Coming Home to Jerusalem: A Personal Journey

An American Jewish woman uproots her family to live in Jerusalem, searching for a new home.For Wendy Orange, a writer in her early forties, what starts as a ten-day conference in Jerusalem stretches into a six-year residence in one of the world's most captivating cities, where she undertakes an illuminating and evocative trip to both banks of this ancient land. Amid language barriers, household drama, homesickness, and a halting job search, Wendy Orange strives to settle her small family in Israel for the long term. Her sociability and interest in her surroundings fast connect her to a wide assortment of Israel's varied personalities: famous authors, ob-scure artists, politicians, psychologists, journalists, American-Israeli housewives, evangelical Christian teachers. She meets a long-lost family friend who came to Jerusalem in the 1948 war, and she comes to know sabras who are wearying of the life she finds fascinating and compelling. She is introduced to Holocaust survivors who arrived shattered to work the land on farms. She meets therapists who blame her problems on American self-absorption, and rabbis obsessed with the Torah whose lectures she yearns to understand. She goes to a picnic with absolutist West Bank settlers. She falls in love with a Moroccan-Israeli cab driver and receives an education in Israel's class schisms. When Orange gets a job as the Israel correspondent for an American magazine, she crosses the Green Line that separates Israelis from displaced Palestinians and she begins a journey through another country she comes to love. Crisscrossing from Israel to the territories, Orange confronts views of the world that are completely at odds and she experiences in a profound way the ancient conflicts as she becomes absorbed with people who are at polar extremes: peaceniks and settlers, the political elite and the downtrodden, high-profile intellectuals and young soldiers. She is drawn into subcultures that coexist, if barely, throughout Israel. In Coming Home to Jerusalem, Wendy Orange brings to life the extraordinary and the everyday in a country she tries to make her own.