"Look at how he works at the kitchen," my mother, always a sucker for carbs and cleanliness, says as she looks with glowing eyes at Ravid working the dough ahead of a poppy-seed Swiss roll without even making the slightest crumb fall onto the floor of the kitchen.

"His concentration is just superb," my pottery-enthusiast sister adds. She considers him a successful project, having trained him last year and making him build a small statue of a dog and had him paint it so beautifully, to the point that she had to reprimand her longtime student Daniela for not properly following her instructions, unlike the super-concentrated Ravid.

Even my father, who likes gadgets, is so happy when Ravid tells him about the latest smart objects that my father has been struggling to cope with.

And this was also the case during our self-isolation, when Ravid taught my father to stream all the online concerts from my mother's mobile phone to the TV, so that he would not have to rally to her aid after every horror scream when she realized that the computer screen would turn off

I guess I should be delighted that my kind spouse is beloved by my family, but I must admit that I am also begrudging him.

In order to thank my parents for hosting us, Ravid decided to make Shabbat dinner for all of us every week. It turns out, just like in the military, that the way to a sentry's heart is through their stomach. His culinary enterprises, who evolved into monstrous dimensions during the lockdown days in London, now have an enthusiastic customer base in Israel who are hardly bothered by the price these culinary fantasies of the Don Quixote chef have exacted on the Sancho Panza squire, a miserable man in the Tel Aviv area suffering through the boiling heat with a mask, in search of some simple food. 

"Maybe you can just stop whining, " my father growled at me when he took some of the fish Ravid had prepared after our visit to the new fish store, during which I was tasked with waiting in the car, which had taken two parking spaces and therefore got a long of honks and swearwords. When my father returned to the car that day, he said, "Great produce." 

"So what if you worked a bit in the kitchen, not a big deal," my mother told me after I complained on the number of pots I had to wash, as she took more from the chicken balls Ravid had prepared just for her, because she is allergic to fish, or at least convinced she is since birth, even though two years ago she ate Fish schnitzel and nothing happened (but she did ask for more). 

"He always had two left hands," my sister said when Ravid remarked that I had burned half of the chicken. And while they lavished praise on Ravid for the fig tart that had been presented to them on the table, they resolved that this time I need a citation, because at least I helped chop the vegetables for the salad and I did without complaining even once.

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I so sorely miss flying and the whole experience of aviation. This is a somewhat bizarre fact because I am generally not an abroad-kind-of-person. Only when I was 32 did I actually fly outside Israel, to northern Italy. This was not so long ago. Who would have thought that in 2012, eight years later, the skies would close and the humming of the planes would sound like a beautiful cantor's prayer? 

Before the first flight I was very scared of flying, but after a physicist graciously explained how an aircraft flies and told me about the four different vectors (I moved to "flight mode" when he started talking about equations), my fear was replaced with expectation. 

Michel de Montaigne wrote in his essay On Solitude that when Socrates was told that someone did not have fun on his journey, the great Greek philosopher said, "Of course he didn't, he brought along himself." 

This is perhaps why I miss traveling so much. When I arrive at a foreign country, I can imagine myself peeling off my identity, even if it is just for a week. I can give up my opinions, stop with the posing, and adopt a character that I have always wanted to adopt. 

I like every minute detail of going abroad. Even the thought of how to reach the airport: by train, by taxi or with a private car.

At the airport itself, I like the grilling of security with the question "Did you pack by yourself?" After being asked this question I get a slight sense of fear that I would not be allowed to leave, but then I get calmed down when the luggage gets sent on the conveyor belt and get a pat-down and go through passport control, and then the sprint begins: the liberating, wild run toward the departure gate.

In this mad dash all the wheels on everyone's suitcase participate. And then there is a bizarre walk between the various letters: A, B, C. And eventually you find the gate, and you board the plane, and you get the welcome greeting by an airline crew member as if this was their first flight. 

I like that walk in the aisle, passing by the business class with all the big seats and wide legroom until I reach my place, worried that I won't get a window seat. 

Since I am a disorganized person, I am very much attracted to the well-defined systematic approach of the flight attendants.

The small meals wrapped with aluminum foil, containing food that I would never ever eat in any other circumstances, the collection of trash and the calm words they tell the anxious passengers when there is turbulence. I exchange a nod with my neighbors sitting next to me and turn toward the examination of the world wonder before me: floating cotton is all around, giving me the sudden drive to just sail around them. Luckily, engineers are in charge of building aircraft, not some people with fantasies. 

