Part 1: The Move

One of the miracles and blessings of the Internet is the freedom that we have to work from anywhere. Three years ago my wife and I took advantage of this to facilitate a dream we’d had for many years … but first, some background.

I grew up in England, and lived there until I was around 20. In college I majored in American Studies and thus had the chance to study in the US. I spent my junior year at the University of California in Santa Barbara and that, as they say, was it. I absolutely fell in love with America and during my final year of college back in England I made plans to return for graduate school. As chance would have it I got a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas and, in my naivete I figured “California … Kansas … How different could it be?”

It was different. Oh yeah, it was different. But, Kansas was also a great place to live and I ended up staying in the Midwest for almost 20 years. After a brief stop in Omaha I moved to Minneapolis where I was soon to meet my wife. She’d recently returned to the Twin Cities — where she grew up — after a dozen years in Boston. We spent the first twelve years of our marriage living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with our four kids; fairly quiet people, not particularly given to doing anything unusual. Seemingly quite normal, you might think. And then, finally, we jumped.

For years, my wife and I had dreamed of moving to Israel. We were there for a brief trip early in our marriage and my wife had studied there for a few months in her late twenties. But life, and jobs, and kids, and family, and inertia, and fear, and uncertainty kept getting in the way of this dream. Until the summer of 2002, when we happened to be talking about Israel and realized that both of us had been thinking the same thing for several months: We should do it. We should move there soon.

As resident family geek, I quickly rushed to Google and started researching everything I could about moving to Israel. And the message that was repeated on site after site, again and again, came ringing in our ears … do it while your kids are young. Do it now, while your kids are young; because they’re going to have to take on a new culture, and a new school system, in a new language, and you’re taking a real risk if you wait too long. At the time our oldest was nine … was it already too late?

It took us two years of planning to get our lives in order and make the move and in 2004 our family moved to Efrat, a small town about 15 minutes drive south of Jerusalem. We never expected the transition to be easy, and it wasn’t always. Our oldest two kids were very resistant to the move, and the two younger ones picked up on some of their siblings’ moods. But we were blessed with smart kids who, once they realised this was a done deal, decided to make the best of it. They’ve studied hard, learned Hebrew beautifully, and made friends easily. For the youngest two of course, the transition has had less speed bumps: One entered first grade here, and the other went to preschool. Within weeks they had sufficient Hebrew to play and interact with classmates, and three years later they are pretty much fluent.

And how about Tuppy and Mrs. Tuppy? Are they also chattering away fluently in Hebrew? Have they dived headlong into the Israeli workforce, moving confidently up the career ladder with gusto? Not exactly, no … and in part two I’ll describe our working lives here in Efrat.