The Day I Realised Johannesburg Was No Longer Home

Seventeen years after I made aliyah, I stood on the balcony of my father’s flat in Glenhazel, watching the jacaranda trees explode into purple the way they always did in late October. The air smelled exactly the same: hot tar, braai smoke, and that faint sweetness of frangipani that used to live under my childhood bedroom window. Everything looked familiar, everything perfect.

And yet, for the first time in my life, I felt like a visitor. I had come “home” for my father’s seventieth birthday, the same trip I had made many times since boarding that El Al flight out of OR Tambo in the winter of 2008 with two suitcases, a toddler on my hip, and a heart full of certainty that Israel was the only place a Jew could truly breathe.

Back then, leaving South Africa felt like the most natural thing in the world. The crime statistics were terrifying, the future felt shaky, and the pull of the Land was stronger than any fear. I never looked back. Or so I told myself.

But standing on that balcony, something cracked open inside me. The purple jacarandas were beautiful, yes, but they weren’t mine anymore. The Shabbos sirens that used to echo through the suburbs every Friday afternoon no longer marked the beginning of my week’s rest; they were just a nostalgic sound, like an old song on the radio. The friends who gathered around the birthday table spoke of schools and shuls and security complexes the way people speak of oxygen: something you need but never celebrate. I realised I no longer understood the rhythm of their fear, and their joy in the same instinctive way. I had become the one who had left.

It hit me with the force of grief: the place that almost destroyed me was never Israel. It was the place I had left behind.South Africa had been unravelling me long before I admitted it. The electric fences, the panic buttons, the late-night phone calls that began with “Don’t worry, but…”. The slow, corrosive knowledge that no matter how many generations your family had poured their sweat into this red soil, you would always be slightly conditional here.

I carried that anxiety in my bones for twenty-seven years and only noticed its absence in Israel told me how heavy it had been.In Jerusalem, I walk my dog at midnight without calculating escape routes.

My children speak Hebrew like it was poured into them in the womb. When the siren sounds on Yom HaZikaron, the entire country stops breathing at the same time, and for two minutes I am not a minority. I am simply part of the whole. That wholeness saved me in ways I could never have articulated while I was still trying to be both South African and Jewish with every ounce of energy I had.

And yet, for seventeen years I kept one foot in the diaspora, telling myself I was just “loved going home.” I needed the illusion that I could belong in two places at once. The truth is gentler and more brutal: you can love a place with every cell in your body and still outgrow it. You can carry its songs and its smells and its purple trees inside you forever, and still know, deep in your marrow, that it is no longer home.

On the flight back to Israel that year, I cried quietly in seat 32A. Not because I was sad to leave Johannesburg; which I have been many many times before. I cried because I was finally understood that I was crying for a version of myself that no longer existed: the girl who thought she could split her soul in half and still be whole.The jacarandas still bloom every spring in my memory. I send my father photos of the almond blossoms in the valley below my house in the Judean hills, and he sends me photos of the purple streets.

We don’t say it out loud, but we both know: he stayed, I left, and somehow we both ended up exactly where we were supposed to be.South Africa gave me my childhood. Israel gave me my future. And one ordinary October day in Glenhazel, seventeen years after I thought I had closed the book, I finally turned the page with steady hands and a heart that was, for the first time, entirely at home.