Because of the monotonic noise, I enter into staring mode, as if it was some magic potion that helps move plots forward. During my flights around the US I began drawing up my storyline for my latest novel. "It's me, Iowa." During my flight to Shanghai I completed a short story dealing with the mourning of a lost baby, and during my flight to  Alicante the roots of my current novel began. 

As soon as I hear the wheels slamming on the runway I get transported to a new world. English becomes my language of choice and with great enthusiasm, I tell the clerk at passport control about my itinerary. This always gives the clerk a smile as he stamps my passport. 

Every week I go to Tel Aviv and think about the writers workshop and the topic of the meeting and wonder how the participants will react. On the coronavirus and its damage I no longer think, but all it takes for me to get nostalgic about flights and the airport and passport control is for one plane to pass overhead.

I miss all this so much that I am willing to give up a windows seat in my next flight.

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My daughter could not contain her excitement, and I also got this contagion at some point, but only after we had finally sat in the 9th row of the EasyJet plane with our luggage.

While she painted, I read Yishai Sarid's novel, in its German translation. I had to take a break every few pages to process the characters in this story. The main protagonist is an anonymous historian

He works at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and runs tours in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Nothing is new in this novel we have heard it all and seen some of the sites with our own eyes,, or have been told about them by our family members. But despite all this, this topic is never easy or more tolerable. Maybe even because of this.

After two and a half hours we landed at the tiniest airport on the island. After filling out the official government form I got a QR code. Without this code you cannot enter the country. Everything went smoothly.

Less than half an hour later I was already at a car rental company with the keys for a 20-year-old Fiat Punto. At first I was a bit angry, and I initially thought of making a brouhaha like in Israel, meaning to protest and make my voice heard, refuse to be humiliated, until someone calls the police.

But I was just too exhausted to do all this. And having read the novel, I finally understood what total exhaustion means. I loaded my two suitcases to our car and buckled up my daughter in the back seat

I sat at the driver's seat and turned on the radio. I found one station, which played traditional Greek music non-stop, and started driving. My daughter fell asleep immediately.

For an hour I roamed the winding roads alongside sheep and hens, cypress trees and oleanders.

I thought about January 2020, I thought about how I lost one of my best friends. How she just hung herself from the window sill of her home while her three daughters were sleeping their bedrooms.

I thought about April 2020, and how my grandmother went to sleep and didn't wake up, after years of pain, and how we buried her in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin, with all of the family members standing 1.5 meters apart.

I thought about how this all started seven months ago, not that much, and that in that short period I started working in three jobs, I lost two jobs, wrote 50 manuscripts and even managed to complete my new novel. And then I silently recited the Kaddish prayer. Due to the turbulent events of the past year, I already know it by heart.

A sad song blasted out of the speakers of this silver clunker, and I cried a bit. This did not feel liberating at all. And then I realized that I was not on the right course, so I decided to make a u-turn in some narrow trail full of sand. For five minutes I tried to put the car into reverse, but I couldn't, so I eventually got out of the car and pushed it with my bare hands until it finally stood on the right position so that I could continue driving.

A great start for this vacation, I thought to myself, but also to the second half of this crazy year.

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I started wandering pointlessly, crossing several streets, and then I suddenly saw someone I knew. I immediately recognized him because he was drinking ice coffee and his mask was just below his chin. We had grown up together in the same town until he decided to leave.

He is many years my senior. He is a poet, a journalist and a curator, or at least he was all this. He changed. His hair is long and white. When we met last, over beer 14 years ago, before I left Israel, he had short brown hair. He was working as a bar critique and invited me to accompany him to one of the bars. 

When he immigrated to Tel Aviv he changed his last name to that of a well-known Israeli poet, at least known to those who know Israeli poetry. "Israeli poetry is all about restrained bereavement, but also about love. Because you have to f-ck before you die," he said. We sat at the bar he just went on and on, talking bout politics and poetry, two things I knew little about.

The poetry was reserved to memorial days in school. The words, like headstones, represented something that no longer exists. And politics? Well, it is a fata morgana, appeared for a fleeting second and then disappeared in one hot November night.

