“When you move to another country, the only thing that stays in your memory is your house, the tree next to your house, and the bench," Igor tells me, as a mortified Daniela sighs. She had warned me that her father liked to speak in metaphors. "He has a metaphor for every situation in life," she says as he smiles and ignores her. On that trip in 1995, he founds out that the house was gone, the tree cut down and the bench burnt. "The only thing in your memory and now it's nothing. Even after only four years, I realized that Israel is my home."

Their feelings track with what some scholars of diaspora and return immigration say about the relegation of the country of origin into the realm of nostalgia and memory after just a few years in the new homeland.”