[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life. Not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Now, I got a question for you, and I know you can't answer because you're just somebody listening to a podcast, but what do you call home? Not where, but what? I turned 43 this weekend, and I've lived in the same house for most of my life in a bedroom community in northern New Jersey, a bit more rural than most people's idea of this state. This house has just become so familiar to me over the years. It's like an extension of my mind or my nervous system, but is it a home? Well, I got my dogs a couple of years ago and started taking them around the neighborhood on walks. I couldn't have named more than half a dozen people living on our street, but thanks to them, now I know a ton of them, and I'm the guy with the gray hounds, and people talk to us when we're out for a stroll or when we visit the farmer's market in town. Does that make us place more of a home? I wonder. The thing is, I've always had this other home, even though I haven't been there in 30 years. My mother was an ardent scientist, and my dad was a refugee in Palestine when Israel was founded. I've always had this sense of Israel as the one place that would take me in. There's no danger of my being deported or anything, but it's still the one place besides this place. It's a place that's supposed to be home. I know a lot of people don't agree with this policy, but it's the one place in the world that gives me a right of return, not like Poland and Romania and England and the Ukraine and Germany and France and all the other places that my people come from. There's only one place, and that's Israel. The Jews were part of a diaspora, but we know there's a home we can go to, even if it's in a desert and surrounded by enemies, and even if we're not religious, and I'm not. It's still there for me to make Aliyah, but is that aware, or is it a what? Is it Israel the place or Israel the notion? What's home? I've been asking myself that question this week because of our guest on this episode. Emily Rabato recently published a memoir called Searching for Zion, The Quest for Home in the African diaspora. Emily is a biracial American and she went on a trip to Israel in her early 20s that kind of spurred her onto a mission to find some version of the Promised Land. It's really a lovely book, and it got me thinking sort of about the contrast and the essential uprootedness of the Black diaspora in relation to the Jewish one, and as Walter Sobecchak puts it in the big Lebowski, "3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Kofax, you're goddamn right I'm living in the fucking past," but Emily's book, it throws into really sharp relief what happens when you don't have that tradition, when your people have been scattered and there's no common roots upon which they can draw. Over centuries, Black communities in the new world kind of built new traditions, mixing and matching and trying to find Zion in a sense, trying to find the Promised Land. And searching for Zion illustrates the ways that these new mythologies play out as Emily visits Israel and Ethiopia and Jamaica and Ghana, and eventually America's Deep South, where she tries to sort of find out how uprooted people lay down roots. As for me, you know, I'll be here in suburban New Jersey a lot longer, I hope, of a local temple where I went to Hebrew school and got trained for my bar mitzvah, closed down last year, as the membership dwindled away, but even if there's no Jews out here, it's, you know, it's quiet and it gives me space to read. And now the virtual memory's conversation with Emily Rabato. So tell me about the search for Zion. I read the book, I know physically where you went. Where's the book come from? What's it mean? I think the book came from in a personal way. I mean, I was thinking of Zion in a multifaceted way, largely as a metaphor for freedom, but also as a metaphor for home, you know, not just home in a physical sense, but also like a spiritual sense and also a sense of kinship. And when I really think about the source for this book, it was about searching for a feeling I used to have with my best friend, Tamar Cohen, at 13 years old. And I don't know if you had a best friend in adolescence, but that kind of love I think is not easy to reproduce. I feel that I'm very happily married, but it's not the same kind of love. And that feeling of kinship I had with Tamar, who I spent so much time with and shared so many dreams with, and had a kind of almost our own language, our own lingo, and with whom I spent, you know, weekends and sleepovers and who was in my house and whose house I was in was something I really treasured. And then we grew up and we grew apart, and I didn't have a kind of kinship like that in my 20s, and I made the mistake in a sense when I undertook this adventure of this book before it really became a book. But when I undertook the adventure of adventuring or wandering, of thinking that I was looking for that kind of kinship along racial lines, and it was only after I stopped wandering