You have no idea how complicated it is to be an immigrant. You love your old home country. You miss it. For whatever reason, you do not live there anymore. You embrace the new land: you learn about being a resident of your curiously different, but increasingly familiar home. You don’t go back to the old place, but then you do go back. You get all nostalgic. You go back again. And again. Until you remember that it’s not all that perfect back home (in the same way that it’s not all that perfect anywhere). You think – I best put it behind me. You do, but you don’t really. You want to write a book about it all. You do write (or commence to write) a book about it all. Then you go back with renewed enthusiasm. After all, your childhood memories were good and pure and simple.
And it does not stop there.
I’m finishing up work here, but my foot is already there, in Warsaw. I can see myself on the January streets of my childhood turf. I can feel the place. Not as it feels to, say, my sister, who lives there now, but how it feels to me, the immigrant, going back to what was once undeniably and completely home.
I was thinking about this as I was walking to Whole Foods this afternoon. Perhaps because the route to the store is so boring.
going there
heading backOr, because I have a quick (so very brief) trip to Poland ahead of me.
Or both.
While I've never been an immigrant, my moving back and forth between Poland and America produced -- on a smaller scale -- the feelings you write about. I look back through my journal, and both times I moved back to America from Poland, I was eventually overwhelmed with a desire to move immediately back to Poland. When I did go back to Poland, I read the frustration in my journal at Poland not being, well, America.
ReplyDeleteAll of K's emigre friends who live in London, Brussels, etc. all speak of experiencing the same thing: the doubts, at some point, about the wisdom of being an emigre; the constant nagging in the back of their minds to move back; the realization that, if they move back, there'll be more nagging about whether that was the right decision.
It all goes back go how you define "home." I remember the first time I was in Polska, living in the tiny village I eventually came to love as a second home, and the first bout of real homesickness washed over me. One night, as the homesickness was in its last days, I went into the kitchen to begin cooking dinner. When I opened my spice cabinet, I realized that that -- having a space dedicated to spices, and having a small collection of spices -- was the first to making the place home. It was the act of making it my place, not just the place I inhabited. From then on, I don't think I really had another bout of homesickness, because I realized how relative "home" is.
I wish I could say the same thing about my return, in '99, to America. But if I were able to overcome that bout of homesickness, I wouldn't have gone back to Poland, and I wouldn't have married. (And after all, everyone knows that you can't top a Polish woman -- hardworking and beautiful!)
Unlike K's friends that you write about, I don't doubt. I'm happy here. I could not live away from this home anymore. I let go of Poland. Except when I go back. And I know it, too. When I am about to go back I put myself in the mode of being Polish again. And then I remember that really, it is Poland that made me who I am, much more than this country.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, K, your Polish wife, is lucky because she never has to let go so completely. You understand Poland like no American I ever met. She doesn't have to break away so completely, I did. I'm fine, I'm good. Except when I go back.