Moving Up to the Old Country
Judith Ezekiel

This unpublished paper was written in 1999 at the request of Nira Yuval Davis and Marcel Stoetzler for their research among feminist scholars on imagined borders and boundaries.

     As a girl growing up in Dayton, Ohio in the late 50s and early 60s, it never occurred to me that I would one day have to add "United States" for a letter to reach my home address.  Borders for me separated neighborhoods and they were formed, not by geography, but by money and race.  My house was half a block below the one that divided Upper-, from Lower-Dayton-View.  The "lower" part was more black and working class; the "higher" half still integrated and middle class.  

     The rising Black Power movement changed the neighborhood zeitgeist allowing black kids to embrace new cultural forms and to express pent up rage at racism.  The whirlwind of Motown, afros, and our own miniriots, even if I felt excluded as a white child, seemed righteous and energizing.  Others experienced the period differently and the white flight accelerated.  My parents' mostly-Jewish friends, having eked their way into the middle class with the help of the 1950s socio-economy, and with less moral commitment to integration, escaped their new pale.  They disappeared into other school districts, our second overlapping borders, only making forays back into the old neighborhood for services at the city's three synagogues.
     For me, transferring to the seemingly-distant all-white Meadowdale school district (all of a couple of miles away, far from the real power in the affluent waspy southern suburbs) was nothing short of high treason.  When my parents considered buying a house there, I proclaimed I would never cross the threshold of that racist, conservative school, and they knew I meant it.  Imagine my distress then when, in 8th grade, I became part of the first group from my elementary school bussed to an all-white school, ostensibly to relieve overcrowding but clearly organized for racial integration.  Administrators in my new school separated me, one of only two whites in the group, from my black friends and classmates, assigning me to the "advanced," (read: all-white) class--and they warned that I would now face "real competition."  That year, with our house in decay and rising delinquency, my family ventured a quarter mile across the city limits to a fancier, newly-integrated neighborhood, slurred as "Jew Hill."
     By this time, I had crossed over into new spaces of arts and politics.  From eighth grade on, I spent every free second at the Living Arts Center, an experimental after-school fine arts program that brought together a racially, ethnically and economically diverse group of youths.  On public busses, I traveled into the extremely foreign country of East Dayton, the city's Appalachian area, viewed warily by many blacks and Jews.  We took refuge in that converted factory, an isle of freedom, creativity and community.  We joked about seceeding from the union, but none of us had passports.
     My other country was politics.  On the footsteps of civil rights, a (truly) distant country in Southeast Asia took on mammoth proportions in my mental geography.  Although a mere babe of 12 in 1968, the new left, counterculture and women's movements laid claim to me forever and I clung for dear life to the tail end of this political generation.
     Despite the local dimensions of my childhood visions, my family was not insular, as my stamp book and doll collection testified.  Three of my four grandparents had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe.  Fifties geographic mobility meant that neither parent was a native Daytonian and my relatives had scattered around the country.  Farther afield, two sets of cousins lived in Israel, and relatives had spent time in Mexico and Ghana.  And I knew that, since Ohio universities did not meet my standards, I would have to cross state lines for college.  In 1973, I went off to the experimental Residential College at the University of Michigan.
      Some time in high school, it had become clear that, as a woman of the arts, I would have to travel to France, to my fantasy France of impressionism, the  nouvelle vague, theater of the absurd, Sartre, de Beauvoir and the revolutionaries of May 68.  This goal lingered even after quitting the theater department.  In 1974, the Residential College, shut down in solidarity of a strike, was organizing teach-ins.  The head of my department, an expert on Brecht, claimed we had no business getting involved.  When I confronted him he declared that he was not interested in Brecht's politics, only in his art.  In front of the assembly, I abandoned the theater and pledged allegiance to the social sciences where my political peers resided.
