Joseph B. Stinsky's Blog

Or perhaps it is just not the place we think.

People often ask where I'm from. It sounds like a simple question, and most expect the name of a country, a city, or perhaps a neighborhood. Sometimes that answer is enough. Other times, it becomes the beginning of a much longer conversation.

But I have noticed something curious. People who have never moved often believe that home is where they were born, while those who have moved a few times begin to suspect it is something else entirely.

An immigrant learns this sooner than most. The first time you leave your country, you think you have left home. Then one day you return, only to discover that home has quietly left without telling you. The streets are still there, the buildings look familiar, and the bakery still smells the same. Yet something refuses to fit. You recognize everything, but nothing recognizes you.

If home is not where you came from, then where is it?

For years I tried different answers. I thought home was where my family lived, then where my work was. Later, I wondered whether it was simply wherever I happened to sleep most nights. None of those answers survived very long.

Children offer a better clue. Ask a small child where home is, and the answer is wonderfully uncomplicated: home is where Mom is, or Dad, or the room where the favorite blanket waits. A child does not confuse a house with a home. Adults often do. A house protects us from the weather, but only people protect us from loneliness.

Home is the place where you no longer feel compelled to explain who you are. It is not about ownership, but recognition. Not geography, but understanding.

For a long time, that seemed enough. Then life continued, and life has a habit of testing every definition we become comfortable with. The people who recognize us do not stay forever. They die, they scatter, or history quietly rearranges the map beneath their feet. The country where I was born no longer exists, and the apartment where my children spent their last night in Vilnius belongs to strangers.
If home is recognition, then home can be lost. I have lost it more than once.

But I have also built it more than once—in another language, in another country, in another life. Each beginning looked different, yet each began the same way: not with a house, but with one person, and then another, until little by little, explanation became unnecessary again.

Each time I believed this home would last, even as some quieter part of me knew better. That no longer makes me sad. Instead, it makes me grateful. I have stopped thinking of home as something I either possess or lose, and instead as something I build, again and again.

Nothing we build is permanent, and neither are we. Perhaps that is why the building matters more than the finished house. A destination can be reached only once, but an act can be repeated for as long as we live.

The child who says, "Home is where Mom is," and the old man who says, "Home is where I am still building," may be describing exactly the same thing. Home is not the place we keep. It is the place we keep learning to build.

And when you built your next home — did you believe in it the way you believed in the first?

I wrote that phrase in my memoir without thinking very hard about it. It seemed simple enough.
Then a reader I had never met lifted it out and held it up. She said it was the thing she most wished for. Seeing my own sentence come back to me from a stranger, I realized I had written something I did not fully understand.
So I have been thinking about it since.

I spent much of my life moving between worlds. I was born in the Soviet Union. I lived in Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Israel, and the United States. In each place there were things that required explanation.
Sometimes it was where I came from.
Sometimes it was my accent.
Sometimes it was my name.
Sometimes it was being Jewish.
Sometimes it was being Soviet after the Soviet Union no longer existed.
The details changed, but the experience was familiar. There was always a moment when someone looked at me and saw a category before they saw a person.
Like many immigrants, I hoped there might be a place where this would finally stop. A place where no explanation was necessary. A place where I would simply belong.
Years have passed, and I am less certain. Not because I failed to find such a place, but because I have begun to wonder whether I was asking the wrong question.
The countries changed. The languages changed. The political systems changed. Yet the need to explain oneself never disappeared entirely.
In Russia I was a Jew. In Israel, I suddenly became Russian. Today, after almost thirty-five years, I am still Russian in America. Among Russians, I sometimes feel American.
Perhaps everyone spends part of life translating themselves for others.
What interests me now is a different possibility. Maybe a place where one does not have to explain who they are is not a place at all.

I think of my grandmother. She had lost her husband in the war and a daughter not long after. On Friday evenings she lit a candle in the bathroom, where the neighbors would not see. She never once asked me to be anything other than what I was. With her, explanation was never required. It had been settled before I was born.
That was not a country. It was a person.
And when I look back, the moments when I did not have to explain myself were never places. They were people. A Ukrainian family who shared their single room with my grandmother and her two daughters during the war. A neighbor who once told me, "You can always come back home to Israel." A wife.

A grandson who, when a boy told him his nose was too big because he was Jewish, simply said, "Yes, I am Jewish, and my nose is OK."
It took me a lifetime to find that certainty. He was born already holding it — because someone had accepted him first.

So perhaps the place I was looking for was never on any map.
Perhaps it is a relationship. A friendship. A conversation in which understanding arrives before explanation.
Or perhaps it begins even earlier. With being accepted so completely that explanation never becomes a habit.
When I think back on the moments in my life when I did not have to explain who I was, they were never places at all.
They were people.
Maybe that is why the idea seems to resonate with so many different lives. Most of us know what it feels like to be misunderstood. Most of us remember the rare person who simply accepted us.
I know I have encountered people who created such a place.

Have you?
And if so, where did you find it?