This Passover, My Mom’s Exodus
This year, my mom doesn’t need a seder. To be fair, she never really does–a simple bowl of matzah ball soup and a quick round of Dayenu usually checks that box for her. But this year is different from all other years, because as many are running to the grocery store for last-minute matzah and horseradish, my mom will be stuffing her Honda Accord with the last of her belongings and making her own exodus.
Who needs symbolism if they’re headed for actual freedom?
At first, my mom enjoyed the gritty bohemian life she found in Brooklyn’s Park Slope–then nicknamed “Dyke Slope.” By some definitions of “gentrifier,” she was one. (And now that I’ve moved to the slightly-less-exorbitant neighboring area, so am I.) In the 80s my mom was part of a “crunchy” college-educated white activist cohort. She found home in a communal-living cooperative and was an early member of the then-humble Park Slope Food Coop, now triple the size, with a reputation for scandals involving celebrities sending assistants to complete their required work shifts.
In the late 90s, before their divorce, she and my dad bought the apartment where I grew up, a cozy garden-level two-bedroom with a working fireplace and hideous pink carpeting. Our block was full of 60s-era radicals and union organizers. In the surrounding streets, chain stores were scarce and green spaces were still a little wild.
Then it changed. By the time I was preparing for my Bat Mitzvah, Park Slope had become a hotspot for high-earning families with young children. Many of the Italian and Latine former residents had been priced out, followed by the old-school lesbian community. In and around The Slope, new luxury apartment buildings emerged at every turn, blocking out our rooftop view of the Statue of Liberty and the 4th of July fireworks. “Develop, Don’t Destroy Brooklyn” became a familiar rallying cry in my mom’s dwindling circle of peers when Real Estate Developer Bruce Ratner campaigned for the takeover of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards. This was the project that became the Barclays Center–home to the beloved New York Liberty women’s basketball team, but at the cost of air quality, traffic safety along Brooklyn’s notorious Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, and 22 residential blocks of reasonably priced housing (including my uncle’s) and–to my mom’s greatest dismay–trees.
Her idea for the project had been a park with a pick-your-own-salad garden.
Researchers have observed that loneliness grows with population density, that social isolation grows with wealth, and on the other end, that emotional wellbeing grows profoundly with immersion in green spaces. My mom felt the weight of all this. For a time, she still found some respite in small pockets of nature and community. The people were still liberal and the Coop still had the cheapest local produce. But gone was the heimish, no-frills ethos of the 80s and 90s, and my mom’s spirit ached. She longed for unrestrained nature and a small community of warm, salt-of-the-earth people.
Meanwhile, I was thriving as a middle schooler with my first cell phone, a student metrocard, and the spoils of a lush Park Slope babysitting market. I began to explore my fledgling freedom, taking detours to friends’ houses and the new local Starbucks on my route home from school–I paid little attention to the towering new developments, the stretches of sidewalk without healthy trees, or the transience of our neighbors. But my mom, running errands on the same streets and tending her backyard garden, was beginning to find herself in a very narrow place.
With a fire in her belly, she started TreePEP–The Tree Pit Enlargement Project, a small business that worked with homeowners and city agencies to improve the health of street trees and prevent flooding and overheating, by removing as much concrete as she possibly could. A petite brunette Lorax, she preached, “If street trees make your city life more liveable, thank them!” Some people listened. But a bigger pit is still a pit. Even in her garden, buffered by a honeysuckle vine membrane, or in Prospect Park under a blooming magnolia tree, she could no longer tune out the growing noise and pollution and crowds. I went to college, came back, and moved out again. My inner child hoped the apartment would always be there, like a pacifier or a keepsake box. But with a finally fully-developed prefrontal cortex I could see that it wasn’t all about me. Not long after coming out of Covid quarantine, my mom began to find new community in Western Massachusetts, where we’d spent a week or two each summer. The Band Aid came off slowly, but after spending a trial year in the Berkshires’ most state forest-dense town, she knew.
For me, it’s bittersweet. The bitter is the loss of the place that has always felt like home; the dining room where I learned how to write my name and earned my first byline; the stoop where I drank strawberry milk after school and had my heart broken during golden hour; the surrounding blocks where I skinned my knees, trick-or-treated, broke my curfew, ate countless slices of pizza, and babysat many dozens of kids. It is a grief I had not realized could so closely resemble that of losing a loved one. I will write bad poetry and cry about it later. But the sweet? It’s a town across state lines with 1,000 residents, a commitment to restoring nature, and a librarian who knows everyone’s name and will come to work after hours if someone needs to use the printer. It is the crisp mountain air, friends who meet for a dip in the lake between errands, and the assurance, for me, that my mom is where she needs to be.
This Passover, while others are sharing the afikomen and repeating the old phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem,” my mom will step out of her car and into the embrace of the evergreens and pollinator-stewarding friends and neighbors.
This year in the forest.
Arielle Silver-Willner is Lilith’s Associate Editor. Her work has also been published in Lilith, Brooklyn Magazine and the Jewish Women’s Archive. Linktr.ee/arielle_slvr.
