This is going to be one long extended kvetch, disguised as a travelogue. You’ve been warned!
Other than a severe attack of peritonitis that almost killed me, Holocaust survivor parents augmented by a devout Catholic nanny who implanted levels of guilt and anxiety so deep, no $300 an hour shrink could ever alleviate them, and an education system that existed mainly to extol the Soviet Union, my childhood in Prague was a happy one. No helmets for biking, riding public transit alone at age 12 and exploring suburban fields where unexploded WW2 ordonnance was still scattered, collecting stamps, and later learning Beatle songs by listening to Radio Free Europe - all pretty grand! The idyll was rudely interrupted by the infamous invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in August, 1968. My parents decided they’d had enough. We headed across the border to Austria, leaving everything (and I mean EVERYTHING!) behind.
In October 1968, we landed at Ben Gurion (then Lod) Airport in Tel Aviv, where all mother’s relatives lived. I guess my parents felt Israel would be a safe harbor emotionally, despite being supremely unsafe in every other way. I didn’t speak a single word of Hebrew and while listening to my 10th Grade teachers prattling away in that guttural Semitic language, I amused myself by “illustrating” Czech pornographic stories I read under my desk. I picked up the language pretty quickly and the next nine years would have been awesome if it hadn’t been for a) a brutal war in 1973 in which my girlfriend’s brother was killed b) my nervous breakdown in 1974 which prevented me from following a promising musical career and 3) my parents’ increasing paranoia which raised the emotional temperature at home to unbearable levels.
In September 1977, about a month after the death of Elvis Presley, I got myself a Canadian tourist visa, cashed out my very meager savings account and amidst howls of despair and lamentations from my parents (“You must call at least twice a week, no matter what!”), I set out for Munich. The idea was to spend a few days in Deutschland, then somehow make my way to Toronto, where I had a vague notion I’d study music. Or something. Canada was only on the itinerary because my parents had good friends there and thought I’d be safe under their wing. It just so happened that I ran into a French Canadian girl in Munich, whom I talked into traveling with me for a week or two. I recall we had a great time in a dim compartment of the Munich - Zurich express train.
I never made it to Canada until much later. I got myself to London somehow and fell in love with the city. This time language wasn’t a problem: in Israel, I had learned both English and Hebrew simultaneously by having both local and American friends. I picked up most of my English from records and then fine-tuned it by conversing with my American and British friends in Tel Aviv.
While I loved London and thrived there emotionally, Her Majesty’s Government, in the form of sour immigration clerks at the Home Office, refused to extend my visa past the end of my course of study (I completed a Master’s Degree in Linguistics and also studied music - though I never practiced hard enough to pass the ultra rigorous exams set by the Guildhall School of Music which I was attending). Now it was finally time to fly to Toronto, three years later than planned. Those three years in London still stand out as the happiest time of my life: mostly because I was out of reach of my parents.
I lived in Toronto on and off until 1989. It was in that fateful year that my wife, Icelandic by birth, looks and personality, gave me an ultimatum: either we move to Reykjavik, lock stock and barrel (we had two daughters aged 8 and 5 at the time) or the marriage is over. Option #2 would have been the much wiser one but I wasn’t very wise in those days. My mother had moved to Toronto after my dad had passed away and once again, her emotional blackmail hovered around me like an ill wind. Moving to Iceland with two young kids, just as my career was taking off (or so I told myself) was really stupid, BUT it would remove me from my mother’s radius of influence and that was what probably made me move and uproot my life once more.
I suffered my second nervous breakdown almost immediately upon arriving on The Rock: I knew nothing of the culture - other than from my wife’s personal history and Jules Verne’s book “Journey to the Center of the Earth”. The first year was truly horrific. Toronto weather is cold and snowy but there are many sunny days even in winter. Reykjavik winters are non-stop snow, sleet, rain, howling winds and 20 hours of darkness. I also had a lot less work than I had been promised, teaching English only a few hours a week. I understood zero Icelandic. To make matters even worse, Communist regimes all over Eastern Europe were falling and all I could do was watch short reports on TV in a language I didn’t understand. No CNN, no satellite TV. I had never felt so cut off from the universe. But I was 36 and adapted fairly quickly. Within a year, I put together a band, bought a car and got myself on a steadier footing. All my band members spoke English, naturally, and you need no Icelandic to perform old blues tunes. I even got myself featured on the local version of the Tonight Show.
(WATCH THIS SPACE: I’LL CONTINUE THE STORY AND MY HOWL OF COMPLAINT WITHIN A FEW DAYS. MORE TRAVELING AND CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK TO COME)
Thanks for sharing your turbulent journey.
Just want you to know that you are appreciated.
July 1990 (if I remember correctly,) over the course of a few days, travelled from Tampa Fl (90-some degrees,) to Harrisburg, PA (beautiful 80-some degrees,) to Keflavik, Iceland (30-some degrees, dark, snowy) to Pordenone, Italy ( beautiful 80 some degrees,) to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (125 degrees on the tarmac when we landed.)
The starkest memory is landing in Keflavik and seeing a Hawaiian Airlines jet on the runway while it was dark and snowing. My head was spinning; it was surreal. An apt description for what I was about to embark on for the next 10 months.