by Alice Lowe
Jennifer Lang begins her “memoir-in-miniature,” Places We Left Behind (Vine Leaves Press, 2023), by mapping her peripatetic adult life—beginning in 1985, when she spent her junior year in Paris—in a flowchart of dates and moves, seven of the nine boxes dominated by the word “uproot.” This succinct, visual vignette belies its brevity. It speaks volumes and sets the stage for what follows both in form and content.
In micro-essays that play with structure, Lang combines gentle self-mocking humor and deep introspection to explore the dichotomies of place and religion. The two are interconnected and cause havoc in her marriage. Her husband, Philippe, wants to be in Israel where he can live his Judaism; Jennifer wants to be in the U.S., safe and surrounded by friends and family, the comfort of her secular Jewishness. The gulf they will spend more than 20 years bridging presents itself soon after their meeting. In “Conjunctions” she exults that he fits all the boxes on her imaginary checklist, at the same time as she laments, “if he wasn’t Sabbath observant, and he wasn’t enrapt with his new homeland, but he is.”
The majority of the 65 vignettes are headed by crisp, one-word titles (“Pang,” “Stuck,” “How?”, “Cocoon,” “Tilt,” “Flow,” “Surrender,” “me!”), which evoke the snap, crackle, and pop that are hallmarks of successful flash prose. The one- and two-page sketches and fragments are vivid in their conciseness, augmented by Lang’s experiments with form and wordplay:
- a zig-zag tour through the Old City in Jerusalem zigs and zags down the page. Is it poetry? Lang says no, “line breaks in this and other pieces are intuitive”—her sense of how she wants the text to appear on the page, what she wants to stand out.
- we see the graphic, lopsided list of pros and cons that helps her decide if she should stay in Israel with Philippe. At the end of which she says, “When the negatives outweigh the positives, I tear out the sheet and toss it.”
- their wedding is presaged by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and threats to Israel, a reminder of what she’s in for, related in halting broken lines, exhibiting unease.
- “4.1,” the title expressed as a ratio, vividly portrays her sense of being ganged up on and/or excluded, her husband and children on one side, she alone on the other.
The two most vivid for me are:
- “Seesaw” depicts a graphic image, showing her at the bottom and him at the top, when she feels too much is being asked of her, that she’s expected to do all the yielding.
- the coordinates—stark on the page, each of their desired locations stated in latitude and longitude. You don’t need a map to understand that they’re far apart in concept as well as concrete distance.
Words and sentences here and there are crossed out in a strike-through font, showing the reader Lang’s self-censoring, things she’s ashamed to admit to herself or others. It speaks volumes. One example: While living in the U.S., they make annual visits to Israel. To Lang, “non-negotiable (as long as we live in America), but I don’t want to be here.”
Remarking on these tailored-to-fit graphic accoutrements, Lang told me, “The whole book started as what I call flat prose and I tinkered and experimented with a lot of it to make it dance on the page.”
The innovative mix of forms doesn’t get in the way of the continuity of the memoir. For me, it augments the flow, keeps me turning the pages. The frequent moves. The conflict. Jennifer and Philippe negotiate each change, one or both compromising, one or both likely to be dissatisfied. After five years in Israel, they move, with their firstborn, to Paris so Philippe can complete his MBA, followed by a move to Oakland, California, close to Lang’s family, with a second child on the way.
In Oakland, Lang takes a beginning yoga class, launching a long and satisfying personal odyssey. She describes how, mid-session on a “nothing-special Wednesday morning,” she finds herself, “no longer in my little head, dwelling on history, revisiting crossroads, or embellishing truths,” but rather “100 percent fully, totally, completely, wholly, absolutely, entirely grounded in my body.”
When Philippe’s work options require a relocation to either New York or Israel, Lang opts for New York, where they settle in a suburban town that has five synagogues but no yoga studios, and she realizes how essential her yoga practice has become to her well-being. It’s her go-to, her separate space that keeps her rooted and balanced. She locates a studio in another suburb and enrolls in a teacher training program to become certified and expand her passion into an avocation.
When another move to Israel looms, Jennifer declares herself “more ruthless than Ruth-ish, unable or unwilling to adopt Ruth’s ‘Whither thou goest, I will go,’” while Philippe asserts that he’s only here for her, and that he feels dead in America. A graphic calculation speaks volumes in lieu of repetitive words or dialogue: their six years in Israel vs. 12 in the U.S. equals an unbalanced scale. Followed by her “Surrender,” isolated at the bottom of the next page: “Like a losing candidate in a skewed election, I concede.”
Throughout “nonstop negotiations and mobile marriage,” with soul-searching and therapy, grounded in love, the nitty-gritty fact stands out that, “No matter where we reside, one of us will always rue the loss of the place we left behind.”
“Mantra-ish self-talk” brings Lang around to the breakthrough that change can, and might be, good. “Here we come,” she announces as they enter the last box of the flow chart from the first vignette: “2011: Uproot to Israel for son’s military service and marital peace agreement.”
Jennifer Lang’s story continues in Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses, which will be published by Vine Leaves Press in October 2024.
Alice Lowe is a Bloomer who writes about life, language, food and family. Her essays have been widely published, including several times in Bloom and this past year in Big City Lit, Borrowed Solace, Midway, Eat Darling Eat, Eclectica, Fauxmoir, Idle Ink, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. Her work has been cited twice in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice has authored essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf’s life and work and is a regular contributor at Blogging Woolf. She lives in San Diego, California, and posts at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.
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