"Metaphorical love affairs," he stressed. "TO f**k a Palestinian is the exact same thing as fucking someone at a bathroom stall in a bar." That is how he talked at the time, and wrote critiques.

A whole host of characters, anecdotes, political musing and literary references. I read his pieces and even made a cameo appearance in one of them as the "emigrant" in which he recounted how our conversation unfolded that night. We had not met since. 

I took off my mask. We shook hands virtually and he asked me what I was doing these days. I told him I moved to the US and that I write on politics and literature. "I have still not the slightest clue in poetry," I smiled. "What about you," I continued. "It is unclear," he replied. "Yes, the coronavirus destroyed everything," I said. "Yes, the coronavirus," he said and smiled to his girlfriend with that same smile that I recalled from that bar. From the look on his face, I understood that he didn't mean the pandemic, but perhaps he didn't want to tell me what he had endured over those many years. 

We parted ways, and I continued to wander around the streets. It was as if there was nothing really concrete that had emerged from that meeting. It was as if it was some song that I have never fully understood before I emigrated, moved forward, toward the future. An immigrant is not supposed to go back to where he has come from. There is a danger that if he returns, he will discover that his old place was just a fata morgana, an echo from the past that had a fleeting moment in the future and then disappeared in the burning sun.

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An omen that could spell the realization of my wishes came in the form of a letter from a friend in the US, after four years that I had not heard from him. He told me about the depressing state of the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" and wondered whether I was still an independent when it comes to politics (I don't know why this has always bothered him). He ended with a question: "Do you think that Trump is not too much of a punishment for humanity?"

I had to agree with him, although I have never really liked redheads. 

With R. another friend, I corresponded extensively over the new kosher section in the US market, in which many books are taken off from shelves or get a special advisory because they may offend people: Blacks, women, overweight, hyperactive, or sushi haters. Just like the principal at my girls-only ulpana in my youth would do when he measured the length of our skirts. 

I had prepared a list of books and authors that may be banned, all of them could face a de-kosherization certificate. It seems that in the steppes of Netflix and the great expanse of US literature, the word "without" is as popular as that word in nature stores.

Besides, alongside the Pavlovian responses that I have become accustomed to and reply with a yawn ("they brought this Leftie again?" "Is she pretending to be Ashkenazi/Sephardi"), I also got a letter from a reader who has been beside himself. He is outraged that I have been critical of the state. He reprimanded me. We all have to be responsible, and we get amazing things from the state, more than what we give to it, he scolded me. 

I know a lot of couples around me who think that about their marriage. "I have given her everything," is one refrain. Another one is, "He took everything from me." This boring back and forth goes on and on. Having observed people for years, I know this usually does not end well. And trust me, when things fall apart, you don't want to be near them. 

In any event, I have never considered the state and I to have a relationship of giving and taking. I am just too wary of the state and try to trust myself until I get drunk, and then let's see you find someone to talk to. 

In any event, dear reader, it is clear that the state is acting with cruelty to the self-employed and business owners, it hurts their rights and listens only to organized labor and those who make a lot of noise and issue threats.

I would like to take this opportunity to ask you, dear reader, the following: If you don't have anything to do this week and read this coronavirus diary entry, I am still where I stand.

The people in the halls of government are acting with total rudeness and with a heart of stone, they are using bureaucracy that is impossible to beat and lacks any meaning and reason, they do as they please with the state, celebrating at our expense without leading by example, and taking advantage of this resource called coronavirus. 

Let me just remind you dear reader that the word Patriot comes from the Latin "Patria," which means homeland. You can love your homeland and detest the leaders.

I have wandered to letters at a different place, 2,000 years back, to the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca.

He was exiled to Corsica under the pretext that he committed adultery. He spent 8 years there, in solitary confinement that pales in comparison to what we call self-isolation these days.

Slowly but surely I translated his letter to his mother, in which he consoled her. What I particularly liked about it is that he feared that he would come off as too jolly, lest this makes her outraged.

I have to bring this here: nam in morbis quoque nihil est perniciosius quam inmatura medicina. Loosely translated this is: Even when you are sick, nothing is more harmful than immature medicine.

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I arrived in Israel in order to get some respite from the news and statistics in the US. I could no longer hear the words "serological tests" and here I am in Israel trying to figure out who qualifies for the 750-shekel government stimulus check. I don't even have a bank account in Israel, and I am here on vacation. Why have Israeli politics drawn me so forcefully like a magnet? 

