Misplaced Home and Mislaid Meat: Stories Circulating Among Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel

I have been listening to stories that wander between Ethiopia and Israel for almost twenty-five years. The Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews now living in Israel, have been the focus of my ethnographic research, and it is to their stories that I often turn to explore the complexity of their experience. Here, when attended to carefully, it is possible to discern changing personal and collective conceptions of the dramatic passage from Ethiopia to Israel. These conceptions are articulated in different expressive forms, which are often coded and indirect. In fact, as I came to learn, the more the experience touches upon core, embodied senses of being, the more these articulations seek an outlet in shared, non-personal and even commonly produced forms of expression. One such form is the humorous story.

Reflecting the Ethiopian immigrants' encounter with life in Israel through comical stagings, these stories encode some of the more fundamental vulnerabilities of this group's dramatic passage.

The following pages present two clusters of stories centered on the lost home and the lost self. These two primary, existential anchors are simultaneously disguised and revealed in the humorous stories through metaphorical devices. The sense of loss entailed in the experience of migration is miniaturized and metaphorized via key idioms. Prominent among them is the image of a slaughtered animal placed in someone else's apartment. Elucidating such images, which are often laden with contradictions, requires progressively expanding contextualization, which draws on concrete and symbolic cultural associations.

Most of the stories I heard over the years from Ethiopian Israelis were not humorous: among them were stories of fierce longing for the villages from which they came, tales of internal relations between the groups making up Beta Israel, and many stories of the complex and contradictory relationships existing between them and their non-Jewish neighbors, particularly the Christians against whom their own unique identity was forged. In many of those stories I discerned the recurrent image of animals and meat-among them references and allusions to the intimate proximity with domestic animals, the care and breeding of livestock, and the communal slaughtering and eating of lambs, goats, and cows. The centrality of these images as a constituting organizing idiom in the world of the group is expressed both at the level of everyday practices and at the more abstract level of ritual and expressive forms of culture.¹

Unlike the prominent place and elaboration of the meat idiom in stories about rural Ethiopia, the home and the surrounding landscape were so familiar, intimately known, and embodied that they remained undeserving of comment, perhaps beneath the surface of awareness. This internalized mapping is a shared experience in rural Ethiopia, and among the Beta Israel it was particularly vital, because of their need to maintain kinship and religious ties between dispersed villages. It seems that this knowledge was so constitutive of a person's lived experience that the coordinates of the environment and the home were hard-wired into one's sensible being. Against this embodied, taken-for-granted sense of home location in the stories about life in Israel, this knowledge becomes an explicit absence.

The stories to be discussed here constitute a new chapter in the cultural and folkloric elaboration of the meat idiom in the context of the search for the lost home. In these stories I repeatedly encountered the image of a person, or of slaughtered meat, trying to reach the right home. When these stories are framed in humorous forms, they provide both tellers and listeners with a working-through of the trauma. The various narrative incarnations² will therefore serve in this article as an interpretative tool with which to conceptualize the experience of migration and the pain and injury it entailed.

From Ethiopia to Israel

Originally, the Beta Israel (Falashas)³ lived in rural, northwestern Ethiopia. The community was scattered between more than five hundred small villages where people lived in close proximity to their Christian and Muslim neighbors. While in Ethiopia, the Beta Israel saw themselves as a distinct religious group, identifying strongly with the Torah (Orit, the...