by Nicole Yurcaba
Dana Shem-Ur’s psychological thriller Where I Am arrives in 2023 thanks to a translation by Yardenne Greenspan and the publication byNew Vessel Press. A one-star review of the novel on Goodreads childishly asserts that “Literally nothing happened” and “I have never, in my life, read a book where the main character uses the restroom so much. And with such detailed description!!” We are going to assume the said reviewer gave the book a very superficial reading. Where I Am establishes Dana Shem-Ur as an unconventional writer whose style and approach to emotionally taxing and psychologically challenging situations offer the literary world a new voice. More significantly, the novel focuses on the cultural and linguistic disconnects immigrants experience in the new countries they decide to, and in some cases, are forced to call home. Similarly, it also features the emotional and psychological stresses female academics experience as they strive to establish their careers.
Where I Am follows Reut, an Israeli translator and PhD student living in Paris with her French husband and their child. Reut is plagued by feelings of isolation and estrangement. At a dinner party hosted by Reut and her husband, Reut interacts with affluent and intellectual friends. The experience exacerbates Reut’s feelings of being misunderstood, especially as she navigates French cultural codes distinctly different from her Israeli ones. In the days that follow, Reut finds herself not only struggling emotionally, but also physically, as a series of symptoms brought on by stress and exhaustion plague her and make her participation in daily life more and more of a struggle.
While Reut associates her dissociation with France and those around her as “a sense of melancholy and a longing for Israel,” she also recognizes that Israel, too, is a source of frustration and disconnect for her. Reut expresses her discomfort with her own homeland at various points throughout the novel. At one point, Reut reflects, “Every time she visited Israel, she was reminded how unhappy she used to be there and how she sought relief from its explicit public tension.” Reut never explains the “public tension” she mentions. Thus, readers are left to make their own assumptions about the matters Reut deems significant, and perhaps political, enough to form these tensions. At another point, Reut asserts that “each summer time visit to Israel felt vexxed” and she openly expresses a “hatred of the Israeli sun.” Thus, despite the cultural and linguistic disconnect which overwhelms Reut, her story is anything but a love letter to Israel.
Throughout the novel, readers see Reut contemplating the state of her fatigue and exhaustion, fighting a tightening in her chest, and at one point, suffering in public during the initial stages of a urinary tract infection. These physiological manifestations often result in Reut seeking solace in whatever bathroom she can find during that specific moment. However, despite the Goodreads reviewer’s observation about Reut’s bathroom usage, the bathroom is actually an important symbol in the novel. The bathroom represents an emotional inner room into which Reut escapes during her times of emotional and physical taxation. Reut’s retreat into the bathroom, where she can disappear from social pressures and, obviously, physically relieve herself represents Reut’s mental retreat into her own mind as well as the isolation from others that retreat offers. Her return to a bathroom in various scenes represents her desire to break away from the situation at hand, which, as readers see, is emotionally displeasing or uncomfortable for her. However, Reut’s self-isolation is also a key symptom of a much more concerning issue–depression. The novel does not explicitly address depression or any other mental illness. However, the novel’s allusion to depression raises awareness about a social issue many are reluctant to discuss–the high rates of depression among immigrants, particularly female immigrants, as well as the skyrocketing rates of depression in academia among students and faculty.
Because of its structure, because of its objective point-of-view, it initially reads as a superficial portrayal of one woman’s emotional decline. However, it requires readers to read and infer beyond its immediate portrayals in order to find the deeper representations and symbolism in its settings, characters, and even Reut herself. Therefore, Where I Am possesses a psychological duality so effective that readers, by the book’s end, can access Reut’s anguish–making Where I Am one of the most cleverly and intellectually deceptive novels of 2023.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба–Nikola Yurtsaba) is a Ukrainian (Hutsul/Lemko) American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, West Trade Review, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and is a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review of Books.
