Coming to America - Day 2: Diversity or Culture Clash?

Crossing the Atlantic obviously brings with it numerous cultural implications, beyond any possible linguistic barriers.  I've lived half my life in Israel, and although I don't feel like a total foreigner in the US, there is no way for me to prevent myself from constantly noticing the differences and contemplating their meaning.  Much more so for my children.  On our first day, those cultural differences played out in many different ways.

Rise & Shine

After getting up in the morning, we began to get our bearings.  We are being graciously hosted by my sister- and brother-in-law, Sonya and Adam.  They moved near Boston, MA exactly one year ago from central Pennsylvania.  The neighborhood they live in is situated around along the slopes of an enormous hill.  The live on a terrace (that is, the official street name is such-and-such Terrace), which, is its name implies, wraps around the side of the hill.  This was actually the first time I was fully aware of the significance of this specific street classification (lane, boulevard, etc. all denote different geographical/municipal phenomena).  The most poignant ramification of living on the side of a hill is that one side of the house is always going to have a very different relationship to the ground than the other side.  In their case, the front of the house is at street level, and the back is on stilts.  They have a multi-tiered deck that conforms roughly to the slope of the hill, and then there is a nearly useless patch of land between the end of the deck and the next house downhill.  Nearly useless due to the steep incline, of course.  It is, oddly enough, put to use by wild turkeys who come to roost in the evening in the branches of the trees that grow in that otherwise unutilized stretch.

Staying in the house with us are Michal and Sonya's parents, Anna and Leo.  They live outside of Philadelphia, and drove in to Boston to enjoy a rare few days of having all their progeny under one roof.  The dynamics between the various generations began to unfold over the course of the morning.  Anna, being a veteran Jewish mother, feels the full responsibility of feeding everyone in the house, even though they all have their own Jewish mothers to take care of them (or at least Jewish wives).  We are on vacation, but Sonya and Adam are not.  They are university professors, and have responsibilities even over the summer.  Our children are on vacation, as well.  Sonya and Adam's children - Maya (12), Arik (9), and Layla (7) are likewise on summer vacation, but Arik has a drama day camp that occupies him most of the day.

The grandparents speak Russian to everyone in the house, with the exclusion of myself.  I took a year of Russian at the University of Chicago, and then have lived in a house where Russian is spoken around me for the past 15.5 years (since Binyamin was born), but my skills are still quite limited.  Adam, who grew up in Montreal, has been very studious and tenuous in his pursuit of Russian fluency, and it has certainly paid off.  The Boston kids speak to each other alternately in Russian or English; their English seems to be the stronger tongue.  Our kids will understand either Russian or English, but only the older ones are proficient in answering in any language other than Hebrew.  And so on our first morning the regular routines of getting up and eating breakfast were governed in a mostly separate fashion, each nuclear family doing its own thing within the common confines of the house.

Lost & Found

In the late morning, our kids were getting bored and antsy, having been shown around the house and deck by their cousins and quickly exhausted the obvious means of entertainment offered to them.  So I volunteered to take them to the neighborhood park.  I set off to climb to the top of the hill with Elisheva, Noam, Amiel, and Chanania.  After walking up a steep incline for about ten minutes, we crested the hill, and there we found a park split over both sides of the road, with lots of sloping grassy areas and not very much in the way of a playground.

Tree climbing on the top of the hill

Noam and Elisheva trying out a cozy cabin

A man-made stone structure in the park

After exploring the park, we decided to go down the hill to the street on the slope opposite us.  Amiel did cartwheels all the way down to the bottom (after which he was unable to walk straight), while Noam and Chanania just ran.  Elisheva and I took our time, and went over to investigate a couple of lone trees near the edge of the grass.  There we found large flat rock with two bracelets of green polished stones laying on it.  Elisheva immediately requested to adorn them, one on each wrist (she is very much enamored of wearing jewelry).  The boys came over to see what we were doing.  After hearing that the bracelets had just been lying there, Amiel shouted out, "Let's do the mitzva of Hashavat Aveida!".  Hashavat Aveida is the mitzva of returning lost objects (or livestock) you happen upon.  Nowadays the most common approach to finding the owner of the lost object is simply by putting up a note in the place the object was found.  The note must not stipulate too much information about the object, in order to fraudulent claims.  The finder must leave out identifying traits from the note, and only return it to a claimant who correctly supplies them.  Local electronic bulletin boards (like a neighborhood Google Group, or the like) are also a good place to advertise notices of found items.  We did not come to the park with paper and pen, and I have no knowledge of local virtual community boards, so I just smiled at Amiel's good intentions.  Maybe we'll put up a note next time we go to the park.

Elisheva modeling one of the bracelets

On the way home, I decided to go a different way, not the way we'd come.  My phone had no reception since I hadn't yet purchased an American SIM card, and I had no prior knowledge of the neighborhood.  And so, I knowingly let myself and four of my children get completely lost in suburban Boston.  We were supposed to be home in about half an hour from the time we left the park, but I didn't let that bother me.  As we wandered the streets, I pointed out the children how different states put out different-looking license plates, we pondered together the different kinds of houses, and noted how the school buses, mail trucks, and other mundane features of urban life look very different here than in Israel.  We found mushrooms under a tree and harvested them to bring back to Babushka (Russian for grandmother).  We found a wild turkey feather on the parkway.  Eventually, we had only ten minutes to be home, and the children were starting to seriously drag their feet and even whine a little that they were tired and thirsty.  I had to do something.  I've always prided myself on a solid sense of direction.  The streets we had been walking down were anything but straight, and yet I had a strong feeling that were headed the right way.  Then we chanced upon a set of stairs that connected to the terrace above us.  We ascended, and continued to walk along the higher street.  At this point, I decided that enough was enough, and that I would ask directions from the next person we passed on the street.  Just then, I pointed out to the kids a license plate from Pennsylvania.  I took three more steps, looked up, and stopped.  The house on the opposite side of the street seemed oddly familiar.  Oh yeah, that's the house I see when I walk out the door of Sonya and Adam's house... I called out to the kids: "Ok, we're here, come inside!"  We had walked just past the house without even realizing it.  But we found our way home, on our own, and we were only 5 minutes late.

