New Places Like Home

This Thanksgiving finds my family literally scattered to the four American winds.

Working clockwise around the nation, my brother is in New York, carving turkey in Long Island. My parents are in Florida, catching the early bird in Delray Beach. I’m in Los Angeles, of course, dining with my favorite chicks and their families. My daughter has flown the coop and dines this year in Oregon, with my cousin in Portland.

Strange as it may seem, despite the dispersion, I’m not crying fowl.

Sure, I grew up in a Norman Rockwell-style Thanksgiving, all of us saluting the bird, eating sweet potatoes and marshmallows around the dining room table. I loved those years, my mother’s Ritz-cracker stuffing followed by my husband’s pumpkin pie.

Yet fish gotta swim, Jewish children gotta fly. The comings and goings of the flock is an expected, if personally wrenching, experience.

Just look for a moment at how and where we’ve flown. When I first selected California, to attend graduate school, it was with the blessing of my father, whose own cousins had relocated here even before the arrival of the transcontinental bagel.

By the time Dad and Mom retired, the Diaspora had spread south. They moved to a Florida town that looks and feels so much like New York that the residents hold annual Lower East Side high school reunions.

I guess I had a delusion that my daughter, Samantha, would find L.A. so warm, open and hospitable to her needs and talents that she’d finally stay put. That’s the seduction of home, its intimations of permanence. It’s hard to think that my great-grandparents felt this way when my grandfather left Warsaw, but how do I know? The parental heart everywhere and in every era eternally cries “Don’t go.” There’s no way of knowing why the itch to fly takes over us, what yearnings of adventure, freedom, spirit and personality compel us to take wing, armed only with a sense that where we are is not enough. It’s an urge only a fool or a dictator would deny.

So I’m not surprised that my daughter followed her girlfriend to Oregon, where she has found in Ashland not only lots of former Californians but three synagogues and a rabbi from L.A. What’s good for the goose, as they say.

And it is good. That’s the way a person, and a culture, grows. Looking more closely at our family map, this particular November of a historic election year, I like the look and feel of the places we’ve made our nests. What’s happened to my own tiny family has also happened to the Jewish family at large.

Is it surprising that my family has landed in what might be called Al Gore country? The coastal states are what gave the popular vote to Gore and the first-ever Jewish running mate, Joe Lieberman. The Jewish vote nationally is small, but where Jews congregate they make a difference. Florida has been so famously in play since Election Day largely because thousands of Jewish Democrats literally started out snow-birding like my parents and now make it their official residence. Gov. Jeb Bush must have been sleeping while planeloads of knishes headed for the Miami-West Palm Beach condo coast.

We’ve always carried our ethics, our tastes and our brethren with us. Since my cousin Mark moved to Portland, the Jewish community there has grown by 3,000. And now we’re heading inland.

An editorial in Sunday’s New York Times calls attention to the battleground states where the gap between Gore and George W. Bush was only two or three percentage points: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio (in addition to Florida).

Of course, you expect a good fight in Pennsylvania, where the Jewish vote went 78 percent for Gore-Lieberman. But Iowa? The 1999 American Jewish Year Book notes for the first time the growth of the Jewish community in Postville (population 1,500), including a large Chassidic Lubavitcher contingent from the former Soviet Union, most of whom work in the wildly successful kosher meat-packing plant. Could they be secret Democrats? However they vote, Jews are putting down roots wherever opportunity and desire call.

I thought my cousin Sonny was brave when she became the first of our family to move to Wisconsin 20 years ago, but she’s hardly alone. About 11.6 percent of the Jewish population lives in the Midwest, including the new Jewish community growing in Traverse City, Mich., attracted to jobs in the expanding medical facility and, one presumes, the fantastic summer music festival at Interlocken.

The geographic reach of our freedom might scare those wedded to the shtetl view of life. Maybe that’s why the Lower East Side gains in romantic allure the further we get from the old pickle markets of Essex Street.From a fifth-floor walkup on New York’s Stanton Street, in three generations my family has spread out. Who knows where we’ll land next?