No Place Like Home

Mishy Harman follows schach, or palm tree branches, all the way from a Jordan Valley date farm to Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me’a Shearim and Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park. Along the way, he talks to a rabbi, a farmer and a gardener about building a sukkah.

Leah Goldberg is one of the most celebrated women in Israeli history. Heck, she’s even on the new 100-shekel bill. She was born 110 years ago, in the Prussian city of Königsberg (nowadays Kaliningrad, Russia), and died in Jerusalem at the age of 58. She was an author, a poet, a playwright, a critic, an editor, a columnist, a translator, a teacher and a beloved professor of comparative literature. Even though she’s been dead for more than half a century, she is rediscovered anew by each subsequent generation of Israelis. And that is due, in large part, to what is perhaps her most enduring legacy: the children’s book Dira LeHaskir, or Room for Rent. The book is a classic; one of the most popular Israeli children’s books of all time. Naomi Schneider and Skyler Inman joined Yoni Yahav as he read Goldberg’s masterpiece – in its new English translation – to his two daughters, 6-year-old Maayan and 4-year-old Yasmin.

As is the case with many other refugees, it’s hard to know where to start Christina Bazia’s story. It could – presumably – begin in 1998, when her parents fled their native Sudan in search of a safer future. It could, alternatively, begin three years later – in Beirut – where Christina herself was born. Or else it could start in June 2007, in the back of a rickety pick-up truck speeding through the Sinai Desert, with a group of frightened asylum seekers crammed together underneath a bedsheet. And just as the story has many beginnings, it has many possible end points, too: Arad, Juba, Kampala and Yehud. Marie Röder tells the haunting tale of one woman’s quest to find a place to call home.