Later in the day, we attempted to get lost again, but with less success.  It happened to be Anna's birthday, and a surprise talent show was in the works.  Almost all the kids and some of their parents would be performing in her honor.  I was charged with purveying the dessert - either ice cream or a fancy cake.  I set out in search of a kosher supermarket I'd told was "just around the corner" but not told precisely which corner it was around, and the source of the information was unavailable at the time.  I left the house with Moriah (in a stroller), Elisheva, Noam, and Layla, with an hour to return. We headed down the main drag, where I'd seen a kosher restaurant, and continued on for some time.  When it was almost time to turn back, I decided we should go a different way back to the house in order to increase our chances of finding the store.  I started down a side street, and immediately Layla started disclosing the way home from our new route.  I turned onto an even smaller street, and again the same thing.  It was as if I had a living version of Waze walking along beside me, recalculating my route at every turn.  So I engaged her in a conversation about the value of getting lost, and told her the story of how we had succeeded in getting lost and then found earlier in the day.  In the meantime, we found ourselves at a dead end, and cut through an oddly unfenced construction site (no construction was underway at that time of day) in order to get through to the next street.  When we got back to a main avenue, we had only 20 minutes left to get home.  I saw a large complex with 6-pointed stars on it.  We walked past it, to find a Jewish bookstore.  I felt like we were getting warmer.  I was about to give up, when a religious couple walked out of the bookstore.  I asked them as to the whereabouts of a kosher supermarket, and they said, "Follow us.  We're going there - it's just on the next block."  Eureka!  Again we had arrived at our destination by trying to get lost.  Now we just had to get the ice cream, and get home.  With fifteen minutes left on the clock, we entered the store, Elisheva screaming for no known reason.  I figured out that she would calm down if I let her sit in the stroller.  I picked up Moriah and went off to hunt for ice cream.  It took me a few minutes to pick out a bucket of cold dessert, and when I got back to the stroller, I found an unconscious little girl inside.  That certainly explained the screaming earlier.  The line was a bit long, so we were fifteen minutes late getting back, but I felt victorious.  Getting lost had proved itself yet again.

Birthday Revue

When we got back to the house, it was time for the birthday programming.  Babushka Anna was requested to come to the room where the electric organ is kept, and everyone began to sing birthday songs, and then dance around her in a circle.  She was overjoyed at the attention and at having so many of her children and grandchildren present.  Then everyone sat down and the show commenced.  Maya MC'ed, birthday cards were presented, short music pieces were performed on the electric piano and clarinet, and then we all sat down on the deck for a festive family meal.

The audience is ready

Babushka in the middle

Avigail

Maya

Chanania

Amiel

The long table

The other side of the table

Toasts were made, food was consumed, (mosquitos were swatted) and good vibes were shared by all.

The Cousin Connection

[This section was accidentally deleted by some child who banged on the keyboard while I was away.  By the time I realized what had happened, I had typed too many other words to be able to undelete it.  So instead I'll just summarize.]

This was the first time these cousins really met each other, in the flesh.  Noam and Layla hit it off phenomenally, despite a one-way language barrier (Noam has a lot of trouble articulating in any language other than Hebrew).  So much so I was reminded of the beginning of Forrest Gump, where he describes his relationship with Jenny when they were little kids, "like peas and carrots."  No other significant cross-family connections were made between the kids.

It May Be Organic, but is it Kosher?

Michal and I are the only members of our respective birth families that keep kosher in a strict fashion.  Keeping kosher in someone else's non-kosher compliant home is always tricky, and we don't have a set protocol for it, since it happens so infrequently.  It becomes ever the more complicated when the host family have their own particularities around food, and yet again when their is another set of guests with their own culinary preferences.  But Sonya and Adam are open-minded and inclusive folk, so the approach they preferred was a "common denominator" approach, to the greatest extent possible - when we're all eating together, we all eat the same food.  That means the food has to be kosher (for us), organic as much as possible (for the hosts [but not only - we also like to eat organic]), and also adhere to the traditional Russian palate (for the grandparents).

Inclusion is also a good approach, but problems still arise when there is a conflict of values.  Sonya wanted to put spinach leaves in the salad.  Spinach is known to have a high probability of infestation by insects, and all insects (with the exception of 6 varieties of locust) are strictly prohibited in the kosher diet.  The accepted treatment is to soak the leaves in a soapy solution for a few minutes (which dissolves the adhesive that sticks the insects to the leaves), and then thoroughly rinse.  Sonya and Adam's dietary restrictions include avoiding ingesting chemicals in any amount, and naturally Sonya was concerned about trace amounts of soap that might not be fully rinsed away.  Even though I am also a fan of spinach, I was willing to leave it out all together.  Thinking about it at the time, I realized it was just a question of priorities: neither one of us was interested in eating soap, or insects, but I was willing to risk small amounts of soap in order to completely avoid the insects, and she was willing to risk eating a few bugs in order to avoid the soap suds.  In the end, she was more resourceful than I, and proposed checking some of the leaves manually, just enough to fill out the salad.  That was a solution I never would have proposed, since it is tedious work and usually people aren't interested in undertaking it.  At the end of the day, inclusion won out, and the salad was sumptuous.