The Final Shlepp

Repeatedly packing and unpacking your possessions is a specific form of torture

We planned our Aliyah move to take place over the course of an academic year, testing the waters before fully committing to Israel. What if we hated it? What if our daughter hated it? What if we couldn’t find work? What if we couldn’t find friends? We were taking a giant leap of faith, and it seemed like a good idea not to leap with too much stuff.

Packing up the kitchen

Part One of our plan was to sell our place in Brooklyn, shove our belonging into the attic of our house in Maine, fly to Tel Aviv with nine suitcases packed with a desktop computer, pots and steak knives, among other items, and unpack into a furnished rental in Tel Aviv. Part Two was to decide, after a year in Israel, what to do with our possessions in Maine.

But over the course of the year, something unexpected happened. While we delighted in the weightlessness of being free of possessions, we also missed specific items. How lovely it was to feel 22 again, back when I could fit everything I owned, including my stereo and a computer, in the trunk of my Nissan Sentra. But damn I wish I’d brought my brown teddy bear fleece, my journal from 2016 and that book about the Jews of   Pinsk.

At first it was wonderful to live, temporarily, with a capsule wardrobe, kitchen, library, and  office. I was content to pine over items I knew I’d be reunited with in time. But then I stopped missing specific items and began missing the totality of my possessions.

I missed the comfort of being surrounded by my accumulated belongings. Every item I own tells a story about who I was when I acquired it, used it, or loved it.  But in time, without these markers of personhood, in a country that was not yet my own, surrounded by someone else’s furniture and decor choices, I worried I was starting to lose my sense of self.

“I miss my stuff,” I found myself saying frequently. Which stuff specifically I could not always say, but I missed being a person who had much more stuff than could fit in the trunk of a Nissan Sentra.

Now, we are back in Maine executing Part Two of our plan: the final shlep (of our Aliyah not of all time, to be clear).

Dinner in Maine

I am coming to you today having moved 15 boxes in Tel Aviv to a storage locker, then flown to Maine with nine empty suitcases. Now my husband and I are in the process of opening the boxes we threw into the attic last summer and deciding precisely which ones go into our container shipment to Israel.

It’s weird to see your stuff after a year‘s absence. First, I was shocked by the state we’d left things in. I opened boxes to find a random assortment of unrelated items - my journal from 6th grade, my great grandfather’s shofar, my father’s high school yearbook (Stuy ‘62) three notebooks from when I worked in the White House, and an archival box with my kids’ art through elementary school.

It was hard to shake the feeling that these boxes had been packed by people motivated by serious inherited fleeing-related trauma, while fleeing themselves — something about the haphazardness of the boxes, but also the assertion that the contents of each box were important to us, and we hoped to see each item again, after the fleeing was over, should we be so lucky.

Seeing all your possessions in boxes you packed a year ago, and being forced to unpack them, weed stuff out and then repack them is a specific form of torture.

Recipes from 2003-2024, bag from 1982

First, there is the overwhelming feeling of owning too much shit. There is always another box to unpack, more pie plates and sweatshirts to unearth, an entire lifetime of mementos, and en endless supply of things that are simultaneously priceless and worthless.

Then there’s the window into who you are as a human through your possessions. The number of sweatshirts I own is baffling. I seem have claimed other people‘s sweatshirts at an alarming rate - stuff I took, and said, well, if you don’t wear it, I’ll wear it.

I have a sweatshirt from my son’s sleepaway camp, a size youth L from some child’s visit to Acadia, one from a work offsite at a place my husband no longer works, my son’s university of Colorado sweatshirt from when he thought he might go there, his sweatshirt from Gregory‘s bar mitzvah in 2016 which never fit well, my husband‘s old Brooklyn sweatshirt that he thought was too stretched out, my son’s sweatshirts from Brooklyn Tech and the Brooklyn Tech robotics team, a beautiful green hoodie I got for my daughter for Hanukkah that she never wore, plus my sweatshirt from when I worked at the United States Digital Service, where there was an argument that the 💪🏼 on the back was both too brown and not brown enough.

Finally, there is the question of what to do with family heirlooms.   My grandmother passed down to me the set of china, silver and Waterford crystal her mother bought her when she and my grandfather married, some of which was originally my great grandmother’s. All of it was purchased for life in New York, as envisioned in 1945 by a Jewish refugee from Hungary. But I also used it for every holiday I hosted in Brooklyn, which means to my husband, kids and me, it’s not really a holiday without Gammy’s table service.

Israel a long and unexpected journey for these and other heirlooms like my grandmother’s photo album documenting her life in 1933 Hungary, or the scrapbook her father kept with clippings that began as articles about the trade association he started for shmatte importers, and then segued into his efforts to organize a boycott of German and Czech goods, and other futile efforts to stop the destruction of his family. Or maybe Israel is the correct place for all of them. Maybe Israel is the obvious place they were going to end up all along.

To complicate matters, there’s the fact that we have lived without all the stuff in boxes for a year. If we don’t take them with us now, why bother keeping them? But at the same time, how do we know what we need?

I don’t need my heaviest fleece or snow boots in Israel, but what if we go somewhere snowy? And there’s simply no way I need this many sweaters in the Middle East. But what if we end up back in Maine for some period of time? What will I wear then? Should I put them back in the attic for a year in case for some reason we come to Maine at the worst time of year to be here?

So much of moving is anticipating who you will be in a new location, which is not something you can know. Two years ago if you told me I’d be working on becoming Israeli, I would have asked, why? What happened? Two years from now, I won’t even begin to hazard a guess as to where I will be. But I hope I need heels, because I just packed a few pairs

There are also unexpected sparks of pleasure in being reunited with items I love and forgot about. Or sometimes, unearthing messages from myself.

Today I pulled out a half-pound bag of organic cocoa powder that had carefully been taped shut. I imagined the conversation Old Me had in my head, standing in my kitchen in Brooklyn, knowing that packing cocoa powder is ridiculous, but also knowing it’s expensive, and something I use a lot in shakes. Why not make things a little easier?, Old Me thought, and gifted Future Me the present of not having to buy a new bag of cocoa powder. As I pulled out the bag today I thought - thank you, Old Me, for thinking and caring about Future Me.

So this is what goes into every box that gets loaded on a boat and sent across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean: a statement about who we were in a past life and a decision about who we will be in the future, gifts for future us to make our lives a teeny bit easier, and sometimes — because I seem to have accumulated a large number of throws over my life and they make good packing material — a throw.

Happy summer, mishpacha. May all your boxes be light and your shipments prompt. Let me know if you need a throw or a sweatshirt. Hana