Zibby chats with author Jennifer Lang about her lyrical, poignant, and funny memoir, LANDED: A Yogi’s Memoir in Pieces & Poses. Jennifer describes how her book is a reckoning—both on and off the yoga mat—with her adopted country of Israel, her cross-cultural marriage to a Frenchman, her merciless midlife hormones, and her imminent empty next. She opens up about the emotional toll of navigating home and belonging and also about releasing a book amid rising antisemitism and the ongoing war.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about Landed, A Yogi's Memoir In Pieces And Poses.

Congratulations. 

Jennifer: Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: Oh, it's my pleasure. I found this book interesting on so many levels. The structure and form of it. The way that you use the page and symbols and, you know, short chapters and just the way that you tell the story, interweaving timelines, all of it. In the way that you do it, but also the content of what you're sharing and how in these brief little moments you are sharing endless amounts about your marriage, your backgrounds, your mothering, Israel, there's just so much in here. And it was, it was a very powerful read. So congratulations. 

Jennifer: Thank you. 

Zibby: Why don't you do a better job of explaining sort of what the book is about and what made you write it in the way that you did?

Jennifer: Sure. So really, truly, I'm very grateful for you having me here and for letting me speak about this book. So it's a hard book to put into this world. It elevates it from, I wrote this book targeting it to a non Jewish audience to teach them, to show that, not teach, to show them what life is like in Israel.

This very misunderstood country to, wow, I put this book into this world in a, during a terrible war, during a time of rising antisemitism, having no idea that what I'd be up against to share this book, because now I share it with fear. So. This book, it landed, uh, Yogi's Memoir in Pieces and Poses is my seven year search, and then some, on and off a yoga mat, for answers to hard questions about my mixed marriage, midlife hormones, empty nest.

And making life in the Middle East. So that's it in a nutshell. It's a moving forward timeline. It's a linear story that takes you through the present tense and through yoga poses. My time on the mat both as teacher and as a student. And it jumps back in time as you mentioned thematically. When I feel like I've mentioned something that requires a deeper dive.

So for some people I can see with reviews. comments that it seems like a really mixed up, strange, like, kind of haphazard structure, but it's really, really, really calculated. When I jump back in time is not random. And the whole goal started because I moved to Israel in 2011 from New York with my French husband and our two younger daughters following our oldest who was going into the Israeli army, making that decision at 18.

My yoga students in New York responded when I said that I was thinking of blogging, which in 2011 was a big thing still, you know, I think today we call it just sub stacking and I mentioned that I was thinking of doing this to share about my new Israeli life. Would they be interested? And I was inundated, inundated by interest.

Blown away by the interest. And most of these people weren't Jewish. And that's where the whole thing started for me of, Oh, I have something to tell. I have something to share. So that became my mission in my writing that I've been doing for the past, what is that, 13 years. So that's that's that. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, first of all, the book shows how to kind of negotiate with a spouse because your resolution on to where you want to live has been interesting because you have jumped around a lot.

You each like give each other, A few years in this place. I'll do this for you for a few years. Like, I don't know that I could do that. I don't know that I could like suck it up for a few years. And I know you weren't always happy and you are open about that. Like you don't necessarily want to be where you are sometimes.

And, and yet you do it because you love your husband and this is the deal. And how did it feel writing all of that, which I imagine is mostly, you know, in your private spaces, right? But now it's become a thing. Like, how does he feel about it and all of that? 

Jennifer: Well, I don't know if you read the first book called Places We Left Behind, a memoir in miniature, which is really, really, really about our 21 year search for home.

It's, it's much more, it's also linear. It's also short chapters. It's also experimental prose, which is what I call this. I call this experimental, playful prose. And, And it's much shorter in length and it's really like a love letter to my husband and an apology letter to myself. Because while we're in this marriage and we're moving and we're trying to figure out how to be whole and happy in the same place and we're parenting, we're growing our family, something else is going on.

And that something else has to do with me and my identity and what happened early, early before getting married, which was my traditionally Jewish French husband who grew up. When I say traditionally Jewish, French, it already, it means something so different to an American Jew who grew up eating bacon and pork and shrimp and having no real sense of the Sabbath.

He grew up with a sense of Sabbath, observing it every week, not to the same extent that he's Started to do in his early 20s when I met him, he grew up in a kosher home, separating milk from meat. He grew up eating in non kosher restaurants, but never ordering meat or chicken or shellfish, all these different things that were not part of me, my identity.

