It is very easy to bike into town to get provisions at the country store or at one of the farm stands, and appear like another Brooklynite up for the summer. The truth is that I am an interloper. To me, the town looks like a Raymond Carver story, an Edward Hopper painting, or any of the towns on the imported American network shows I grew up on. “Dawson’s Creek” and “Gilmore Girls” captivated my mind with images of a pastoral existence of quaint old wells and gentle brooding in gazebos. For immigrants to America, cultural shock is absorbed by the familiar blanket of simulacra. America is everywhere. It is 2 PM on an August weekday, and few people are out as I pedal the flat terrain. Here beauty is unavoidable. Any mundane errand means traveling between creeks, rolling hills, and fields strewn with yellow goldenrods and purple loosestrife. The air smells of cut grass and sometimes of hot gravel, but usually it smells of nothing — a soothing absence of stench. I cherish America for its vastness and the possibility of privacy, but I don’t belong to this inviting tableau of soft, deep greens. I belong to an aggressive mix of yellow and olive. Before I ride back to my cabin, I loop around the large field in the center of town, cycling past the old Victorians and the small cottages watching over it. Whoever owns the field rotates crops every year and sometimes grows nothing at all. A few years back, before marijuana legalization sprouted coolly designed dispensaries everywhere, hemp covered the field. That summer, increasingly desperate signs were taped to the fence: “Contains no THC!,” “Will NOT get you high!,” and — my favorite — “You WILL get a headache.” I find comfort in Americana: diners, motels with Googie-style signs, the majesty of Walmart. Here I make sure to be the nicest, cheeriest version of myself. Otherwise I might be found out. Directness is the most obvious mark of my alien origins, so I learned to sugarcoat and pussyfoot and not to say what I mean. I make small talk, commiserate about the road work on Route 23, and ask the locals if they know my elderly landlady. I tell them how much I love their town. I don’t tell them about my own town. I don’t tell them about my aunt, who was shot dead at the beginning of this war at the age of eighty-eight. I don’t tell them that my aunt’s body is now going to be exhumed and reburied, because, at the time of her death, her kibbutz was still an active war zone: too dangerous for the living, too dangerous for the dead. Next week my aunt is to be dug out, driven south, and put back in the dirt. I don’t tell them about that. I don’t tell them about Noor, my friend in Gaza, who just sent me a goodbye note for the hundredth time: “This is the third night without shelter, the sun is scorching during the day and cold at night. As I told you before, no one will survive this war. Good night sister.” I have known Noor for eight years; we run a direct-aid program together. We message every day of the war, sometimes about the aid, often about the horrors. I am secular, godless even, but every day I tell Noor I am praying for her. I turn the corner and pass a farm stand, where honest Americans can buy eggs, corn, squashes, and tomatoes by simply putting cash in the designated box. An essay by Joan Didion pops into my mind. The essay, “Notes From A Native Daughter,” fills me with resentment, and for that reason it pops into my mind a lot. I resent how free Didion feels to call herself a “native daughter” of Sacramento. Or of anywhere, for that matter. Didion also knows her familial history, going back many generations, and has masses of living extended family: “Dozens of great-aunts, year after year of Sundays.” To my Jewish mind, this seems to be nothing less than a magical phenomenon; growing up where your great-grandparents, or even grandparents, were born and died, being undisturbed for enough generations to grow roots. Almost every branch of my own family tree was hacked off in 1940s Europe, save my grandparents, who fled in time. My family’s story differs only in detail from that of most of my peers, unremarkable, nothing to write home about. In the essay, Didion asks and answers: Q: In what way does the Holy Land resemble the Sacramento Valley? A: In the type and diversity of its agricultural products. Didion is lucky that her home doesn’t have holiness in common with the Holy Land. Diverse agricultural products are a far better thing to share with my country of origin. She goes on to describe her unholy home exquisitely: “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears”. How wonderfully bittersweet it must feel to watch your hometown modernize, the cultural and physical terrain morphing with the times. I experience this too, but my terrain is not evolving; it is burning to cinders. It is imploding and exploding. It is saturating itself with a stain so deep that it will never come off; it will cover everything until the stain is indiscernible from the fabric itself. Until it becomes the fabric. I am a native daughter of nowhere because my identity, the very name of where I am from, is in the eye of the beholder. When I state my geographical origin, it doesn’t read as an autobiographical detail; it reads as a political statement. In this, the Israeli identity is similar to the Palestinian one; others will decide, according to their personal stands, on the validity or even existence of these identities. So consider this, Joan Didion: no one ever says that Sacramento doesn’t exist. 
This year the field in the center
My Dead Are Jealous of Your Dead
