Jewishness and the Human Dimension

5. Tropes of Home

5 Tropes of Home I am writing on an airplane, somewhere over the Rockies. I am speaking to you at the Kansas Union, not so high on the top of Mount Oread. For more than a quarter-century, until just a couple of months ago, I was privileged to call ‘‘home,’’ with a comforting lack of self-consciousness and an equally comforting sense of free choice, that place in America that, for its Jews at least, counts more than any other as a mythic place of origin. Now, suddenly, bracingly, confusingly, I no longer quite know where ‘‘home’’ is, and I suspect moreover that this is at least as much the norm in America as it is the exception. Tonight I want to share with you not a thesis and its defense about what ‘‘home’’ really means, in Jewish culture or in any other culture, but provisional results of my efforts to make fragments of sense out of what is still a very new and startling, if altogether welcome, turn in my life. The account must perforce be a picaresque one, even if it is not a classic tale of a quest, certainly not one with a find at its end. I will start this brief, whirlwind journey in Jerusalem, the founding topos of home in Western civilization if ever there was one. But rather than the usual snapshot of the Western Wall in the foreground, the Dome of the Rock in the background, here is the home-page text for the Web site promoting the work of an 74 artist who happens to work in the medium of decoupage. Now, I won’t make too much of this, but it may be instructive that decoupage , as I understand it, involves taking an image and applying it to something seemingly more solid, almost the reverse of the rhetorical creation of ‘‘home,’’ which rather involves taking something seemingly solid and applying it to an image. The Web site, then, for ‘‘Decoupage for the Soul’’ promotes the artwork of one Libi Astaire—a local girl, as she informs us: Decoupage for the Soul was founded in 2001 by Libi Astaire, an artist, writer and video director living in Jerusalem. Libi was born in Kansas City, Mo., grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas and spent most of her childhood trying to figure out why Dorothy preferred Kansas to Oz. That question started her on a search which led to studying theatre in London, poetry in New York and Chassidic thought in Jerusalem. For several years Libi was the manager of Colors of Jerusalem, an innovative Judaica art gallery located in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem ’s Old City. It was there that she began to see a way to successfully piece together her interests in art, poetry, Chassidic wisdom and the mysteries of the Hebrew language. The result is Decoupage for the Soul—a unique forum for Jewish thought and Jewish art. Now that she has found her way to Jerusalem, Libi is at last able to enthusiastically agree with Dorothy that ‘‘there’s no place like home,’’ and it is her hope that all Jews will find their way back home speedily and within our days.1 Let’s spend a few seconds with this gem of the spidery World Wide Web. It appears that, like many Jewish families from this region, Libi’s family migrated sometime in the later twentieth century, from the ‘‘old city’’—that’s Kansas City, Missouri, a place that plays no further role in Libi’s story—to the other side, to the promised land of the suburbs of Johnson County, Kansas, to a ‘‘Prairie Village’’ that hardly looked like a village, that had no tropes of home 75 doubt already too many houses and too many trees to be taken for a prairie, that hardly looked like anything that could have been confused with the Kansas of Dorothy Gale; but perhaps Libi’s parents were looking for better public schools, and let’s hope they found them. Nevertheless, Libi’s text elides her own ‘‘Prairie Village ’’ with the black-and-white set of The Wizard of Oz and thus affords her a stark contrast between her asserted not-belonging in Kansas and Dorothy’s iconic rootedness there. Less violently than a twister, I suppose, Libi’s sense that she is not at home in Kansas sends her off on a quest at once aesthetic...