so much, or maybe somewhere along the journey, talking to people wider than myself, that I realized I was going about looking for Zion, looking for kinship, really, the wrong way. I was looking for it geographically and racially, as opposed to, as opposed to personally. It was interesting seeing the progression of the book, beginning in Israel and moving on to Ethiopia. No, Jamaica, then Ethiopia, Ghana, and back to America. The, at least in the first several sections, the sense of this sort of black identity, non-white, I'm not sure how you'd want to characterize it, blacks in Israel, the rastafarians in Jamaica, and then some who've made the voyage to Ethiopia, there's almost a sense that they want to be Jews, not strictly, you know, Myron Cohen Jews, but, you know, Jews in this spiritual sense is almost a sense that what you were looking at in your journey was a sort of way of side-stepping Christianity for these Jews. What did you, what did you sort of get out of that process, especially from those first few groups, you were meeting of blacks who had left, some who had left America and immigrated to Israel and decided they were another tribe, the African Hebrew Israelites, as well as the Ethiopians who'd been airlifted out. Seeing that, and then the progression as you traveled further along, what sort of identity did you build, I guess? What did you see in those various ethnic groups and how did it relate to you? That's a few questions. I know, I'm horrible with that, I mean, well incessantly. Well, when you began talking about seeing in my book a trend of groups of black people want to be Jews or who have some kind of an affinity with that identity, it made me think of a quote, and I can't remember exactly, but it's about the journal transition, which is the first journal that I was ever published in, it's an African diasporic journal, which is quite wonderful, and it was begun in the late 60s in Uganda, and then it's had several iterations and now it's housed at Harvard. But somebody said of the journal once that it is a Jewish journal by black people. In so far as it's about diaspora, and something that I learned from my father who is a scholar of African-American religion, a scholar of religion, I should say, focusing on African-American religion who recently retired last spring after 31 years of teaching at Princeton University, I really learned through his scholarship how important the story of Exodus was and remains in the lives of Africans in the diaspora. And we know about that I think probably most famously through the speech of Martin Luther King, I've been to the mountaintop and I've seen the promised land and I may not get there with you, but I know as a people we will get there, that's a paraphrase as well, but that's more or less what he said in his final speech before being assassinated in a sense prognosticating his own death, speaking as Moses who he was, kind of Moses of his people, and not just of black people, but he became a Moses figure and he was speaking out of a tradition that by that point was really very old. And Obama spoke in the same tradition in 2008 when he ran the first time and he posed himself as Joshua who was standing on the shoulders of Moses and in a way it was a nod to the civil rights movement that he was writing in on, but also to say, you know what Moses never made it into the promised land, but Joshua did and so that was very crafty and it was also speaking out of a very old, old tradition that really the point of entry into Christianity for African slaves who belonged to so many different kinds of tribes and prayed to different gods and spoke different languages. Their way into being a tribe of their own according to the scholarship of my father was really this story of Exodus that just as the slaves in the Hebrew Bible were in bondage under Pharaoh and made their way through this fascinating journey into the promised land so too the slaves of our nation wanted to believe there must be a promised land for them. And yeah, began back then, the importance of this story, but it's not just in religion. I mean we hear it in politics and we hear it in music and I grew up hearing it in music and kind of understanding Zion or the promised land as being a metaphor or an idea and it was until I went to Jerusalem that I thought, oh my gosh, this is actually also. This means something in the concrete world and I felt enormously jealous, you know, as you read in my book, that there was such a place, a complicated, obviously a complicated place that's not exactly heaven on earth but nevertheless is, you know, a land, an actual land you can visit and reside in. And I think that that was really important for people like the, obviously really important for people like the African Hebrew Israelites who felt so disenfranchised and disillusioned in the states that they wanted to believe there was a Zion for them. There are many historically that's been Africa, but they decided it was Israel. Which is Africa? Yes, according to, strictly by the map. Yeah, according to those that I spoke to, Northeast Africa they