       My trip to France was always envisaged as a break in my studies, but when my father died, tying me to inflexible scholarships, I accepted the sad reality of having to limit myself to a junior year abroad.  Along with the several dozen students from formerly radical Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, I arrived in Paris in August 1975.  The next day, while the others dined at the Eiffel Tower, I took the metro to the Vietnamese embassy to seek out celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence.  France was not just a new country, it was a gateway to the world.
       Weeks later, as a student in Aix-en-Provence, I went shopping for French political groups with which to connect.  My anti-imperialism fit well with French leftism and nearly two decades passed before I began to understand how deeply it melded with centuries of gallic antiamericanism and chauvinism.  My rejection of national borders comforted those bolstering theirs.
     Another facet of  my first experience living in France was far more personal.  As if by magic, my dark looks and distinctive name shifted from denoting a "nice Jewish girl" (the death knell to seduction) to . . . an Exotic Woman.  Even my flea market and theatrical costumes metamorphosed from weird to chic (and kept their French allure upon return to the US).  I reveled in my new sexual status.  It took me years to grasp the meaning of exoticization and the depths of antisemitism that lurked behind the process.  
       Back in the US, after completing my undergraduate studies, I debated moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Peru or France.  Coming from a  geographically dispersed, Diaspora family, and having grown up critical of America, crossing national borders felt surprisingly like a nonissue.  In the end, I chose Paris.  
       For many years, I found my niche in progressive, artsy, and feminist circles; strange, wonderful and ever-so-exciting.  Politics were initially the unspoken passport into the inner circles, with having manned the barricades of May 68 as a prerequisite, a defining moment that I would never share irrespective of my experiences in the US.  My passport into this community's ritual spaces in the cafes of Montparnasse was my appearance, a pleasurable ugly-duckling transfomational experience, all the more acceptable to its members given my impeccable feminist and radical credentials, but high maintenance for me.  Political communities and my foreignness also allowed me to cross class lines as never before
     Work and family forced me into other, more mainstream zones.  The more integrated I appeared to outsiders, the more ill at ease I grew.  Encounters with antisemitism, in a country where such attitudes led to ashes, made many older people seem sinister.  Antiracism no longer meant solidarity with Others.  Awkwardness also stemmed from misreading or missing cultural signs.  
      It was during an extended stay in Africa, the soon-to-be Burkina Faso, that I comprehended how foreign I felt in France.  After a lovely day touring with some Burkinabé friends, we agreed to meet the following day.  They didn't show.  Somehow I knew with certainty that I had done something wrong, violated an unspoken code, but I hadn't a clue to what it was.  Suddenly, I realized that I experienced this feeling, almost a physical nausea, often in France.  
      Today, not a day passes without me thinking about my foreignness.  I am an immigrée.  A far cry from my great aunt whose letters in phonetic yiddishe English could only be deciphered by reading them aloud, but an immigrant nevertheless.  In a nightmare, dreamed up years before contemplating having children: outside my office window, neighborhood kids are taunting my  imaginary daughter, "Na-na-na-na-na! Your mother doesn't even speak proper French."  Today, after 24 years, I hold tight to my American passport, and entertain a thoroughly irrational fear that my real daughter might start wearing the neat woolen pleated skirts and navy blue jackets of the bourgeois 16th arrondissement.  In day dreams, America beckons, its streets paved with peers, tenured jobs, and innovative schools for my children.  Yet when I do return, people expect me to drop all my snotty French ways and revert to being a regular Joe.  I toy with the idea of moving to Italy or Quebec.
       I have found community in cosmopolitanism.  While some monocultural friends and acquaintances understand the import of cultural misunderstandings, they often attribute what I see as my individuality to "American-ness."  I am bereft of agency, essentialized.  My intimate friends have sifted down those with multicultural experiences and broad world views, types that fortunately abound in Paris.  My political niche is in international networking where, when all goes well, I delight in navigating through cultures and countries.  I love the diverse student body at my university, working class children of West Indian, African, and North African immigrants.  
      But when things go poorly, I am alone in an inhospitable world.  The solitude is excruciating.  
Judith Ezekiel 1999