My parents discovered socialism when I was eight months old. They moved from Tel Aviv, where I was born, to a kibbutz in the southern desert of Israel, where they would share their belongings and get the same basic salary as everyone else. There, at this utopian community in the heart of the desert, they would leave their baby in a Children’s House – a place in which babies and children would spend every night, away from their parents. Perhaps we each have our own starting point, and this version of radical socialism was mine. In the Children’s House there was no adult to look after us during the night. But there was a recording machine that could detect cries if they were loud enough, so that a rotating Night Guard would drop by if needed. By the time I was four years old, some children would learn to get out of bed and walk towards the point where the machine was fixed to the wall, stand under it and only then begin to cry – making sure the night guard would detect their cries and come to soothe them. Every morning I made a pact with myself: tonight, I’ll walk towards the machine, say that I’m scared, and ask the night guard to come. Every night, I woke up and walked the long corridor until I stood under the machine, a four-year old observing the rickety wooden device, tracing the moon and the way it changed in the window next to it, and never managed to utter a word.

Fast forward to London, Holborn, St Clement’s Lane. I’m in my twenties, sitting in a weekly poetry writing class. Outside it is raining heavily and the windows are shaking with such ferocity that I fear they’re about to break. We’re reading a poem by Seamus Heaney, and I can hardly understand what’s going on. My English is so weak, I’m not sure what to make of the title because I don’t know what ‘Naturalist’ is. In the first line, I can recognise the words Year and Heart. Great words to carry a poem, for sure, but not enough to carry my understanding of this line. At the end of the session, I ask the tutor if she could send us the poems we’re reading each week in advance. Time, I discover, is all I need in order to wrestle with this difficult language. The tutor replies that unfortunately she won’t be able to do this. Time, I’m reminded, is never available when it comes to language, because language happens fast.

Sometimes you have to write in a foreign language even when you’re acutely aware that you’re writing against all odds. Language always felt difficult for me, and from a very early age I felt that the language I was given quite simply didn’t work. So many things happened in my life by the time I turned five, that as a child I felt strongly that – somehow – I had to find a different language. But since there was no other language available for me, I had to invent one. I started to create songs in what today we would describe as gibberish. I would walk for hours in the outskirts of the kibbutz and invent songs in my own meaningless tongue. As a child, there were too many things that I didn’t understand about the world around me, but I think I already sensed a rather crucial thing: that it is always better not to understand something on a literal level than seemingly understand it completely and still not get what’s going on.  

My parents separated a couple of years after moving to the kibbutz. Turbulent years followed until, when I was five, I moved with my mother and her new boyfriend to another kibbutz, an even more far-left utopian community, a twelve-minute cycle ride from the Sea of Galilee – ‘the lowest freshwater lake on earth’. Here, too, I was welcomed into a Children’s House and here, too, was a machine designated to detect cries through the nights. But there was also something new: the nights were often punctuated by howling siren alarms coming from the then-perilous border with Jordan. Here, I learned once again that children express fear in at least twenty-four different ways. There were twenty-five of us in this new Children’s House. I knew that I was not the only one who was terrified, and yet only two of us were crying in response to the sirens’ high-decibel descending and ascending wails.

Back in London, it takes me three months after I arrive to decide that what I really need to do is write poetry. Poetry of all things. There is a strong force in me that needs to write – finally, now, I can’t wait any longer. And there is also a strange confidence: something tells me that I will be able to wrestle with this difficult language. To a certain extent, I don’t mind that I don’t understand most of what I read. After all, by now, not understanding is my comfort zone. And perhaps that is one of the reasons I’m drawn to poetry – a space in which one is invited to get lost. I want to dive into English and see what happens. And English is not enough. I want to dive into French and Italian too, I want to swim in languages. Note to self: when you’re back home later this evening, check what ‘naturalist’ means.

