Places We Left Behind by Jennifer Lang

Places We Left Behind: A Memoir-In-Miniature
By Jennifer Lang
Vine Leaves Press 2023

What happens when a husband and wife negotiate for decades and still love each other? Jennifer Lang's memoir-in-miniature Places We Left Behind explores twenty years of her marriage, career, and growing family. Despite the challenges of incompatible religious traditions, different places to call home, and family distributed across the globe, Lang explains how she finds community and expresses love for her family and friends.

The memoir benefits from unique formatting and pacing. The shape of the prose takes on an emotional character of its own. When the author is falling in love, the sentences become expansive and fragmented, dancing around, meandering across the page. But when missiles fall nearby in Israel and she has to carry a gas mask everywhere, the words are compressed into a tight corner of an almost blank page, representing her limited freedom to move and breathe.

At first, the unconventional formatting surprised me, but I was quickly drawn into what felt like a highlight reel of her family’s highs and lows. Each vignette is reminiscent of a candid snapshot in a photo album, lovingly captioned.

How do you choose the turning points of your life to write about? From the reader's perspective, small details are what bring a lifetime to life. Many authors shy away from describing the reality of their relationships. It’s easier to write about only the good times (with someone you’re still with) or only the heartbreaks and betrayal (from the people you’re glad you don’t speak to anymore). Places We Left Behind shows us the everyday struggles of making a loving relationship work, without either glamor or vitriol.

Throughout the memoir, Lang shares how much she loves her husband, how she finds him attractive, supportive, and a compelling partner and father for her kids. I appreciate how Lang shares how much work and disagreement it takes to make a long term relationship functional and successful.

When her now-husband proposed living together shortly after they started dating, Lang made a list of the pros and cons of moving in. Her “cons” list ended with, “religious differences/incompatibility,” even though the two of them were both Jewish.

Despite her concerns, Lang helps us fall in love with her husband by showing us how sexy and caring he is. “Tell me everything, he says, adorning me with butterfly light kisses.” She crosses out sentences to show fleeting thoughts of persistent concerns. “Do I understand that he changed his lifestyle for a country? Absolutely not.”

There are almost as many ways to be Jewish as there are Jews. Lang’s husband asked, “Do you think you could do Shabbat more like me?” He meant not driving anywhere on Saturday, among other limitations. This was a challenge for Lang, who found meaning in weekend yoga workshops.

Details of religious observance became less of a concern compared to the difficult political situation as the couple began their marriage in Israel during the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel from 1987-1993. They carried gas masks everywhere. Missiles landed nearby during regular air raids. The dangerous environment made Lang want to raise children in a place with a lower incidence of violence. After disagreements moderated by a therapist about how a child should be raised, the couple had their first baby and planned to move to Paris for a year, then California for a year.

Lang shows what it was like to uproot from California to Paris, Israel, Paris, California, New York state, Israel (again), and New York (again). This whirlwind of homes meant a hard time maintaining connections outside of her immediate family. Lang has family in California and feels at home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lang’s husband feels supported and at home with his Jewish community in Israel.

Lang asks a question about more than a place—an identity or an ideology, “I glare at my husband: Do you love Israel more than me?” He responds, “No, but I don’t like living here.” This is a disagreement which cannot truly be solved. When Lang’s kids come of age, they, too, have opinions about where to live. Each decision to move is difficult, but critical for holding their family together.

Although Lang was willing to relocate across the globe multiple times for her family, she learned to stand up for her own personal desires and identity also. Yoga practice resonated with her need to be grounded in her body and she became a teacher and made close friends within the community.

I see this book as far more about people than places. Lang writes, “No matter where we reside, one of us will always rue the loss of the place we left behind.” But those places become meaningful because of the family and friends who live there.

Places We Left Behind was a refreshingly short but thoughtful read which resonated with me because I have negotiated who I am in every relationship. I’ve made different life choices than Lang, but I found wisdom and guidance in her story of love and respectful negotiation to protect her own identity.

Rey Katz is a nonbinary writer with published work in POPSUGAR, Catapult, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, and other publications. Check out Rey’s weekly essays about respecting ourselves and our communities at reykatz.substack.com.