Ear­li­er this week, Eve Har­ris shared her expe­ri­ences in a Chare­di school in Lon­don that informed her debut nov­el The Mar­ry­ing of Chani Kauf­man. She has been blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

I made aliyah in 1999 at the age of 25 and lived in Jerusalem for a year, and then for two years in Tel Aviv, work­ing as an Eng­lish teacher in high schools. I returned to Lon­don in 2002 for a break, feel­ing very burnt out by the inten­si­ty of life that is Israel. I need­ed to recharge my bat­ter­ies and make a deci­sion about whether liv­ing in Israel was real­ly for me. I end­ed up being offered my old teach­ing job back at a girls’ Catholic Con­vent school. I realised at the same time how much I missed the breadth and vari­ety that Lon­don has to offer, and its solid­i­ty — which is no small thing, hav­ing just spent two years liv­ing through the sec­ond Intifa­da. Then I met my hus­band so my fate was decid­ed. While I love Israel deeply and go back to vis­it near­ly every year, there are still a few things I con­tin­ue to miss about the country:

• The smell of baked tar­mac and hot, moist earth the minute you step off the plane
• The fact that Decem­ber 25th is just anoth­er ordi­nary, sun­ny day
• The road signs that loom out of nowhere in the desert for places called Sodom and Lot
• The bril­liant, white curves of restored Bauhaus build­ings against an azure sky in Tel Aviv
• The fad­ing, crum­bling colo­nial gems that appear like ghosts flit­ting between mod­ern blocks, down nar­row for­got­ten streets in South Tel Aviv
• The exis­tence of Mod­ern Hebrew every­where — scream­ing bill­boards, shop signs, radio jin­gles, the lan­guage of the street and the court­room, of com­merce and of lovers, of politi­cians and mothers
• Eat­ing chunks of sweet, fleshy water­mel­on mixed with salty feta cheese at a café on the beach at mid­night — my toes in the sand
• The sul­try scent of ole­an­der, its waxy flow­ers adding anoth­er ingre­di­ent to the olfac­to­ry explo­sion that is a Tel Aviv sum­mer night
• The sweet relief of rain after the relent­less bar­rage of summer
• The old, wood­en poles that sup­port loops of ugly elec­tric cable that hum at night in Neveh Tsedek
• The screech­ing of stray cats pur­su­ing their amorous adven­tures at the back of every apart­ment block
• The bliss of step­ping into the cool, qui­et lux­u­ry of air-conditioning
• The blind­ing, bib­li­cal sun­light that strips the world of colour at mid­day that can’t be found any­where else
• The ancient city of Jerusalem with all its secrets, curs­es and shadows
• The mod­ern bub­ble of Tel Aviv with all its vim and vigour and love of youth and hedonism
• The qui­et and peace that steals over both cities just before sun­down on Friday
• The old, moss cov­ered sycamore trees that look like old men with beards that line Rotschild Boule­vard and the fruit bats that live in their branch­es and haunt your periph­er­al vision with their silent swooping
• The smell of hot pine resin and crushed pine nee­dles from the lit­tle play­ground where I used to play as a child near my grand­par­ents’ house
• The knowl­edge that if Eng­land were to ever throw me out for being a ​‘dirty Jew,’ I would always have a home

Eve Har­ris was born to Israeli-Pol­ish par­ents in Chiswick, West Lon­don, in 1973. She taught for 12 years at inner-city com­pre­hen­sives and inde­pen­dent schools in Lon­don and also in Tel Aviv, after mov­ing to Israel in 1999. She returned to Lon­don in 2002 to resume teach­ing at an all girls’ Catholic con­vent school. The Mar­ry­ing of Chani Kauf­man was inspired by her final year of teach­ing at an all girls’ ultra-Ortho­dox Jew­ish school in North West Lon­don. Eve lives in Lon­don with her hus­band, Jules, and their daugh­ter Rosie.

Relat­ed Content:

• Essays: On Israel
• Read­ing List: Tel Aviv
• Read­ing List: Con­tem­po­rary Israeli Literature
• Read­ing List: Israel Classics