English: what a language. All those possibilities of time and space: twelve different tenses and three conditional moods! All those prepositions! At school, I was very weak in English as a foreign language. In fact, I was one of those pupils who weren’t able to concentrate at all, on any topic. I was too busy missing my father who steadily faded away until he completely disappeared from my life. I couldn’t sit still during lessons, was often thrown out of class and failed at every subject apart from Sport and Art. I wanted to be outdoors – play ball games or go for a run. But later, when my friends became experts at smoking and getting drunk, I knew that if I followed suit, nobody would notice – just as nobody seemed to notice that I spent so many hours out of class. Spending the nights in the Children’s House, away from the adult world, we were left to calculate the risks around us on our own. Perhaps some children hoped that if they pushed themselves to the limits, some help would eventually come. I knew without doubt that if I pushed myself any further, I would fall apart. Something had to change. I just didn’t know what that something would be.

The arrival of Holden Caulfield, swearing and sweating in outrageously outdated Hebrew in an odd translation from the English, was the most important event that happened to me at fifteen. We had to read The Catcher in the Rye for an exam in Literature, and here was a book that I actually managed to read past the first page. It wasn’t easy: I remember noting to myself that the translation didn’t feel right. The slang and swear words, in particular, felt so old fashioned that it was hard to believe anyone had ever spoken like that. Something told me that the original must be better than the text I was holding in my hands. And yet, miraculously, Salinger managed to shine through this odd mix of dated Hebrew and peculiar swear words, and within a few days The Catcher in the Rye became the book that made me realise that reading was an incredible act. For several months, I carried the book in my school bag anywhere I went, the way I carried grief.

I began a habit that would never change: if there was a book I liked, I would hold onto it, I would come back to it again and again. After a few years of holding onto books, I eventually applied for a degree in Comparative Literature. Sitting in the lecture hall at Tel-Aviv University, there was this rarest of feelings: I felt at home. Home, even though it was an odd one: the only available dormitory space was above the university disco hall, which meant studying was forever accompanied by the persistent beat of the bass. Home, even though it was never clear for how long. Some incidents, however brief, seem to anchor themselves in the present tense. This is one of them: towards the end of the first year, while working on an essay on The Odyssey, the phone rings. It’s my mother. She calls to let me know that they won’t be able to pay the rest of the tuition fees. By now she and my stepfather have left the kibbutz only to discover that you can check-out any time you like but you can never leave. Or you can leave – with nothing. My grandfather, who had sensed this would be an issue one day, had left me a small sum of money to cover the first year of university. But my first year was about to end. I spend the entire night crying to the muffled rhythm of loud disco music. My roommate, an immigrant from France, tells me that in France the tuition fees are free. I’m already working in four different jobs that I hate in order to sustain reading The Odyssey through the night. First thing the next morning, I enrol in a French class.

Léa
Elle est pas intérimaire, elle est pas comme ma mère
Elle est passagère, elle est pacifiste
Elle est pas d’accord, elle est passionnée
Elle est pas fut’-fut’, oh, elle est pathétique
Elle aime pas tous mes tics…

I love studying French. We have a brilliant teacher, a woman in her thirties who always looks a bit sad and who carries the air of someone who’d actually rather be somewhere else. Perhaps because of this we spend much of the time listening to Louise Attaque. We study the band’s ‘Léa’ in order to practice negation in written versus spoken French. We read Sempé, we watch Alain Resnais and Jaoui-Bacri films. I keep wondering if our teacher realises how brilliant she is. Back at the dormitories, two new students from Ecuador and Panama join our flat. Soon the four of us are wrestling with languages as a way of mapping our opposite directions. The three of them study Hebrew meticulously, treating it as a precious key that will enable them to keep studying and find work. I study French driven by an urgent wish to get away from this country as fast as I can to a different – albeit imaginary – place in which I will no longer need to worry if I can afford to study. We communicate through different levels of broken Hebrew, French and Spanish, while in the background Shakira’s ‘Dónde Estás Corazón?’ Competes with the ever-persistent night-club beats coming from down below.

