Goles - Author's notes

A great part of humanity aspires to having a house of its own. Often, this aspiration is linked to wanting to be part of a nation, having a homeland of one's own. An enormous amount of words has been spent to express this sentiment, which is usually defined as natural, as if it were inscribed in our genetic code in an a priori category. This is probably not true, not automatically; the feeling of belonging is a cultural manifestation which finds a strong instinctual and emotional push in man's fragility and inadequacy with respect to himself and his own strange destiny.

The loss of what we see as an irrevocable ubi consistam, is always a fountain of acute suffering. Only a few have been capable of seizing that loss as a condition of priviledge, even fewer have been capable of celebrating it and expressing its extreme value as well the philosopher Emil Cioran in one of his best aforisms: "No self-respecting man has a homeland. A homeland is glue." Our calendars celebrate war victories, religious events and the restoration of conditions of belonging. No one celebrates exiles, not even paradoxically. Even fortunate exiles are never celebrated as such.

Only two peoples on this earth have been capable of glorifying exile as a splendor of the human condition: the Rom and the Yiddishkeit Jews. For the former, homeland has always been the voyage; the roof over their heads, a starry or cloudy sky. The latter, built an "exile homeland" in the small villages scattered across the land of Oriental Europe, under low skies heavy with snow, in houses with roofs of wood and mud. There, they dreamed of a far away and impossible homeland, upon which shone a spiritual sun. Far from their dream for two-thousand years, they were able to be a people without borders, without a bureaucracy or an army, without banners; a people of philosophers and prophets who practiced humble professions and who, when chased away by prejudice, took to the road towards an even farther exile.