I remember how there used to be a time in which I would try to sever ties from Israel but just couldn't do it. It was after I had arrived in Iowa from New York for a writers workshop. In the open air, with the sweet smell of corn and the chirping of cicadas in the afternoon, I was enjoying every moment. In the evenings, after dinner, I would sit in the back yard and read under the lamp and the fireflies. This was the first week.

But during the second week, the Israel Defense Forces entered the Gaza Strip. In a flash, the light of the fireflies was replaced by the light of my cellphone, and the moon was replaced with a computer screen. The updates, the news, and the nightly arguments on social media prevailed. 

One evening I walked into a bar, just so I could feel alone for a moment. Country music played in the background. There were the regulars, and then there was me, the only foreigner. "Where are you from?" the barwoman asked me. "Israel," I said. I stretched my back, preparing to present the case for Israel that I had prepared mentally. To my amazement, she just smiled and said, "oh, cool," as if I had just told her some factoid, that watermelon is actually a vegetable.

She wasn't even excited on an anthropological level ("I heard that Tel Aviv is great," would have been an example). My shoulders converged out of insult. "I am from Israel," I shouted in my head. "And there is a war going on. And demonstrations! And the tv screens are inundated ad nauseam with analysis, experts and vitriol!"

But then I realized that Israel was an Archimedean point for me, the prism through which I observe the world. It is there that my compass points to, the same compass that I had received in my Bar Mitzva. To paraphrase Rabbi Yehuda Halevi – my body may be in the West, but my heart, mind and soul are condemned to be in the East. 

Before I could blink, the barwoman had already begun serving the other customer. This is the beauty in America, the land of the huge expanses. This is not just physical space. You can drive 12 hours in Texas and still be in Texas. It is also a space in which you can reinvent yourself, disconnect from your previous life. In America, reincarnation is a practice you perform before you die. 

Politics is not just a practice. It is a language. And my language is the Israeli political system. In America, political language is foreign to me. It is still something that I have relegated to television. Most Americans would never get to see the White House in their lifetime. I saw Gilad Erdan eat at a Thai Restaurant. Us Israelis dream and talk and eat politics with our Pad Thai. 

Perhaps I was too naive to think that I could just disconnect from the turbulent place in the Middle East. On the other hand, it doesn't matter where you go, I will always feel its burn on my flesh.

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The hope I had harbored until the very last minute that I would able to fly to Tel Aviv, after all, and stay there for a month, gave way to pragmatism. I don't expect Israel's borders to open until 2021. My hope had turned into sober realism, as you can probably tell. 

What I see and notice from my safe German couch makes me tired and a bit impatient. This is a weird feeling, in which I cannot be in Israel when it devolves into chaos.

Over the past 10 years, I have always been there. In 2011, during the social justice protests, in 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, and also in 2019, when I had the glimmer of hope that a political change was in the offing.

But my impatience has nothing to do with some bizarre war tourism hobby or voyeurism; it just that I can't quite understand anything if you are not physically present there. I always believed in this phrase and today I see things through that prism. 

I know that this principle that has wired me in such loyalty has been met with total dismissal by others and that anyone can say anything about anyone, and everyone has their own opinion on any stupid thing, rather than abide by what Socrates said: "I know that I know nothing"

During our modern era, people believe they know everything, but that is rarely the case. They read somewhere on Twitter, they saw a video on YouTube, they saw some half-sentence in a newspaper, and based on those snippets of information they have declared themselves to be experts.

This takes place in America, in China, and in Botswana, it doesn't really matter where. The modest declaration, "I don't know," has become disdained, just like playing Tetris. But if we had only kept this phrase in our lexicon, it would have provided great relief to all of us, both online, and in our discourse in general. 

The thought that I would be in my getaway in just a week's time, perhaps even to the point that I would be turning off my phone and playing on the beach with my daughter while bathing in water and playing water games, or just sitting in a fine village restaurant and drinking Retsina Greek wine gives me a great deal of joy even now, in part because of the intellectual stress that I have had to endure over the past several weeks. I am looking forward with delight for the crickets chirping and the fragrance of fresh citrus, to the scorching heat and the ancient olive trees, as well as the friendliness of the Greek. 