And when we were 23 and really, really like deep, you know, stupid and infatuated, he asked me if I would keep the Sabbath his way. And I said yes. Because I was so stupid and infatuated. I said I would try. And so really, that decision, that, that request on his part, and that decision on mine, that wasn't a very, a very thought out decision, that's really where I looked back, I looked back at the right, while writing that first book, and realized I had to stop blaming him, pointing a finger at him.

Because I said yes, and that first book ended up being, and it makes me teary, an apology letter to my younger self. I realized I had to take responsibility for that yes. I never realized that and all the years of therapy with him, which we, that's also in the first book. I'd never realized it. So that's carrying through also.

So search for home, but also search for self. I wanted my self back and I didn't know how to get it. So it was hard. In answer, a short answer to your question. H. A. R. D. It was just hard and there was a lot of, you know, I think I also look back and think, wow, I think I was just angry, but it was a low, low simmering resentment and I was just carrying it from place to place and I was, it was with me at home because I was uncomfortable in my own home raising my family.

Raising my children in a school system I didn't like, dressing them in a way I didn't want to. And, and that's, so that's much more present in the first book. I try to move away from it in the second because the decision to return to Israel in 2011 came after years of therapy during which I brought to the table.

If I give you your country back, the place where we had met and married and he really wanted to live after an unintentional 16 years in America, where I wanted to be, then I wanted myself back. It was a conditional thing. We were constantly making these conditional clauses. Not so healthy in a marriage.

Very, very manipulative, very, you know, not healthy, but it's kind of the only way we knew how to play. And so the answer became yes, but then I had to figure out how to do it. And that's really the story and landed. So yeah. 

Zibby: And you're still together. 

Jennifer: Yeah. Isn't that amazing? I find it amazing. So how does he feel about it?

So the first book is like a love letter to him and I think he recognizes that he's like the hero. The second book a little less so. And he doesn't like it as much. I can only say it like that in quotes because that's kind of how it, you know, comes out sounding. 

Zibby: Okay. Well, for the reader, I felt, for what that's worth, it's really interesting as a read, because we don't often get those inner glimpses with as much vulnerability and honesty about how sometimes we do things we don't want to, and yet we're still not happy.

And like, the things we do to be nice. Can eat away at you just the way that you talked about so that's interesting to have the context now I wish I'd read the other one too. I'm so sorry, but thank you for the background of that and now I see how that course is through. There's so much more than just that relationship.

There's a lot about you with your children and you, you know, moving into new places and inhabiting new spaces and then overlay, as you mentioned, you know, this whole war situation now versus what it was when you were writing this. And there was this one scene, can I just read this little bit that I was like, oh my gosh.

Bifurcated 2. I'll just read like one of these short sections. And each little section, it's not even an essay, these little.. 

Jennifer: I call them chapterettes. 

Zibby: Chapterettes. Okay. 

Jennifer: That's from Blaire Glazer, writer Blaire Glazer. 

Zibby: Okay. Okay. This chapterette is called Bifurcated 2. Midway through my residency, I call our Israeli landline during workshop break.

Daughter number one answers with a huff. What's wrong, I ask. They found the boys. It's dead. How do you know? It's everywhere. Facebook. Twitter. Times of Israel. WhatsApp. With her brother in the army and her induction date set for the subsequent summer, she grasps the implications. Quick comebacks and fast thinking have never been one of my assets.

How to respond? I'm sorry, or I wish I were there, even if untrue. Tell me what else is going on. What did you do today? Went to Jaffa? Yaffa? Yaffa? Jaffa? 

Jennifer: Whatever. You're good. 

Zibby: With a friend. Walked along the port and around the flea market. Ate falafel. It was super fun until now. I peer out the window. A charged sigh escapes.

My eyes moisten. The push me pull me between home in America and home in Israel tugs. We blow kisses. I slog two sets of stairs to the room. Clench a tissue. Cover my face. My hands shake. A cavernous sob erupts. Are you okay? Strangers ask. What's wrong? These three Israeli Jewish boys were kidnapped before I left home.

Netanyahu accusesaccused Hamas. Hamas denied it. Dozen of eyes stare at me. They've never heard of these boys. My daughter told me they were found dead. Netanyahu vows severe retaliation. Their faces are blank. They have no idea what retaliation means in this region, where everything's fair gamemissiles, suicide bombings, knifings, car rammings, where the biblical eye for an eye bullshit reigns knows no end.

I picture myself on my yoga mat, my legs spread apart in standing straddle pose, one foot there, the other here, and feel yawning, irreparable pulls between them. 

