A search for home
Throughout her writing journey, Jennifer Lang has released not one, but two memoirs. She felt it was the only way to explore the two distinct parts of her journey.
For Jennifer Lang, growing up Jewish meant being different. Lang grew up in a small city in the San Francisco Bay area where the population was less than 10 percent Jewish.
“Throughout my childhood, we ate pork and cheeseburgers, attended services every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and stored our leavened food in a basement freezer and brought sandwiches on matzo to school every Passover,” she told The AJN. “We went to public school and Hebrew school, celebrated bar/bat mitzvah, and got confirmed. In my teens, I participated/attended/served on boards of my temple youth group, Camp Swig, National Federation of Temple Youth.”
But, she said, unlike many Jews around her, she had visited Israel. By the time she met her husband in Israel in 1989, she had been eight times.
The author has recently released not one, but two memoirs. She felt it was the only way to explore the two distinct parts of her journey. She told The AJN though that it wasn’t meant to be writing at first. It took a trip to France for Lang to fall in love with the English language.
“Since the age of six, I’d been learning French as part of a pilot program in our city. During my junior year abroad of college, I immersed: lived with a French family, befriended Parisians, watched French movies. After graduation, I returned to Paris and worked as a Bilingual Assistant in the European Jewish Congress on the Champs-Elysees. A dreamy first job during which the linguistic lightbulb went on and grammar rules in my own native tongue finally clicked,” she recalled. In the years that followed, she began to fully embrace her “newfound superpower” – working as a copy editor, content writer and editor.
A decade later, she stopped reporting on what the experts were saying and starting to write for herself.
But what to do with a 95,000-plus word manuscript?
“The timeframe it covered was excessive, its word count, unnecessary. Its only redeeming feature was that after decades of writing and publishing long-form essays and flash nonfiction pieces about home and belonging, language and longing, I’d finally found my way into the story except that it didn’t work,” she said. “I put it aside, let time pass, and eventually started anew. What resulted from pressing restart was not one but two books that read like Part I and Part II but can also each stand alone.”
What came out was Places We Left Behind, which begins in 1989 and ends in 2011, covering the author’s marital search for home, and what follows is Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses, which begins upon arrival in Israel and stretches for seven years during which Lang shares her struggle to make peace with living in Israel.
Since then, she has shared the differences in living in a country that is often so misunderstood.
“I wrote about celebrating the holidays, about sending my son to the army, about voting in my first election, about navigating the bureaucracy. I wanted to show what life was like here in this tiny, complicated, misunderstood country. The more I wrote, the more I sensed my mission: to show life in Israel for people who don’t know or understand its complexities, its history, its importance, its presence,” Lang explained.
Lang was in the US promoting her book when the October 7 massacre occurred. Her husband was still in Israel, unreachable. She told The AJN that antisemitism is real in the literary world.
“Jewish voices, especially Israeli, are being silenced by thousands of authors, who are boycotting Israeli cultural institutions,” she explained.
Lang explained that it took her weeks to acclimatise to the reality of Israel when she returned in late October.
And while she experiences the ups and downs of life in Israel, Lang said she’ll continue to write.
“Writing is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, moving pieces around until they snap into the right place,” she said, explaining that she loves the chills, the clarity and the response that come and go from the whole writing process.
So what does she hope readers get out of her memoirs? To stay true to themselves.
“At some point in my intense, new relationship with a Frenchman, I lost my sense of self. Only 23, I lost my way, my voice, my identity … and from that point on, I no longer felt comfortable in my own skin. While home is a given for many people, it felt shaky for me. My hope for readers, especially female, is how important it is to stay true to yourself, your core, your home.”
Places We Left Behind and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses are available for purchase on Amazon.
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