When I decided I would go on this getaway, there was no question in my mind that I would do what my daughter wanted. Ever since we visited Cephalonia, she keeps telling me she wants to go back. Ever since discovering, thanks to My Heritage, that she has 40% Greek ancestry, I have tried to accommodate her requests and passions on this matter. We are definitely going to listen a lot to Aris San singing – she has already memorized her favorite song Dam Dam – and we will act as if life is so easy to live as if we are in a summer night in an olive orchard. 

When we get back to Berlin, fall will have already started. Life will once again pick up pace, in part because Germany has managed to put the coronavirus pandemic on the back burner, to everyone's astonishment. In September, the first copies of my new novel will reach the journalists. This is a complete horror show for someone whose self-confidence hangs by a thread – that is, what will the reviewers say. The answer to that is to just give up and move on, and do more.

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"I think you should properly say 'picket the Prime Minister's Residence," he said.

"Ok, what does it matter how we will do this," I brandished my knife.

"That's totally fine," he replied.

"And no excuses, ok?" i said. "You cannot just complain all day and just not do anything. This time you are not going to get me off track, ok?" I placed a banana slice on the peach and wondered what the judge on the show would have ruled. 

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"Me?" He looked at me with bewilderment. "Yes, you," I replied, as I sat next to him on the couch.

"You are the one who last week told me that you don't feel like going because of some crap about how this was a political protest and that this cannot be a non-political even if you are protesting a man who is charged with criminal conduct."

He answered, "Yes, it's true I said that," and then he silenced the presenter in one of the ads on television for an air conditioning device.

"But I also said that if you really want to go we will go, and you said that you were afraid of the crowd because we live with your parents," he continued.

"Yes, that does sound like me," I said with a sign of embarrassment. "At least we honked when we passed under the bridges waving the protest flags," he tried to comfort me. "We are true freedom fighters," I quipped. 

"That's all water under the bridge," he said as he increased the TV volume. "Now there is a feeling of a national awakening, a real one. If you think this is what you really feel, then ok, let's go. It's important." 

"I totally mean it. Why do think I might be faking it?" I said, annoyed, as I thought about the judge at that cooking show that said she was willing to go to prison if needed because of her protests, or on some other celebrity who finally spoke out along with the thousands who flooded Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and were countered with water cannons.

I also thought to myself that I was the only who was sitting on his behind in search of excuses and only resorts to armchair speeches on the perception that has developed over the past 50 years due to the occupation and other measures, a perception that has made it possible for the government to adopt such a detached policy toward the coronavirus, replete with military metaphors and doctrines that all but ignore the plight of the people. 

"Scratch my back," I heard my father saying after he had emerged from the side of the couch. "What?" I asked. "Scratch my back!" he continued, reprimanding me for not complying. "More upwards, left, stronger! Yes, with your fingernails, you wuss." 

"Stop insulting him," my mother cried out from the couch. "He is not that sensitive," my father replied. Ravid increased the TV volume. The judges on the cooking show were just arguing over some dish that had been prepared unsuccessfully, and I just leaned by and imagined myself storming the area of the Prime Minister's Residence with gloves and a mask. 

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I was so innocent back then. I was convinced, in mid-March, that the project will continue for four or five weeks and then we would return to our normal lives, which now seem so distant. But I now understand that this acute stage is over; we are now at the chronic stage. We will just have to live with the virus somehow. I already see how my despair fits in a more comfortable position. 

What's particularly difficult is the fact that I am locked inside Israel. If we do not consider the domestic flight my friend arranged for me when I was 17, it is safe to say that I was 32 when I first flew overseas.

I have been invited to various writing programs abroad ever since. The meetings are now carried out by email correspondence with my friends around the globe.

Hau in Singapore wants to know more about the radical change that has transformed Israeli society since May, from a country that is among the safe "Green" countries to one of the most "Red" countries.

Tatiana has been taking pictures styling a face mask and posing like a supermodel, sending me a makeshift picture book. Only with the Chinese, I have yet to talk. This has nothing to do with the coronavirus; it just an old grudge from some writing program in Iowa. 

The government's bipolar conduct may raise some eyebrows, trigger ridicule and bewilderment among people globally, but my reaction is horror. It's amazing how little is necessary to unmask the facade of government solidarity, showing the atrophied and complicated situation in our regime, the foot-dragging and shirking of responsibility, and the inability to appoint someone who could manage the situation in a cold and calculated way rather through some populist policies. 