said. Yes, as they put it, but your experience when later in the book in your life, when you travel to Africa, you find a very complicated picture, particularly, well, particularly for American blacks coming to Africa and how they're perceived by locals in the countries you visited, but also in your own very particular situation being biracial and very light skinned, you were, most of the places you traveled it seemed, you were not black to the locals. No, but most of the black people, you know, from the states, from the Americas, I should say, who traveled to Africa, we're not seen as African, that they might be seen as black. And blackness itself didn't have the same meaning in most of the places that I went as the meaning that I understood from my own context. So how disconcerting was that? The first time I was disconcerted about, or I should say, disconcerted is the right word because it doesn't necessarily imply pleasure, or pleasurable surprise, right? How different was it to be white to other people? Oh, well, yes, I guess in Jamaica, it was surprising to me to feel white to be described as white, where I feel like in many contexts in the United States I'm perceived as a light skinned black woman, though that's not always the case. But then there were interesting circumstances in Israel, for example, where I perceived the Ethiopian Jews as being black, and they said, no, we're not that, or we weren't that until we arrived here in Israel. And that, you know, what I understood as blackness both did and didn't have to do purely with skin color, and in other places blackness doesn't have to do with skin color as well. So it's a bit in different ways. So, you know, in Jamaica it sort of strictly has to do with skin color, and also with class. And the Ethiopian Jews had, you know, some of them had perception of black people as being, that's a term they would use for other Africans, but also for their own slaves, and so that was like a strange and dispiriting discovery. Everybody's got someone lower on the totem pole? Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. So you were no longer black once you traveled at these other locations, and yet you were you all along. Yeah, and yet I was me all along, and yeah, and many of the African Americans who traveled to Ghana, in particular that was where I felt this schism between people who desperately wanted to feel a sense of kinship or a feeling of home with Africans without having much understanding of all of the different kinds of tribes, that's, you know, 72 languages at least are spoken in Ghana, by at least that many tribes, and here they are arriving after 400 years of separation in terms of culture and language and geography and politics and religion and everything expecting to have some kind of feeling of brotherhood or sisterhood, and to be told you're not African at all. It was very hard for a lot of tourists who are going for roots tourism. Yeah. Did you talk at all the people who were looking at that sort of trip? Have you had any encounters with people where you said, you know, you might not be getting what you think you're getting out of this before they... I have. And I tell them what somebody told me there, a taxi driver, who I quoted elaborately in this book, who said, you know, often black Americans come and they tell us how we should be more African, or they tell us how we should be more cleanly, or how we should cook our food, or they complain about the lack of air conditioning, or the sewers, the open sewers in the streets, and it's not really right to come as a tourist and tell us how we should be. Well, somebody else told me slavery is only really one story. It's not the only story about this place, and so to come with that baggage and see only through the goggles of that history is also to be blind to, you know, what Ghana is now, and all of the stories that are there in the present, including slavery that continues to exist of different kinds. But not only that, you know, that's maybe a sad story, and there are happy ones too. Do you foresee yourself going back at some point? - To Ghana. - Yeah, to Africa overall, but to Ghana in particular, it seemed to be a very resonant place from the chapter you devoted to. - I think it's one of the easiest African countries to travel to, which is perhaps one reason why it was the one that Obama chose to make his first visit to in Africa, the Sub-Saharan nations, politically it's the democracy is relatively stable. The language is, the lingua franca is English because it was colonized by the British, so unlike Ethiopia where I didn't speak the language, and it was quite difficult to navigate, or other nations where there might be political strife happening, it was really pretty easy to get around, and people were very open and friendly. - I would love to go back, but just as you were saying with all the books you want to read before you die, I mean, that's just how I think of nations that I want to visit. I won't be able to make it to all of them, so do I really want to waste a future trip, especially now that I have children on a