Dónde Estás Corazón? I didn’t make it to France. I landed in Venice as part of a student exchange programme, during which I tried to study Italian while discovering Luna Pop, bursting from every TV station and radio channel: Cos’è successo, sei scappata / Da una vita che hai vissuto / Da una storia che hai bruciato… Some cities, however much history they carry, are ever moored in the present. Venice is one of those places: fragile and changing in a matter of hours. A typical day in Venice takes shape like this: in the morning, I study Italian; in the afternoon, I fail to put it into practice. It doesn’t take long to learn that any local Venetian I ambush has already lost their last shred of patience for beaming newcomers eager to brush up their skills:

-    Vorrei, erm… un caffè e… une, mi scusi, cornetto, erm un cornetto, per…
-    Espresso? Here you go. Next?

Along with my Catholic Spanish roommate, we embark on the far more gratifying, self-appointed task of researching tiramisu. Soon we are on a mission: to reach and taste each and every variation of gelato al tiramisù found on this ancient lagoon; in the process, we learn the city’s map by heart. Only the Acqua Alta sirens, which become ever more frequent and to which I always react with momentary panic, prevent us from truly accomplishing our work. On weekends, I sometimes accompany my roommate to a rather theatrical Sunday Mass, in which an enthusiastic, rock-star-like priest preaches, hands moving in all directions along with the occasional air-guitar, completing each sentence with Avete capito? Avete capito? I like sitting in this space in which I hardly understand a word apart from this refrain. For the first time I let myself grieve for my grandfather who passed away a few months before my arrival in this sea-level city. And it is here, in this space, that I suddenly miss him. Avete capito? My grandfather had to learn Italian in a matter of months in order to be able to work with Italian engineers on the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, a project that was the closest to his heart. All those years, did I bother listening when he told me about the years of working on this, telling me how difficult it was, how meaningful, how exciting to communicate in a different tongue? No, not so much. Avete capito? When we step outside, the city is immersed in light fog and rain. There is so much water all around us. No, non lo capisco.

After three months, I packed the fragile city map, the canals and the sirens, the Acqua Altas, the Sunday Masses and a few Natalia Ginzburg books I hoped to manage to read one day, and left with an urgent wish to come back. But a couple of cities and years later, I followed my then boyfriend and left Israel for England rather than the receding dream of Italy or France. And it is in London that I realise I can’t wait any longer. I need to write.

For the first few years in London, I can barely communicate in English and find a job as a Hebrew teacher at a reform synagogue. I quickly realise that here too, we speak different tongues. Hebrew is taught like musical notes – the goal is to be able to read it aloud; the meaning of the text is secondary. Following my time in Venice, I have learned to love immersing myself in a language I don’t understand, setting my own thoughts free and filling in the gaps. And so, to a degree, I get this. At the synagogue, the pupils’ goal is to read aloud a section from the Torah as part of a Bar Mitzvah tradition. Like me, most of them are not coming from observant homes, they don’t especially care about the meaning of these religious rituals. But, unlike them, for me Hebrew is a living language, remote from religious texts altogether. While I love the Old Testament as a work of literature, I know very little about religious rituals or texts like the Siddur. Growing up in the kibbutz movement, the religion I was brought up with was Socialism. And this, too, turns out to be rather different from the version I discover in the UK.

I spend the first two years in London wrestling with languages. Teaching a different Hebrew to the one I speak, taking a weekly English class with fellow foreigners who, like me, struggle with the tenses. The present perfect is not about time, it’s about continuity – the teacher explains – it’s about creating links, and for the first time I think I actually get something. At night, I spend hours going over a long list of English words, testing myself until I remember what they mean. I find it exciting that English has different words for House and Home, as opposed to the one word that carries both meanings in Hebrew (בַּיִת), French (la maison) or Italian (la casa). I find it frustrating that the verb in ‘I miss you’ does not convey the absence of someone from your life in a way that illustrates the physical want, as it is in Hebrew: אַתָּה חָסֵר לִי – which is impossible to translate but perhaps roughly means ‘you are absent from me’. The French (tu me manques) and Italian (mi manchi) seem to me closer to the Hebrew meaning. Poetry-wise, I find it exhilarating that in English, the adjective comes before, rather than following, the noun – I can already see that this seemingly small technical feature has the most exciting potential for creating surprise and suspense while working on a poem.

