Review by IMP
Longing for place is a familiar echo to me. Home— both a concept a physical space. A place where trees and lakes remember you when people do not. This book wades deep into what it means to reconnect to home in our bodies and in our hearts, those spaces in us which carry the dreams and stories of ancestors, as well and in the physical places that our families lived and loved and played in for generations.
This book explores home from the bone-deep longing of ami weintraub, an anti-zionist Jew living in and from the east coast. His lineage is one of brutal displacement and genocide. I’m also of this lineage. To read this book while the genocide of Palestinians splashes across my screen made the search for home and belonging on and to a land ring deeper yet. It is painful to see a desire for “home” distorted. To see the grief and pain of my Jewish ancestors used by the state of Israel to justify atrocities against the people of Gaza and the West Bank makes my stomach turn, and my skin crawl.
Reading this book I unwound and rewound my Jewish heart. It felt like a healing thread in my own understanding of home. I want to curl up and reread it from the comfort and safety of the place I call home.