place I've already been, I don't know. - You do mention in the book at one point, just in passing a trip to, I believe, Antarctica? - That's right. - Okay, so that's the heart of whiteness as opposed to the heart of the dark, is what exactly led to that trip? What was the story? - In my next book, one that I've been working on in ways that have been stalled. - Once again, the children and family thing? - Yeah, children and family, but also perhaps the book's theme, which is difficult to really inhabit because it's dark. Nevertheless, I was stalled, I felt I needed to go to Antarctica to understand the mind of the protagonist of the book, who is a man who is a marine engineer. He designs propulsion systems for ice breakers, and I felt I needed to venture on that kind of craft in order to understand his work, and it just so happened that to be on that kind of craft, I would need to go to Antarctica, but also I wanted to see Antarctica. - That was it. - It was amazing, because you could imagine, you have to, to get to Antarctica, you have to travel through one of the most dangerous, treacherous, it is the most dangerous and treacherous stretch of ocean on the planet. It's called Drake's Passage, and because of the confluence of currents, the waves can get up to 35 feet high, and so of course, as you're traveling this passage, which takes two days to venture, unless you're made of steel, you are incredibly seasick, and I don't know if you've ever been seasick for any amount of time. - No, I've been quite lucky about that. - Oh, you never have. - That is a little kid voting with my dad, but that's it. - Yeah, you've probably been nauseated, I mean, if you can imagine nausea that lasts two days, and doesn't end for two days, you nearly want to throw yourself overboard. But if you can make it, which you probably will, because-- - Oh, a big tough guy, look at me. - Then you find yourself born into one of the most amazing landscapes you'll ever see. It's like being on the moon. I mean, it's like being in outer space, it's that bizarre. I mean, shades of blue that are indescribable with words. - But you're going to try? - Oh, I think we can-- - Not here, I mean-- - We'd have to leave that to a poet, yeah, or I'll have to try in my book, yeah, I haven't gotten to that. - Which I'm guessing is fiction? - It's fiction. - Okay. - Had you written a novel before this, or has it all been non-fiction? - No, this was a side leg that I didn't think was going to turn into a book, Searching for Zion, I mean, I written a novel called The Professor's Daughter, and as you can guess from the title, it's highly autobiographical, it came out in 2005, and then I wrote an essay for Transition Magazine that I mentioned earlier about those two groups of black Jews, the African Hebrew Israelites and the Ethiopian Jews for that magazine, Transition, and it did rather well, which surprised me, which is to say it was anthologized a couple of times at Best American Essays and a couple of other places, and I thought, oh, there's interest in this topic, not just in my own mind, but I think what Zion mean for black people in the diaspora and other places is something I'd like to pursue, so I kept doing it, and then it eventually became a book. - One of the odd aspects, and you do address it somewhat early on, your mother was Mertal, she was Irish, and an Irish writer asks you why you don't choose to follow those roots and then go back to that homeland and follow it up, is that any sort of dream down the line? Have you been at all, have you looked into those roots? - That is a dream, yes, my mother is Mertal, she's still Irish, and that writer that you're talking about, Nula O'Fuelen, who was a writer I met at the McDowell artist's colony, a wonderful woman who has since died, and yeah, she said, have you taken a look at yourself love? - How in Jason's name can you call yourself black? Yeah, pointing to some things, I guess, strange in my leanings given what I look like in terms of identity, but I think one that often happens with biracial people, particularly of my mix, which is a black/white mixture, which is perhaps reaching for the black side more than the white, and I see it, especially as I've aged as a sad omission or kind of blindness to my mother, but it also has to do with knowing my mother better than my father, I think, or feeling at home in her, perhaps or with her more than my father, so that she... - Forms the less of a mystery? - Yeah, it was less of a mystery. I just read a book, I finished a book today that was quite wonderful, called A Life's Work by the British writer Rachel Cusk, who is a novelist. It's a book about motherhood, which makes it probably boring to everyone who's not a mother, which is a hard truth, but nevertheless a truth, and she has a wonderful line in there that I'm probably also going to misquote, but it has to do with mothers being the country where we're from, something like that, and I knew it was true when I read it, and I thought about that in relation to my own mother, and as for her Irish roots, I am very interested in that. Ireland