Jerusalem was a place where history is not a one-way street; here the resurrection of old glories still seemed possible.
—SAMUEL HEILMAN, A Walker in Jerusalem
Friday morning, Wendy was walking around her apartment, getting ready for her day’s task, to go to the shuk, open-air market, and buy things she’d need this year for her place. Wendy picked up the metal grogger on a shelf in the living room. It was a small, cheap thing with its caricatured pictures of the dense Persian king, his heinously evil advisor and rapturously beautiful Jewish queen portrayed in clashing tones of turquoise blue, hot pink, and neon orange. Was it a sacrilege to throw it away? She had misgivings about whether it was worth saving; yet it made a slight mewl of protest as it was being tossed to the garbage pile, the plastic cogs grinding angrily in complaint. Would its made-in-Taiwan apparatus be strong enough to hold up to repeated ritual protests against the evil Haman? It seemed to personify uncertainty, which was what led to her desire to keep it, unnecessary and ugly though it was.
The prohibitive cost of overseas shipping meant that each item from her Princeton apartment took on a larger significance. When she was packing that place up, she felt like, with each piece of her apartment she took apart or discarded, a bit of her identity was being obliterated, rubbed away—a bit of finger gone here, a brown eye there, now some locks of her black shoulder-length curly hair. If her stuff defined her, with less of it, she was lesser too. She remembered seeing a billboard for a real estate agency: “Nothing defines you more than the home in which you live.” Despite her graduate student status and lack of both cash and the ability to reside in this place longer than an academic year, she wanted the things in her apartment to be part of her self-definition. She hoped it was a scintillating agglomeration of things. She wanted a visitor to her apartment to pick up any random item—book, poster, vase—and know there would be a captivating story behind it. It all added up, she hoped, to a picture of herself that was appealing—as a friend, or as a love interest.
She replaced the grogger on the shelf and tried to list what she needed. Extra kitchen items. She would use the pots for whatever she wanted so she wouldn’t have to worry about using the kosher pots in the apartment the wrong way. In her apartment in Princeton, Wendy didn’t cook much beyond spaghetti, eggs, and soy hot dogs. Cooking was a skill graduate students at Princeton did not hone. Friendships and parties were not focused on food—if people wanted to be in a group they went out to a bar or restaurant. If the department had a potluck gathering, people brought things from a takeout store. Cooking was not part of the life of the mind, and it brought no one closer to tenure, the scale by which all was rated in the world of graduate student priorities. As they frequently reminded themselves, mantra-like, the work is all that matters.
Wendy wandered around, getting ready to leave her apartment, looking for her sunglasses, keys, and wallet. She hoped, looking at the sunny space where her still-unpurchased desk would go, this would be where she’d begin her dissertation. There was something magical about the thought—this is where it would begin. How do I really know where I came from? Hadn’t Freud written that the mystery of origin is one of the greatest to humans? Enmeshed within this city, woven tightly into this place that is the omphalos mundi, the absolute center of the religious world, source and foundation of three religions, would be the beginnings of the lifetime opus of Wendy Dora Goldberg, sure to be of field-changing, paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering proportions. She laughed aloud at her own grandiosity.
Before leaving, she put a small notebook in her purse, remembering the admonition of Violet Dohrmann, the anthropologist on her dissertation committee: “An anthropologist doesn’t know what she thinks of a situation until she goes home and writes about it.”
After going over her list of needed items, she left her apartment and walked down Mishael Street to Yehoshua ben Nun, a quiet residential street with bougainvillea framing the stone gates of the apartment houses. She admired the trees. Eucalyptus? Hopefully, she’d learn the names of the Middle Eastern flora. She noticed the cats trawling the green garbage containers for sustenance; they were beginning to have a certain charm, scrawny and disorderly though they were. The quality of the sunlight attracted her notice. Did the light somehow pierce things that normally didn’t respond to its rays? But not knowing the names of the things that surrounded her, or even why she noticed the light, made her feel alien, appreciative as she was growing of Jerusalem’s beauty.
There was a meow from a feral cat somewhere in the alley, and a scurrying of paws. Wendy remembered the note of caution her friend Leora Lerner gave her when she came to pick up Wendy’s cat and care for him for the year. Leora had spent time studying in Jerusalem before college, and visited relatives here frequently.
Leora had cautioned her, “Do not adopt a cat from the streets of Jerusalem. Once they’ve lived wild, they can’t be tamed. They don’t change.”
Wendy remembered asking curiously, “Why can’t they change? People do. Or say they do—that’s the whole point of my study.”
Leora had planted her hands firmly on her hips. Wendy recalled the gesture and intonation, as Leora opined, “Animals don’t.”
Wendy moved away from the cat noises to see Rail’s Felafel across the street. She turned left, following the directions from her landlady how to exchange her American dollars for shekalim. She saw the money-exchange kiosk and entered a space with enough room for three or possibly four people to stand sideways and a window with a teller in front of her. Behind the teller was a blackboard with flags for different countries and the exchange rate for each currency posted. Wendy felt like she was engaging in some kind of illegal activity when she slid her hundred dollars in cash under the glass window. She felt furtive, pulling the cash out, glancing around, not wanting anyone to know where it came from or how much she had. She thought of the Off Track Betting windows she passed when she went through the George Washington Bridge bus terminal on the way from visiting her brother Joel and his family in New Jersey back to college at Columbia. At OTB, people slid things back and forth under the glass, hoping for profit and gain. As she took her four hundred shekel notes and some assorted change, she hoped she was not being cheated because it seemed like there were fewer shekalim than she’d thought there would be. Of course, she could look at the rate and do the math, but her concern was more that she didn’t quite know how things work in a new country.
Walking out the door, she decided the OTB analogy wasn’t completely farfetched; this year was a bet. If she stayed here, hung around with religious people, listened, took notes, wrote it all up, she’d get material for a dissertation. Then she could get some articles out of it, get published and on conference panels, and get a job. But maybe not. She could be stuck in a series of one-year visiting positions—or none at all. Or, become so mired in the research that she’d never begin to actually write the thing. Or, worst of all, get so frustrated by the enormity and scope of the project that she’d just give up, and run straight to law school, screaming at the stupidity of having wasted four years as a graduate student with nothing to show for herself.
For now, she would just enjoy getting to know a new place, discovering the small things that pleased her in the neighborhood. There was a movie theater on nearby Lloyd Cremieux Street, and bars and cafés lining Emek Refaim, the main drag. Every other store seemed to be either a hair salon or a store offering some kind of arty accessory: clothing or jewelry or housewares. There was a grocery store, a video store, and quite a few felafel and pizza places. At all times, there were people on the street, going to the stores, hanging out at cafés and restaurants. More than either New Bay or Princeton, there was street life. At all hours, people strolled the main boulevard, sat in outdoor cafés, and enjoyed being on the street.
She noticed the street sign, Rahel Emainu, Rachel our mother. Streets named for