Jennifer: Okay, so, I'm a little teary. 

Zibby: Oh. I'm sorry. 

Jennifer: Because that's what it's like to live there. And because, and because the beautiful day my daughter had had is also what it's like to live there.

They both coexist, these things. I call it the beauty and the bedlam. And they just breathe the same air, and it's constant. And I don't consider myself a political person, but the personal is the political. It's, it's, I can't, I can't write anything without that political. It's It's part of the daily life.

Sorry, daily life. 

Zibby: Well, the fact that these things keep happening and the larger world does not always know or pay attention or care, the fact that this is all happening a long time ago and many people Hamas is only like a thing now that people care about. It's wild. And in many places in the book, you put, I think even on the next chapter, you have these asterisks like January 2024, how naive I was.

We all were like all of these. 

Jennifer: Well, so that's what happened is that last January of 2023, I had to reread the manuscript for the first time in about six years. I'm not sure if that six is correct. Four years since I'd submitted it, signed a contract, had a yes, because the first book, Places We Left Behind, had snuck in sideways and had, and had come out first, just by chance.

Like, I called an author's embarrassment of riches. I ended up, while this book, this manuscript was on submission, I was, I put together the manuscript for Places We Left Behind and was submitting it to different contests for creative nonfiction, prose, prose. Chatbook contests. Oh, and so that book came up like second.

It was the earlier material of a much longer originally a much longer manuscript that wasn't working and so I put it aside and started over upon landing in Israel in 2011 to do my seven year journey, and I just set aside the earlier material and a fellow writer friend in San Diego, text them, emailed me in Tel Aviv to say, hey, I, I'm entering these contests because we were swapping flash stories all the time to just read each other's work, always nonfiction.

And she said, I'm entering these contests. I think you should too. You should look back at your earlier work and link together by theme. And I was like, well, I have that. And I went into the original earlier long overwritten manuscript and kind of picked out and sculpted this under 10,000 word. because the, the limit for all these different contests was probably somewhere in the 10,000 words, which, you know, some people would say, well, that's not a book.

That's an essay. That's a long essay. Places We Left Behind is 14,000 words and published as a book. And, and so the, it all, it all happened just serendipitously and I call it sideways. And so when I had to reread Landed in January of 2023 in the, in the middle, in the beginning of the war, it was so difficult.

I almost couldn't do it. I almost pulled the manuscript. I emailed the publishers to say, I don't know if I can do this. I need to bring it up to date somehow. So that's why the preface is in there. And that's why those asterisks are in there. That's what that is. I had to address October 7th. 

Zibby: Yeah. But aren't you glad it came out?

Like, tell me, and tell me about the fear that you mentioned earlier. 

Jennifer: Well, let's say this. Tonight is my first event in the States. It's at a fabulous little bookstore that hosted me for my first book as well. It's in Sausalito, California. What am I fearful of? And then I end my one month of events at your bookstore in Santa Monica.

Thank you. 

Zibby: Yay! 

Jennifer: And the fear of these two events. In the non Jewish world, is some crazy person coming off the street, hearing somehow that I'm in from Tel Aviv, hearing somehow that this is what I write about, and I fear, because of where I live maybe, something happening. 

Zibby: Oh, Jennifer. 

Jennifer: That was so real. It's so incredibly real.

Yeah, October 7th has really changed everything. I didn't have that fear when I came for my first book tour in September of 2023. I came with joy and excitement. I approached everyone, Jewish and non Jewish, for events. I had loads of events all over, not all Jewish. I also am in a library in New Orleans in a couple weeks.

I have some fear. Advertised in the New Orleans newspaper as the Um, in from Tel Aviv. 

Zibby: Well, if it makes you feel any better, we have had lots of events at the store. When we have any concern, we have security there. And nothing has, God forbid, happened yet. Even when I did the big launch event for I'm Being Jewish Now, which was really out there, and there was a line around the corner and whatever, and it was fine.

Nobody came. So, I don't know. Maybe it's too inconvenient in L. A. to get all the way to the west side or something. But, but, you know, I'm joking. The fear of all of it is real, right? The fear, have you experienced, you know, like so many authors these days, have you experienced online hate, anti Semitism, you know, any cancellations, all of that?

Have you, have you had that? 

