Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason
I first became familiar with Jennifer Lang’s writing just after she published her first book, Places We Left Behind. It included all the ingredients I enjoy in a memoir: a cross-cultural story, an unusual structure, and settings far from home. In Lang’s case, she is known for writing very short chapters that still manage to pack in as much content as found in more traditionally structured memoirs. Lang met and married a French Israeli man decades ago and wrote about the many ways in which she navigated her international marriage, including where they chose to live. When the book ends, Lang has found a balance—and home—in her marriage.
Now Lang has a new memoir, Landed: A Yogi’s Memoir in Pieces & Places, which takes up where Places We Left Behind left off. While it’s heftier in size, it follows the same structure of short chapters—some not even taking up a full page—and mainly covers seven years, from 2011 to 2018. When the book begins, Lang’s three children are teens and preteens and the family is about to move from the United States to Israel. She alternates her family story with accounts of her yoga practice.
While we walk, I think about the Zen Buddhism concept of shoshin or beginner’s mind: having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject. In yoga, we call it beginner’s eyes, reminding us to look at everything as if for the first time. Our cross-cultural, multilingual life keeps me in a permanent state of shoshin.
Lang’s yoga practice is inspirational even for readers who don’t practice themselves, but it’s her life in Israel that drew me in the most; I loved how Lang shared the ways she and her family have made a life there. She writers of her younger daughter joining a group of Jewish Israeli and Muslim Israeli middle school students to build bridges and break down barriers.
To find her own place in Israel, Lang searches for something to complement her yoga practice. She writes and would like to attend a low-residency MFA program. In one very short chapter, she shares her excitement when this dream starts to materialize. “When the acceptance email from Vermont College of Fine Arts chimes in my inbox, I yell through the house, ‘I got in! They said yes! I’m going!’”
During her MFA studies, another Israel-Hamas ceasefire is broken and the summer of 2014 breaks out in fighting across the border after three Israeli boys were kidnapped and killed by Hamas. Lang notices a change in the conflict, which is chilling given the current war.
The night after I return from Vermont, a siren screeches, leaving me dumbfounded. The next day, another one. Initially, I thought they were random rockets but now realize they were directed strikes, guided missiles to scare innocent citizens. While the alarm yowls in Raanana, I think what the f***? Since when are Hamas’ weapons, situated 60 miles south of Gaza, long-range or powerful enough to reach us in the center of this paltry piece of land?
Lang sometimes flashes back to her childhood in the Bay Area and the early years of her marriage, which catch up readers who haven’t read her first book, yet do not seem at all redundant for those who have read Places We Left Behind.
At the beginning of Landed, she writes in her author’s note: “A structure geek, I often think of my container/structure and then of its contents/story. Sometimes it works in my favor, many times against—simply too confining.” As I finished her book, I thought back to her author’s note and felt the opposite. Her structure is not confining at all. She seamlessly writes of motherhood, navigating moves across oceans with her family, and how she made a home as a yoga instructor and founder of the Israel Writers Studio. To use a term central to yoga, Lang’s prose is very balanced in both her structure and her story.
Landed: A Yogi’s Memoir in Pieces & Places by Jennifer Lang
Vine Leaves Press, 2024, $17.99
9783988320889
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, a 2023 Zibby Awards finalist for Best Book for the History Lover. She is also the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and the 2024 Zibby Awards winner When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League. She is the co-editor of Hong Kong Noir and a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, Cha: An Asian Literary Review and World Literature Today. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and PopMatters.