is definitely one of the nations I have to see before I die, like one of the books I have to read before I die, and I'd love to go with my mother. In fact, when I wrote a book proposal for this book, Ireland was one of the sites I wanted to visit, and then I got pregnant and ran out of money, and it didn't happen. So the book is perhaps simpler than I think it should have been. I mean, it raised the question to me of, do you embrace your blackness, and I'm doing air quotes even though no one can see it, just because I'm that politically correct? Is there a sense of embracing your blackness in this pursuit of what you pursued in the course of the book, because you're out in America, and if you're not 100% white, you're not white in America, or do you feel a different sense of who you are here? Am I just projecting race ideas that I have in my privileged New Jersey Jewish guy, white guy sense? Well, hey, I'm also a privileged whitish girl from New Jersey, and I grew up in Princeton. I come from the woods, so it's way up north where I am. Yeah, I mean, we have that one drop legacy that I think is hard to shake, that if you have a degree of that history in your genealogy, it takes hold. But I think it's more than that. My mother, for many years, was a second grade school teacher, and she did a unit on the underground railroad in which she taught her students that song "Follow the Drinking Board." I don't know if you know it. It's beautiful. It wasn't part of our curriculum when I was a kid. Mine either, or maybe in my curriculum at home, but not in my school. It's a beautiful song. If I had a good voice, I would sing it, but the lyrics are about, the drinking gourd is the big dipper, another word for that constellation, another term for that constellation. And "Follow the Drinking Board" is a song about, it's basically a map of the stars and also refers to the Ohio River, in coded ways, it was a song, a song among slaves, about how to get north to the "promised land," what was perceived as perhaps, dreamly being that place. And anyway, my mother taught this song to her students, and there was one little white girl who came back to school the day after she learned the song quite sad, and my mother asked, "What's wrong?" and she said, "I just really want to be black." I feel so sad that there's nobody, I went home and I asked my mom, "Were we a little bit black?" And she said, "No." So I bring that story up just to say, I know exactly what that little girl felt, hearing that song, which is very powerful and beautiful, which carries the same kind of weight if you hear it. It really has that kind of minor tone that Amazing Grace has, and Godone Moses has in so many of those Negro spirituals have, which is something bluesy and real and triumphant over pain that you want to lay claim to, right, as your own, which is why that's happened so much with music, which is why there's this song "Promised Land" by Chuck Berry, which we all know of, or those of us who know this song, probably know it as being sung by Elvis Presley. Yeah, there's a way that we want to claim that story and that history because it's largely one of triumph, right? Well, it wasn't for the people that I visited, right, like for so many of the black people that I visited and these other nations who were looking for that place, their story when they lived here, for example, the African Hebrew Israelites, many of whom came from the ghettos of Detroit and Chicago, their story of, their story of what it was to be black in America was a tragic story. As one man said, when I asked him, "Do you think you found the Promised Land in Israel?" His cagey answer was, "If I wasn't here, I would be dead." And I believe he was right. I believe he believed he was right. He would have been in prison or dead by that age. So anyway, there was a kind of a sad story, right? But what this little girl was talking about, and I think what I was raised on the diet of pride to believe was we wanted to overcome and we have largely overcome, yeah, or we endured. Yeah. Surviving. Yeah. Where I'm coming from is first-generation American. My mom was born in 1940 and London, dad was 1938 in Romania. So we come from a Jewish world. They met in Israel and came to America and it was something that really struck me over the course of your book. The sense of, and it ties back to my question of this sort of notion of black Zionists wanting to be Jews, that sense that as Jews, we went through all of these awful hardships, but we held on to memory and culture all these thousands of years and we had that as a unifying thread. And what you show, particularly in the Ghana chapter, where you show the big slave castle and the process of boarding slaves onto boats and starting the middle passage, all that got stripped away. Like you end up with a completely derasinated people whose only identification is their skin color and tone and a sense of trying to self-mythologize. I suppose. There's no actual question in there, but that's sort of what struck me, that idea that Jews as Jews had this idea of who they were stretching back all