Home is where the Challah is

The period of the Jewish High Holy Days always makes me reconsider my precollege conception of distances. In May 2002, a few weeks shy of my high school graduation, 350 miles from home to campus seemed just right. The six-hour drive time meant that my family would occasionally come to visit, but never unannounced. Now, though, I'm envious of my friends who can take a train home for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Though I'd had experiences of being at camp for birthdays, I never understood the difficulty of holidays away from home until my post-high school year abroad.

I arrived in Cormòns, Italy, at noon on Sept. 6, 2002 — just in time for the sunset that would mark the beginning of Rosh Hashanah. Because there was no time to locate the closest synagogue, I gave in to jetlag and fell asleep shortly after the holiday began. I had to content myself by a next-day observance of tashlich — the casting off of sins symbolized by tossing bread crumbs into running water — which I performed while standing under the Devil's Bridge in Cividale, a nearby town. While the fish of the Natisone River ate the bread I'd carried over from America (since I couldn't possibly have had time to accumulate sins in Italy), I thought about what an interesting new year it would be.

The thought returned again 10 days later, when my Italian host mother drove me to Trieste for Kol Nidre services. We crisscrossed the downtown pedestrian district several times before finding the synagogue, at which point we had to surrender passport and identity card to the security people at the door. Thus stripped of legal documents, we doubled back into town to search for a place to eat, since I would soon begin my fast. As fate would have it, Kol Nidre fell that year on a Sunday, a night that all Italian restaurants are closed. My host mother finally located a cafè and ordered me a "toast," which proved to be ham and cheese sandwich. I ate it in order to have energy for my first day of school the next day, and added it to my list of things for which to atone.

After these major shocks, the year proceeded more or less smoothly. I got through Hanukah by inviting Italian friends to light candles with me, celebrated Purim by baking Hamantaschen and went to the Passover Seder with a family I knew in Trieste, who made the best charoset I'd ever tasted. Still, there was always a sense of the strange and exotic, a longing for the familiar that made me wish myself, at least momentarily, home for the holidays.

Now that I'm at Princeton, a stronghold of the multicultural United States, being away on significant occasions has gotten a little easier. For one thing, I no longer feel like the only Jew from Venice to Vienna. Other people are celebrating the same holidays, and those who are not are generally informed about what certain observances entail. Having open-armed cousins who live in practically the same zip code also helps. However, I'm still slightly jealous of those who live near enough to campus to make the trip to be with family. There's nothing like contemplation — something in which the Jewish holidays are steeped — to make one, as the Italians would put it, "nostalgic for home." Emily Stolzenberg is a German major from Morgantown, W. Va. She can be reached at estolzen@princeton.edu.