Filling in the Memoir Holes

Jennifer Lang

By Jennifer Lang

For the past few months, I have been entrenched in writing a memoir about my marriage. As an American married to a Frenchman living in Israel, I am writing to reckon with how I have traveled so far from my homeland and my youth, what I have given up, and why I agreed to live in a country I both admire and fear.

Digging in the past and trying to conjure up the scenes from twenty-four, twenty-five and twenty-six years ago have left me wondering if I can master this task. Gaping holes somewhere between the size of a Cheerio’s center and an SUV’s tire need filling.

In the midst of writing, I awakened to an email from my mother. While I had been sleeping in Raanana, she had been sifting through seven decades of personal possessions and memorabilia in my home town of Piedmont, California. My letters—circa 1987 when I graduated from college onward when I moved to Paris then Israel—had surfaced. Did I want them?

I emailed back immediately: YES.

When, during a recent family visit to Manhattan, my mother handed me a manila envelope marked in her slanted scrawl, a cross between cursive and script: Jen’s letters pre-’93, I peeked, and saw red-white-and-blue airmail envelopes and flimsy celestial blue aerogrammes.

The idea of becoming reacquainted with my younger self thrilled me. I remembered how my husband Philippe and I had met through a mutual friend in the hills outside of Jerusalem on a student retreat but not what I was feeling about sojourning in Israel. I remembered how after a one-month courtship he asked me to move in with him but not if or when I had decided to defer graduate school in Manhattan that fall.

Upon my return home, despite excruciating jet lag, I settled into bed with my letters. One by one, I opened them; pages and pages of lightweight sheets of paper fell into my hands. Over the next few days, unable to focus on my manuscript, I dumped my goldmine onto the living room carpet. Postcards from London, Chamonix and Frankfurt; a 50^th birthday card to him and then her; and annual father’s and mother’s day cards slid onto the floor.

Dear Mom and Dad,                                                                                       12/12/89

… Living and making my life here, raising a family here, I objectively think there’s more good than bad. Family is a strong unit. No doubt it’s a difficult and stressful existence, combined with the political problems, but I must admit, it’s very meaningful. Me, the not-so-Zionist of all, feels this… You just can’t live a daily life without processing what goes on around and I’ve always had a tendency to be like that.”

I had arrived in Israel nine months earlier with no intention of staying. When and how had I made such a leap?

The Treasure Trove

I spent hours opening, reading, folding, arranging. On the outside of envelopes or aerogrammes, I noted the main theme: loving Israeli life, engagement, MA program in Haifa, First Gulf War preparation. Then I organized them chronologically and stacked them in piles according to year. I rubber banded each pile, laid them out year by year and snapped a picture on my cellphone. Title: my treasure trove.

That night, when I crawled into bed, I told Philippe how confessional my letters were. I had shared way too much with my parents about my romantic life and realized our kids, who communicate with yup’s and yeah’s or a thumbs up to indicate they’re fine or a frowny face for a bad day, will never share with us the same way.

When my present day self has been asked why I first came to this country in 1989, why I stayed, why we left in 1994 and what brought us back in 2011, I have always slanted the details in such a way that made me seem somewhat unhappy and wholly ambivalent.

But when I re-met my twenty-three-year-old self I realized I had to change my storyline. Because she wrote: “I feel great here….Something has fallen into place and removed me even further from the States-grad school mind frame…” Then, she thrived on learning Hebrew in ulpan (now I mostly speak English); on spending time with her only sibling who immigrated here after college (we seldom see each other, but that’s a different story); on living abroad in a foreign culture (how I pine for the American hello-can-I-help-you refrain). “This is a country where one can make change and contribute. There is a sense of need here…” (Still true.)

I might not be able to turn back time, but I can learn from the me of my past. First she can fill in the midlife-related blanks, and then, maybe, she can show me how to see the place where I live with my family through less judgmental, softer eyes. So that I can recreate scenes and write my memoir with clarity and honesty.
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An MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Jennifer Lang resides in Raanana, Israel, where she writes, runs a writers salon and teaches yoga. Her essays have been published in Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women, the South Loop Review, The Indian River Review and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first memoir about staying in a complex marriage.