ºMy last night in Turkey, my parents and I went out to my favorite restaurant to get lamb shish kebabs. Once dad got some food into his system, the crankiness subsided, and he actually seemed to be in an OK mood. I, on the other hand, still had weird cramps after two days of drinking herbal tea and eating light. Finally, mom figured it out: it's the pre-travel bug I've gotten twice before. The first time I had it, we went to the hospital at night, where I eventually signed a book saying I "refused treatment"—there are some things that need to be reserved for someone I'm sleeping with. I don't even know why it happens since this time, I wasn't feeling particularly nervous about logistics or the actual journey. Or so I think. Maybe I was sad to leave the Aegean Sea and wanted more alone time with my family after all my friends left Izmir. Maybe I was worried about having a ridiculous amount of reading I need to do for work while in Israel, or about having too much time to kill in Israel with relatives, with no specific plan of getting away. I don't know.
It didn't help that dinner ended with marriage talk, the topic that's been pervading the last three days of my life.
My next door neighbor has a good friend who's married to a Turkish Jew. He is the son of a famous photographer in Turkey. The only Turkish photographer, in fact, whose name I know. When I told this to my parents earlier this year, they brought up the time they tried to set me up with a Turkish Jew living in San Francisco.
The guy was a computer programmer or some shit, right in the height of the Silicon Valley boom. I was hanging out with a Turkish (and not Jewish) friend the day I was supposed to (begrudgingly) meet him in a café, and I decided to bring her along to ease the awkwardness. What? This is not a date, and I'm bringing a Turkish friend along. Fuck the matchmaking plots. I ain't playing, brother. So we sat down together. I don't know how long this whole thing was, if my friend eventually left or not. All I remember is that I had nothing to talk about with this man. I was bored. It was obvious this was a failure from the start, maybe because I approached it as such, but probably not just because of any prejudice I had. Apparently, later, the guy complained to his mom about how I brought a friend and that I wasn't serious. I complained to my mom about how he was too serious and had nothing to talk about, and yelled at both my parents and demanded they never ever EVER try this shit again because it would be embarrassing for them too if they did. (A year later, my grandmother tried to set something up all the way from Israel. The guy she was trying to set me up with called me drunk around midnight and said some stupid shit—exactly what I needed to get those in my family with ambitions to be matchmakers off my back. No one has ever tried a set-up since then, and my parents have even refused some acquaintance's proposal to "get our kids in San Francisco together" at the cost of creating social awkwardness at a dinner table with a group of friends because according to my dad, "we're scared of you now." Excellent.)
So it was years after this non-date with the computer programmer guy that I found out the guy who is the son of the famous photographer now married to my neighbor's very cool friend and the too-serious guy with nothing interesting to say were the same man. Maybe he's got issues about being identified as his famous father's son, but fuck, man, you should have mentioned who your dad was—then, we could have talked about something that I find exciting (photography, not your dad's photography) and eased the awkwardness for a few minutes, and maybe eve made our parents think we actually tried to have a conversation. (I still wouldn't have married you though.) More importantly, the time I spent sitting there at that cafe wouldn't have been a complete waste of my time.
At the dinner table, my father looked sad. He finally admitted how he had his hopes up, how sad he was the set-up didn't work. "He's a man from a good family," he said, as if that explained everything, and that fact alone was reason to drop everything else and marry a man. I acknowledged that what he said was exactly the way things worked in his generation and his Jewish community at the time, maybe, and pointed out they don't work like that anymore. A good family name isn't reason to commit to someone you don't even like, let alone love. He sighed a sad sigh of disagreement. We paid the bill and got up.
On the cab from the airport to my grandmother's house in Israel, the cab driver turned around and looked at me like he was physically incapable of continuing to drive (to my relief, there wasn't much traffic on the road) when I told him I wasn't married, revealed that I was in my 30s, not 20s, and that I'm not sure that I would ever want to get married or have kids. "WHY????" he asked, baffled and with a sense of urgency like unless he convinced me during the remainder of the cab ride, he would fail to save my soul and lose whatever privileges he had from a special covenant. I tried to explain in a language he could understand. I told him I like my independence, my freedom, traveling, doing my own thing, and I don't want to replace all that with doing some guy's laundry and washing his dishes and making a baby the center of my universe. I compromised with a "maybe someday I'll want a family; thanks for the ride."
And my first day visiting my aunts, once again with marriage talk. I already had my diatribe ready. I told them both that I am single because I am still looking for someone who knows I'm amazing (not the complete story, of course: there are other, more private considerations I wasn't going to share just yet with my aunts). Tant Diamante said that ultimately, it was all about finding someone who would respect you, that everything else would work out if a man truly respected a woman. I loved her for saying that. By way of persuasion, Tant Röne reminded me it's nice having a companion in life. I reminded her how old she was when she finally found the man who would love and respect her for who she is to be a good companion in life. She smiled—she was in her sixties.
When they mentioned having kids and raising a family, I told them what I told the cab driver—that I loved my independence and my freedom to travel. My aunt said that her son, my cousin Moshe, who died in a motorcycle accident when he was my age, was just that kind of guy. She went on telling me about how he would strap his baby girl to his back and go climb a mountain.
I knew. He was my favorite cousin among five, a brother, my kindred free spirit & world traveler. He and I had so little time together, but each time we hung out, I felt at home with him. I miss him so much more than anyone knows.
"Yes," I said; "…when I find a guy like Moshe, I'll marry him."
And then we sat there in consenting silence for a moment and sipped our Turkish coffee until Moshe's daughter came in with her dad's beautiful, smiling eyes.
Tant Röne, Dad's older sister.
Tant Diamante, Dad's sister-in-law, Moshe's mother.
Snir, Moshe's daughter, now 8 years old.
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