this time. But when you have to build your own mythos and your own heritage, that's a real dicey proposition. Yeah. I mean, that lacuna, that terrible rupture, I think is the source of so much of the pain that drives a lot of those roots, tourists back, because they're trying to bridge that unreachable gap. But that said, I believe that little girl in my mother's second grade class who was reaching for blackness in this way was talking exactly about a culture that she heard expressed in that song that she wanted to glue herself to, right? Which was something that led to the birth of the blues, that led to the birth of rock and roll, which was this Negro spiritual, this American music that she heard and loved and felt a part of in so far as she learned this song was created here, you know? And out of nothing, out of something, there was some residue, right? Yeah. But it's also such a mix of everything that was imposed on the historic, I mean, Christianity, right? But the story, I mean, the entry point, the gateway to Christianity was the story of Exodus, you know? And that's how you have these people, the Rastas, where I'm asking them in Jamaica on my journey there, do you consider yourself a Jewish? And they say, we're not Jewish, we're Jews, we are Israelites, you know? Like, that story is our story and it's this, I think, beautiful co-opting of a story, which is also a story of triumph and survival. You also, and it's something we mentioned early on, that sense of someone always being lower on the totem pole, that thread comes up several times over the course of the book, Hans and Jamaica, when the issue of gays in Jamaica comes up at one point, Palestinian, basically, talking about an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier in very unflattering terms. As a monkey. Yeah. And there's this sense of, again, she keeps rolling through, but it reminded me somewhat, I went to Hampshire College as an undergrad, so I, at this very, you know, aware, well, I had awareness pushed upon me, I suppose you could say. Of that sense of power structure behind everything, were you, did you feel you were learning that over the process of these visits, or had you already had some essential knowledge that everywhere you went, you know, something was going to be upturned, that, you know, whatever you saw, there was going to be some, then nothing was idyllic, there was going to be a rupture where somebody points as, well, of course, you know, those ones are the subhumans, and there's always some sense of pushing off an otherness like that. I hoped it would be upturned. I mean, I thought it would be more interesting if it was upturned. I imagine that if I had found the Promised Land, it would have been quite boring, right? That maybe for the construction of this book, which is a memoir to a degree, I had to present myself in a way as Dorothy, who was looking for home, and who was looking genuinely for that place. But I think I, I don't want to say I was jaded enough to know that I wouldn't find it, but maybe. But still, Jared, at least the way you portray it, you do seem a bit surprised at the, yeah. I think I was smart enough to know I wouldn't find an easy utopia. But I didn't always know, I mean, I was often surprised by how somebody who I may have thought of as dispossessed and therefore would have empathy for other people who were dispossessed in other ways. I was often surprised that they weren't more empathetic, but as my husband pointed out to be at a certain point along this journey, like you can't valorize the oppressed just for being, having been oppressed, like there, you know, doesn't make somebody saintly that they, that they were stepped on. In fact, it, it more often than not makes them want to step on someone else to elevate themselves. And so you had examples, like the ones you referred to, time and time again, that, that often were unpleasant surprises for me, and yet, in a way as a writer, I was happy to be surprised. Sure. Yeah, how has the book been received? So some of the book's first responders were members of the Jewish press, and I think it was because of the title of the book. The field was a big switch. Bold. Yeah, I think some of them were maybe surprised about what, what, what was inside of the covers of the book, but also, I think that, you know, to talk about Zion as a metaphor, one for so many, it's not that, it's, you know, it's, or it's that, but it's also very concrete, is, is almost sacrilege, you know, it's, it's, so I think it, I think it was upsetting to some that a conclusion, if you want to call it that, of the book, was that you can't arrive at that place geographically, which is something I came to feel after wandering around looking for Zion on earth. Did they object at all to your portrayals of Israel? Yes, yes. As my friend Tamar Cohen's mother, who really enjoyed the book, said, when one criticizes Israel at one's own peril, and, you know, it, which I, I understood going in, I, and I, I, I hoped, or I tried to be nuanced, and, of course, yeah, what, I mean, you portray the ugliness from a lot of different