Somewhere there is a country in which the hunger for knowledge is met with access to knowledge rather than towering tuition fees. I don’t know where this country is. It is not the country I was born in and it is not the country I’m steadily falling in love with. After two years in London, I finally manage to pass the required English as a Foreign Language test, apply and get accepted for an MA in Creative Writing. Both these achievements feel to me completely incredible. It is not until a few weeks later that I realise how naïve I have been all this time. Even though I manage to get closer to continuing my studies, the obvious, glaring truth was always there – I would never be able to afford the UK’s international tuition fees. The small sum of money my grandfather left for my tuition has long gone. I don’t know how to describe the months and years of heartbreak that followed this.

I can’t go to university in this city so instead I study the city. I study London. The streets and the theatres, the bookshops and libraries, the tube, the bus stops, the galleries, the languages around me. I gradually accept that I’ll have to become an autodidact. That I’ll have to keep studying, in spite of all my efforts, on my own. And even though this is not my preferred method of learning, it is the only one available to me. To a certain extent, I have no choice, because I rapidly fall in love with the English language: with the multitude of words it contains, with the elasticity of its syntax – how it allows itself to change and move into so many directions and create exciting new forms. English, what a difficult language, what a remarkable language. I keep going to poetry groups during which poetry becomes a form of experimenting. I want to test how the English language works, to stretch its possibilities. Every new, unfamiliar word becomes a word that I test in a poem. The poem, in its turn, turns into a lab in which I check how the word performs in relation to others. Here’s an example: I stumble upon a word that I don’t know: ‘abundance’. I check and test it in a poem: can you say abundance of rain, abundance of nightfall? I start my poem ‘After­-Party’ with the line Yes, there was the abundance of nightfall and hope it makes some kind of sense.

There are worse cities than London in which to become an autodidact. When the Institute Français programmes an entire week on the cinema of Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, including lectures and seminars with both filmmakers, I learn about the craft of playwriting and filmmaking in the most meaningful way. I’m fascinated by the ways they create tension between action and words, how so often the dialogue in their films and plays is punctuated by the weight of the things that are left unsaid. A few years later, at another event with the same filmmakers, now back in London to promote their latest film, I approach Agnès Jaoui and ask her whether the two of them give workshops for writers while in London. They don’t do that, she says, but she is generous enough to share some advice. If you want to progress with your writing, she says while we cross Leicester Square in the rain, if you want to take it seriously, these are the two most important things you should do: first, find a good therapist and begin therapy sessions. Second, don’t wait for editors or directors to tell you if what you are working on is good. Be your own editor and director. I was nine months pregnant with my first child when she gave me this advice before dashing away towards Charing Cross Road with her crew. I watched how they disappeared while the square turned into a mix of neon and lightning and smoke. So many things were about to change.

Childhood – that thing that keeps coming back, that close and faraway country, that catalyst of images and sounds. A sandstorm in the desert. A fresh-water lake. Childhood – that unreliable recording machine. Perhaps all new mothers run in opposite directions, back and forth at once. Holding my baby close, I’m pacing in circles all night while simultaneously going for a run in the long corridor that stretches from our rented London flat all the way towards a distant country, a house, a recording device forever anchored to the middle of night. The present perfect is about continuity, is about creating links. Sleep deprived and exhausted, I’m tired of links. Holding my baby close for months of restless nights, I find it even harder to comprehend those distant images: the Children’s Houses, the long corridors, the siren alarms, the daily ritual of failure – that of walking towards the machine and never managing to speak.

