identity, or why it was the first time that I managed to be fully honest with him about it; all I know is that I nearly cried into my bagel and, when the last box was put away, my new place felt like home.
Even though I would like to think a maturing sense of interior design contributed to making a home. I spent so long hiding, shifting away, eluding questions about who I was that, for a time, I lost any and all sense of it. Moving in alone helped, but so did growing into jobs, a career, friendships and relationships that taught me who I was either consciously or unconsciously.
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