The government's next step is to use profanity against the people, and that has trickled to the street. "Israelis are a bunch of scammers; it is all because of us," I hear a man preaching to his friend at a coffee shop near my home.

Such statements cause my blood to boil and I approach them and recite from my black book all the tricks and fraud methods of our apathetic elected officials: ministers who took part in super spreader events without a mask with great banter; the Health Ministry that sends people into isolation without any accountability and destroys their livelihood along the way, as well as the esoteric term called "privacy;" the jaw-dropping ineffectiveness and the rejection of offers to help just because of ego. And of course, the waiver from isolation for the rich. The two men turn silent and I look at the other customers. Whoever dares to demean the people has been warned. They better not try me. 

My outrage is not just affected by the first coronavirus year. This is also my first year of divorce. I got my divorce only two months before the virus emerged and I am getting used to how society treats a divorcee and has been learning that one can write an entire novel, a thick one, with the gems of this term. For example, there are some people for whom the word "divorcee" threatens them much more than the agile and lethal virus. 

The writer's workshop is not filling up. People are worried about congregating and they are sick and tired of Zoom. The fear of the unknown has led me to do something that I have not done in many years: send my CV. I call that Corona Vitae.

I have been sending it all over to various offices, including some that I never knew could exist in our world. Because of the plethora of such places, I do not get a response. Sometimes someone blurts out in a passive voice: "So many books! Why is that useful?" 

These responses take me back to my novel, which has been spending time with me for two years since its conception on a flight to Spain.

We have a complicated relationship. He makes my life miserable, he sneaks up on me and turns off the light at the end of the tunnel just when I reach it. The concentration is difficult in these times of divorce and corona. But now, perhaps as a gesture of solidarity, he flashes with great fondness on my computer screen and asks me to come closer. 

I put down all my worries and daily anguishes, and allow myself to snuggle with the words and characters as I go on a deep dive – even if it is just for an hour – to this unuseful world.

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"We can have coffee," I said, taking two steps back as her gaze wandered off to the little kitten who was browsing the yard. 

"Brilliant. So tomorrow at the Buke?" She said as she took two steps toward me in horrifying messiness.

"Yes, tomorrow, great, but perhaps we should sit on a bench on Rothschild Blvd.?" I said, seizing the opportunity to take another step back as she checked her messages on her mobile phone. "I have decided not to go into closed spaces until we fully figure out what the infection rate is; I have to be vigilant because of the parents." 

"Sure, honey, whatever rocks your boat," she said, once again closing the gap between us without noticing, and her hand placed on my arm with an intimate move that was designed to calm me down. My gaze was locked on her furbished fingernails that were resting on my hand.

After four months of not touching anyone in London other than Ravid, even the fancy manicure she had gotten at that parlor in Tel Aviv felt like a skeleton that from a zombie taken right out of The Walking Dead. 

Shaken, I sat down at my isolated back yard right after Dita had left back to Tel Aviv, where (according to her incriminating testimony), she will kiss and hug everyone as much as she wants.

I don't want to sound paranoid, but I have been convinced ever since my arrival that Dita and the rest of our good friends, Tali and Loly, are talking behind my back. "This is completely nuts," they probably say as they express amazement over the "elbow handshake, no hugging" policy that I have adopted with great fanfare since my isolation. Due to their indifferent approach as the corona cases mount, I am convinced that they consider me some messy-haired Miss Havisham  who has escaped her mansion. 

"The numbers here are almost nothing; we barely have severe cases," they try to calm me down in our conversations, and I reply that in my experience living in the UK, the number of dead is a lagging figure that would become clear only after two weeks.

"There is no way of knowing anything with all these contradictory studies and the irresponsible leadership," they continue, and I respond that I because of this confusion we have to be extra careful, and as I say this, I try to figure out just when was it that I had transformed into a mother.

"Above everything else," they conclude, "we cannot let the fear of the virus control our lives, and the real danger is the economic crisis."

I tell them in response that they are right and ask myself whether I am Cassandra, who is sounding the alarm over Agamemnon's imminent death while the other characters look with bewilderment at her, or perhaps I have just become insane. 

"So how is it in Israel," my friends from London ask me. And I answer that I have been living outside Israel for the past 13 years. But this is the first time where I feel like a new immigrant in my visit back home, as someone who cannot figure out the locals' ways and anguishes if he has to abandon everything he has learned overseas.

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