New York made me realize that I’m in a complete and utter transition mode. It also made me realize that I’m having a freakishly good life. At least by the average standards and that kind of lifts the pressure and just makes you want to go a bit nuts. Which I will.

I just to figure out some stuff about myself.

The whole identity topic was kind of an issue for time for me. No wonder, right? For somebody who lived in so many different countries and cities, it’s kind of an obligatory thing to start thinking about this stuff at some point. Living without a citizenship and not having the feeling of belonging to one specific country doesn’t help either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m rather liking it not having a citizenship. It’s always a good conversation starter and it kind of makes me feel like I really do live on the Internet. One step closer to a global citizenship? Maybe, it’s rather pointless to call it something because this status is so seldom that it’s not really helping to belong to something.

Belonging is actually what it’s all about.

I never had the urge to belong to somewhere or somewhat, but it seems like I’m developing it right now. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s an age thing. But thinking about it and especially being in New York mixed a whole lot of things up and in my case it made me think a lot about Judaism and what it actually means in my life. I would argue – and that’s a spoiler! – that it’s very important. Not because I’m religious. I’m not at all, but this cultural background kind of dominates who I’m anyway. Not as much in Germany, but it sure is very obvious for me in the US. Probably because people are talking about Judaism or religion more openly. But especially with Judaism it always gets very awkward in Germany. People are always trying to be much more pc as soon as they hear that I’m a Jew. History is still being processed and I’m very sure that Judaism never ever will be as openly debated in Germany as it can be in the US.

And it’s kind of neat for me being here and being able to take in my family, the cultural background and discuss this topic in a different way here. People are actually differentiate here between cultural Judaism and religious Judaism. That’s very interesting, I would definitely fit into the first category. But you could make things even more complicated. There are a lot of different Jews here. In my case, it’s the Sowjet Union/Russia background that makes things even more interesting.

I’ll give you an example: Up until now all my girlfriends where German. That was never really an issue. Not for me, not for my parents. At least not like on a substantial level. But being in immigrant with a lot of different, not utterly unproblematic backgrounds, it always led to different awkward situations. Introducing your girlfriend to you parents and especially introducing your parents to your girlfriends parents was always like a cultural clash. Again, it never was an issue and there wasn’t any real tension there, but it was something you one needed to work through.

And I’m witnessing the same issues with my cousins here. In our family, we are the generations that stands between two worlds. We have this Jewish/Russian background in our genes, but we’re being confronted with a very different world on a daily basis. For me especially it’s even more confusing, because in 99% of the time I’m not being confronted with my background in my daily life. But not being confronted with it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easier to process.

To come back to this whole girlfriend example: I never really came into the phase where the relationship went into this serious area of really talking about marriage and having kids or something. It came up, but it always felt far away. But at some point I always knew that it would be something that would make me a huge headache. Why? Well, have you been to a Jewish wedding? If not, it helps, if you saw “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. We’re obviously not Greek, but the whole family stuff isn’t really made up and it’s as troublesome with Jews as it’s with Greeks. Not that I’m somebody who would do something utterly out of obligation to my family, but it would be awesomely complicated to tell my huge, scattered family that there won’t be any Jewish ceremony or wedding style, because I’m not that into that and I’m marrying a German girl who is certainly not into that.

I’m not really sure that this post is going somewhere specific, so I will end it here. It might actually be just something that I wrote for myself and not something that necessarily needs any publishing, but I kinda want it to be out there and if somebody have any thoughts on this self finding, cultural mixed up situation … fire away.