Running between languages, this is what I have learnt: operating in a foreign language is both a constant physical activity and an illusion. You tried to escape language and all you did was get caught in a new one. You tried to create new meanings and you’re still trapped in syntax and tenses. Moreover, you now constantly need to catch up with more than one language, because the vernacular changes incredibly fast and the canon shifts directions at equal speed. But one thing I’ve discovered is this: learning a new language, to a degree, gives you a second chance of childhood, and as a result – a second chance of home. After all, when you acquire a new language you have to learn everything from the very beginning, like a child. You have to learn the concepts of time and space, the days of the week, all the rules around you, how to speak and pronounce each and every word, and so on. And – like a child – you may feel the urge to experiment and play with this language. My language of play, against all odds and my own expectations, has turned out to be English. It has also turned out to be my home.

Looking back, I realise now that even though I grew up in a largely monolingual community, there were many unspoken languages in it. The two kibbutzim I grew up in were largely formed by immigrants and refugees from Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. But no one around me spoke Polish or Czech. Those languages were buried far away in mass graves on dark European lands. Those languages, like the losses and horrors they carried, were not part of my childhood. Although perhaps they were. My grandfather, who lost his mother and father and seven-year-old sister in the Holocaust, refused to talk about any of it with me. But when I asked him once why he’d never told me that my name (which means Autumn in Hebrew) means Lake or Pond in Polish, he looked at me in utter confusion. He was very old by then. He still refused to talk about any of this. But in a rare moment of revelation, he told me that after the Holocaust, he decided two things: the first one was to forget Polish – the language he was born into and grew up with. The second was to let go of the idea of God.

I’ve been thinking about these two decisions often. That perhaps, on some level, language and God are always deeply interlinked. That when you reject the language you grew up with, you inevitably doubt your most foundational values and beliefs. My grandfather, who left God behind in the rubble of European ruins, who deliberately forgot Polish, proceeded to immerse himself in six other languages, as if trying to counterweight the loss. My grandfather, who made sure I went to university. How many languages does one need to learn in order to compensate for the loss of one’s own mother tongue, of one’s own God?

The year before he passed away my grandfather invited me to spend a week with him in Greece. He wanted to see the Acropolis, visit Athens and travel to Delphi. At the time, I was obsessed with The Odyssey, and he assumed I’d be delighted to come. But I wasn’t sure. He was very frail, and I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to help him if anything went wrong. I lingered on the decision for weeks, but by the time I decided to go he’d found an alternative plan. Perhaps it is fitting that the stories about the oracle of Delphi are stories of a ritual susceptible to misunderstanding. I imagine when pilgrims arrived in the Delphi Temple, the oracle had to interpret their pressing queries, forward them to Apollo, hoping he was not too distracted by the pursuit of mortals as he skimmed through the questions. What Apollo offered as answers was translated back into the oracle tongue and then delivered against a background of hot vapour and fumes rising from the fine, deep fractures of Mount Parnassos.

Sometimes, on sleepless nights, I drift back to the Children’s House, to the child walking the long corridor at night, and see it as an image of a pilgrimage; of a daily journey towards the sacred shrine where an open window features a different version of the moon each night, where a machine is fixed to the wall – ready for your urgent pleas and questions. But how hard it is to ask questions as a non-believer; how difficult to ask for anything when you are scared. On those nights, there was no god out of the machine – not even the possibility of misunderstanding, just the absence of sound. But I have learnt to appreciate that during that time, there was another kind of sacred space – found in that long corridor of night, in those hours away from the world of adults – where it was possible to take the time, observe the world around you, and think for yourself. Years later, if you’re bound to carry that rickety machine with you wherever you go, you may as well turn it into something else – a backpack, a camera, a sound box to experiment with, and opt for a different kind of pilgrimage, running between languages.