Living far from home for a long time the list of things you miss unspools like a bobbin let loose. The biggest items in life alternate in it with small and trivial ones in a jumbled mess. Missing becomes part of your daily routine, like a little ripped cuticle on your finger that throbbs at a low but constant pain level. It is just there.
You miss your parents, your brother, your friends, the beach in Tel Aviv at 6 pm, warmth, the wonder of poppies appearing in the new grass in the spring, cottage cheese. What is unique to Israelis is that you also miss rememberance days - you miss memory itself. You miss stopping with the sound of the zfira (the alarm that commemorates Holocaust Day and the Day of Remembrance), and just standing there no matter what it is you were doing before. You miss the sombre-Hebrew-only songs on the radio. I suppose that what you really miss is belonging - being a part of a mass of people.. It is odd, but you do. I never feel as alone here as on these days, unmoored.
My favorite poet in Hebrew, Dan Pagis, wrote this, the simplest and deadliest of all Holocaust poems:
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freightcar / Dan Pagis
Here in this carloadI am Eve
With my son Abel
If you see my older boy
Cain son of Adam
Tell him that I...
And this song of Yehuda Poliker's:
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