directions, as well as portraying some of the glorious aspects of it. Well, thank you. And we hoped it was equal opportunity ugliness. That's what I'm saying. You didn't just hate one side as, you know, this was terrible, but yeah, yeah. But I, but I was also looking for, for beauty where I, where I found it and trying, trying to empathize to, you know, there was one, this taxi driver Oz, who I wrote off as being immediately as being a racist, he was an Israeli, who said some ugly things about Palestinians in such a way that I dismissed him entirely. And we were driving to Haifa, and this was during the war with Lebanon in 2006. And he, he said, do you have any children, and I said, no. And he said, well, I do, I, you know, I have my own children, and then I have two children that I adopted, who are the children of my best friend, who was shot in the face during the last war we had with Lebanon, and I, and I saw that happen to him. And I, I felt like I'd been punched in the gut, because if I'd seen my best friend Tamarco and shot in the face, I can't say who I would turn against and say ugly things about. And black reception of the book? Black reception of the book, yeah, and I've also been invited to talk about the book in a lot of African-American studies programs, so I think both of those groups have embraced the book or been interested in the book, I should say, because they haven't always embraced it. But then I've also been surprised by like some middle-aged white guys who, who liked the book, the man who ended up purchasing the rights to make the audiobook, said that he grown up as an army brat, and when he read my book, he felt like he was reading his own story in a way, because he felt like me that he didn't have an easy relationship with America or with home. He didn't really feel at home here, because he'd spent so much of his childhood elsewhere, and that feeling of trying to find that place was something that has driven him and his life. And so I think the search, I hope, you know, the search for home is something that a lot of people feel is kind of a universal quest, but yeah, the first responders were the Jews and the Blacks. Yeah. And you create a community for the dispossessed and uprooted, so that's an achievement. Thank you. You're raised Catholic. How much of this book was a sense of, I don't want to say overcoming that, but dealing with that in terms of other cultures that are really, really not Catholic, all the way through the final chapters where you attend services with Creflo Dollar, the great, oh, we could say charlatan, or, you know, great, great megachurch pastor, however-- I'm happy to call him a charlatan. Okay. Yeah. How was I trying to overcome my conversation? Was there a sense of that? Well, it did feel--I mean, this was a spiritually driven journey, as I said, in a way. You had to find a sense of kinship and that's something a lot of people find in faith. And maybe I, you know, I mean, being Catholic, it's a lot of--I mean, you've probably heard people say before it feels quite cultural as well, like, I mean, you can be a lapsed Catholic, it was hard to not be Catholic anymore, like, they-- Right. And I'm wondering what that-- How that drove-- What that felt like while you were traveling in the world that are very, very different from that? Yeah. Well, often I had people asking me, you know, in places where their faith was very entrenched, what my faith was, or they were asking what I was, and I was used to that being a racial question for me, I haven't grown up being racially ambiguous, you usually receive that question and the answer that satisfies is I have a black parent and a white parent, but in some realms, you know, including Israel and--including Jamaica, where I was talking to Rastafarians, and also in Ethiopia, and even in Ghana, people were asking, you know, what are you--and they were asking what my faith was. And I didn't have an easy answer for that either, you know. And that was a problem for many of them, just as it was a problem for most of them that I was traveling without a husband. That does seem to come up numerous times in your visits that-- Yeah, I-- How many children do you have? Right. That does--yeah. Especially as I neared 30 and then surpassed it, yeah, but I now belong to a church around the corner. It's an Episcopal church. Do you want to tell me that synagogue down the hill? You know, if we lived closer to that synagogue on 125th Street, close to 125th Street on Old Broadway, we might be going there, I don't--I like that place. But I like this place, and part of the reason I like it, it's where my husband and I were married and where both of our children have been baptized. There are maybe 15 parishioners at the ten o'clock mass that we go to. They are much older than us. But I like it for--one reason that I like it is that it makes us interact with people we wouldn't interact with otherwise, because they belong to a different generation, they belong to different class, and they're coming from different backgrounds. And I like the structure of it. There's something