A former student describes his school in Israel

 

I pulled up Google street view in maps and showed her the school buildings I had attended and neighborhood I had grown up in.

....

“You can’t see the room I was in for first grade, because it’s below ground,” I finally found the words. “There were two windows for the classroom that opened to a courtyard below street level.”

“It looks like a prison,” she observed. “Why are there bars everywhere?”

....

“I happen to know the building looks even worse now,” I told her. “They’ve put tarps over the bars so you can’t even see through them.”

I continue the tour, showing her all three buildings where I spent 11 years of my life.

“This was where the community garbage room used to overflow, and trash would pile up right to the door of the school building.”

I showed her the window I sat beside, in 8th grade. It was covered in steel mesh, further contributing to the prison chic aesthetic. “But the window pane was broken, and during the winter I froze when I sat there. I ended up getting pneumonia.”

I showed her the kids crowding around the camera that was capturing all this. How we’d just empty out into the street and roam aimlessly during recess. How there were almost no trees or grass or any greenery.

“It all looks hard,” she observed. “Stone and cement.”

I showed her all the narrow alleys and tunnels, shrouded in shadows. How the houses were so close to each other that there wasn’t enough light even through the windows.

“Whenever I imagine the neighborhood I grew up in, I just imagine darkness.”

She had never seen anything like this, she said. Amanda from Newfoundland did not have context for Zilbermans or the Jewish Quarter.

I feel like I am endlessly showing. Telling. Explaining. Yet nothing I say can do justice to the darkness in my mind, the bars around my psyche. This Google Street View was another attempt.

“It feels oppressive,” she observed.

Did it land for me? Her words, her mirroring back to me what she was seeing? Not really. Maybe a little. Maybe nothing can. I guess the crying was a good sign, if nothing else.