Jennifer: Yeah, so I really end your event at the books, my event at Zibby's is, um, the 26th, and on the 27th, the reason I'm actually in LA and why I, why I'm going and why I'm in the States for a month, and I'm on a panel on, um, I forget what it's called. Narrow, narrowing the bridge on writing against anti Semitism, like being resilient for AWP, the Association of Writers and Poets organization in L.A. I'm on a panel with, um, Sarah Einstein, Howard Lovey, Elisa Wald, and Amy Fisher. Yeah, well, yeah, the answer to your question is yes, and that's the thing. That's that, you know, it's like a constant push me pull me like I don't want this fear. I've been trying to be so brave. I've been braver than ever these past year and a half in living in Israel.

Like I've really reached a point of I can't live anywhere else. I now understand. I can't live anywhere else. I now feel more Israeli than I've ever felt. If I ever thought I'd landed in 2018 when landed ends, I almost look back and think, well, I think that was a false landing. I think I landed on October 8th of 2023.

I mean, that's, that's the craziness of it. I, I belong in Israel. I see that now. I am not a religious Jew. I'm Jewish. I'm not religious. I am not observant. I do not keep the Sabbath. I'm in a mixed marriage and I'm happier now than I've ever been. That's the crazy part because I'm where I belong. I'm with a lot of people who we share the same story and perspective.

We are in it together. The bond is so strong. We can say things. We don't have being canceled. We don't have this concept. We are, we don't have speaking politically correctly. We don't have these. Things hanging over us. We say it directly and we understand each other and there's something really comforting about that.

I can't say it to you here now publicly at all, but I can tell you that it's comforting and, um, to be able to be so open and honest and to speak ones true feelings and to not have to hide and to cower. I don't cower in my daily life, and I am surrounded by people who understand. So that's, that's kind of crazy.

Zibby: That was beautiful. Really beautiful. So what do you do when you feel the fear? Like, how do you handle it? There? Now? Here? You carry it with you. 

Jennifer: So I used to tremble when I would hear an air raid siren, and there's like a strange numbness that has happened. It's I'm going to say two things. They, they both live together, which is I no longer tremble. I feel really calm on the one hand. On the other hand, I was somewhere in San Francisco where I am this week with family. When I heard, I don't know, it was the beginning of an ambulance whine and it's a visceral thing. No one else was triggered. Just me. I didn't even say anything because I could see no one was triggered. So there's something in the sound of the siren that is very triggering viscerally in the body where you have a moment of fight or flight, and then it, you know, but I, I used to actually tremble in in the time of what landed is covering like the summer of 2014, which was a 50 day war with Hamas in Israel.

I trembled every time I went down into our bomb shelter in our home in Renana. Yeah. I no longer tremble. So on the night of, I mean, this is crazy to just sit and talk casually, right? But on the night of the ballistic missiles coming from Iran back in the fall, back in September of 2024, my first daughter was visiting.

She lives in New York. She was visiting. It was my husband, myself, and my daughter, we were in the middle of having dinner, we took our plates into the stairwell, where we just, you know, talked and listened and heard the crazy stuff going on in the sky, and heard the neighbors in the stairwell, my husband went back in to get a refill on his wine, cause he's French, he came back into the stairwell with his wine, like, it was a, it was, it's just this crazy, calm, shit, pardon my language, reality And the other crazy thing, my youngest daughter, daughter number two, just spent six months in Taiwan immersing in Mandarin.

She's, she now has to come back to Israel and will start to adult, start to look for a job. She's kind of done having these amazing experiences. And she was battling her first typhoon. She was hunkering down in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, because there was a typhoon warning. Which she's calling us to say, like, I don't know what to do.

We're like, we don't know what you should do. You should probably Google it and good luck to you. And she's like, good luck to us. I mean, there's something crazy, right? And then, and then the bigger picture of all that is the world feels a little like it's falling apart on us. And I cry really easily and I feel sad for my children.

It's a really sucky world we're giving them. I didn't have these experiences. I had other things growing up at their ages. They're in their mid twenties, but like, this is, this is bad. What we're living, you know, it's, In Israel with a friend this summer, the conversation was civilization goes through cycles and we're reaching the end of a cycle.

That is what it feels like to us in Israel. We are reaching the end of a cycle. And the question for us in Israel is will we survive? Once we hit rock bottom, will we make it to, to, to reset? That's our conversation. So we're approaching 60, we're, we're 59 and a half. And our group of friends kind of ranges from mid fifties to almost 70.

And this has been the summer for every one of us to either write our wills or update our wills because I, you know, the summer of wills and war. Because that's what you have to do. And again, it's like I don't say it unemotionally. I say it to you with a lot of emotion. It's just this is our lives because there's a lot of beauty in it and you have to recognize it.