very--people call the Episcopal church, the Episcopalian church, I call it Catholicism light, and I like many of the rituals that are familiar to me from childhood. I like the smell of the incense, and there's something kind of--I don't use the word magical that seems wrong, but almost right, that there's something very comforting in the familiar rituals, and yet I'm pleased that many of the things I was uncomfortable with about the Catholic church are not true of the Episcopal church. >>How do your friends deal with any sort of religiosity or spirituality in your life? Is that a common thing? Having no social life and no friends whatsoever, I don't know. But I always take New York to be filled with godless heathens, so I'm just wondering if there's any sort of, "Oh, you go to church?" >>Yeah, there is. They're really, really it. >>Not that I mean to create any waves between you and your friends, but-- >>No, I think most of them are surprised and confused by it, because their perception of somebody who goes to church or refers to themselves as "Christian" is--they have a picture of a certain kind of Christian that frightens them, right? >>Holy roller. >>A holy roller, you know, somebody very right-wing, somebody who would tell them how to behave and what to do with their body, and in fact I was invited to--this was a strange place that I wound up, but I was invited shortly after searching for Zion came out to go down to the production--the production office, I guess, the office of the producer, the woman who produces Bobby McFerrin, who had a new CD coming out around that time, which was--as it turns out Bobby McFerrin is deeply Christian, and a lot of the songs on the CD were faith-based songs, some of them were Negro spirituals, and a couple of the more songs that he wrote about Jesus and about God, and I think the producer was very fearful about how those who still listen to Bobby McFerrin would react badly to him having-- >>Would react, yeah, that maybe the perception of him is sort of alternative, hippy type, I don't quite know. >>I don't know anyone who knows anything of his after 1987, but yeah. >>After me that you are, I mean, I was sort of--this was a surprise to me too, that even that he was still putting out CDs, and maybe that sounds mean, but-- >>He's probably not listening. >>I went because I thought maybe I'd see him, and I had seen him in concert actually as a young adult, and been amazed by the feats of his voice. And I thought maybe he would sing, I was pregnant at the time with my daughter, almost nine months pregnant, and I thought he might sing something at my belly and that it would make her dance inside me, and I was looking forward to that, and then as it turned out, he wasn't there, they just wanted me to say some words about--it was very odd, they wanted me to say some words about as a non-crazy Christian person about faith, basically, to justify the purchase of body-making parents' CD. >>That's a good racket, if you can get people to pay you to do that, that's got to be something. >>Yeah, and I mean, I was very taken aback, because as I said, I thought maybe I'd be meeting, I didn't really know what I was there to do, but I think I said something like, you know, I don't--when I hear stories from the Bible about Jesus walking on water or multiplying those of bread and fishes, I don't take them as literal truth, I just, you know, but when I'm about to undergo something as miraculous and frightening as childbirth, it helps to be able to reach to stories like that, just as it helps to be able to reach to all sorts of myths, to be able, you know, including Exodus, to be able to achieve something really, really hard, you know, such as giving birth or leaving home to find a better home somewhere else. We reach for stories like that, to be able to take risks, you know? >>You found Zion in Washington Heights? >>Yeah, I think I did. >>Emily Rabato, thanks so much for coming on the Virtual Memories Show. >>Thank you for having me, Gil. >>And that was Emily Rabato. Check out her book Searching for Zion from Atlantic Monthly Press at your favorite bookstore, and visit her site for more information about her writing and signings and more. She's at EmilyRabbato.com, and I'm not going to be so mean as to not spell that out for you. That's E-M-I-L-Y-R-A-B-O-T-E-A-U.com. And that's it for this week's Virtual Memories Show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Rachel Haddes, a poet, professor and translator, and author of "Strange Relation," a memoir of "Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry." Until then, do me a favor, go to our iTunes page and post a rating and review of the show, because that makes me seem more important to Apple, or hit up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation to the show. This is ad-free, and I really treasure every little penny people drop in the tip jar. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groth@chimeraobscura.com, or VMS pod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next week, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] You