Zibby: Oh, Jennifer. 

Jennifer: Sorry. Kind of sobering for 830 in the morning, Zibby. Sorry. 

Zibby: No, no, don't, please don't apologize. Like this is, this is what life is about. It's connecting over the, the, what we're all, what we all are dealing with. And it's really helpful to hear it from your perspective. I mean, I think a lot of people are wondering like, oh my gosh, like what's it like now in Israel?

And are people okay? And you know, it seems so dangerous and people here don't even want to visit, like, but how can you live there and dah, dah, dah. So, this is how you can live there. This is, this is the answer. 

Jennifer: Well, the answer to how you can live there is you, you move forward with life. I mean, this, this is hard for me to say, because I've definitely had people comment on this, but if I say to you, Tel Aviv, where we live in the center, we live right near the Carmel market, like a shuk, a suk, is popping.

You need dinner reservations because the restaurants are full. You need reservations at the wine bars because the wine bars are popping. You need, the beach is open almost. It's almost all year the beaches active and like surfers and kite surfers and I don't even know the names of all the sports on the water and runners and walkers and bikers and electric bikers and electric scooters and, and people yoga in on the, on the seashore and always and suppers and like all of these, it's so it's so dynamic and alive. It's crazy. You, you would have no idea there is a war, save for the posters of the hostages everywhere you turn, the graffiti, if you understand it, the street art, the graffiti on the street, which I miss a lot of it because I don't understand it, and my daughters stop and show me, like, break it down for me.

I mean, I can read, but I read like a kindergartner, and the reminders of war are everywhere. The other thing that we see that we never used to see to this extent, soldiers get off, like, It's nothing, I think, like the American Army. Soldiers get off, maybe, every Friday for the Sabbath to go home. To have Friday night dinner with their parents, maybe, depending on the unit they're in.

So, if you've been called up and you're in the reserves, you might get home more often. And the opposite can be true, depending on what unit you're in. Never have I seen so many off duty soldiers, and how do I know who they are? Because they're carrying their huge um, gun across their body, you, if you're in a unit where you're assigned a gun, which not everybody is, obviously, that gun can only be left at home if it can be behind two locked doors.

One, the door of your house or your apartment, and two, a locked closet. And because of the security situation since October 7th, what I think I'm seeing is no one's leaving their gun at home, no matter how many locked doors they can leave it behind. They're feeling a sense of, I need to be the person on the street when I'm out at dinner or the wine bar or the beach.

I've seen a guy group of friends, on a Saturday, at the beach. They're all removing their clothes, getting into the, putting it on the sand, and walking into the water, and this guy has his gun over his bare shoulder, he's in his swim trucks, and he goes up to his legs. And they're all hovering around him, only where they can be up to the water, up to their legs, because he's carrying a gun, he can't go one step further.

It's mind blowing to watch how real life sinks with war. So that's, that's what it is. 

Zibby: Are you writing about this? 

Jennifer: I've written an essay. I kind of don't want to give itI haven't found a home for it. I've written an essay that I wish I could find a home for, but all of those venues that I used to write for, you know, they're no longer open to me.

Zibby: Put it on, um, on our Substack, on Being Jewish Now. We have new essays. Like every day, every week. If you want. I know it's not the same as like, you know, a major newspaper. 

Jennifer: I don't think I knew that you had a Substack. 

Zibby: Yeah. OnBeingJewishNow. Substack. com. Okay. If, if you're interested, we would love to publish it.

Jennifer: Okay. Yeah. 

Zibby: As a last resort. If, if you were interested, let us know. 

Jennifer: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, then I just feel like I'm writing to the choir.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Jennifer: Right. I want to, I used, I, my, my whole mission all these years, like I'm so, I have to say it like widely published on non Jewish. Places and that was always and you know always been my goal, but thank you.

I will look into what you're yes Thank you. 

Zibby: Well, Jennifer, this is a lot you are holding a lot. You are being really brave I know that's a stupid word to say when it's so many people but By sharing what you're going through with the rest of us, it is empowering, it is enriching our lives to hear what's going on with you there.

And you know, the book is fabulous and also shows us a side of Israel that we might not know about. So thank you for taking us with you and letting us in. Really appreciate it. 

Jennifer: Thanks for having me. 

Zibby: And I hope you're okay. And we're looking forward to hosting you. 

Jennifer: Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Jennifer: So much. 

Zibby: All right. 

Jennifer: Thanks, Zibby.

Zibby: Thanks. 

Jennifer: Bye. 

Zibby: Hang in there. Bye.