Welcome Home

"Welcome to Cleveland," the Rabbi said jokingly, when I told her about my first week back in the city, and the reason I'd just moved to another apartment in my neighborhood on Cleveland's east side. When I looked out my front window on my first Sunday morning in town, I noticed that the kids next door, who had been chalking the pavement in their driveway the night before, had written "faggot ass Chancey" in mine. My first thought—this wasn't about me, and the kids were just repeating language they heard at home/school/wherever — but I still felt uneasy. Later that morning I took out a bucket of water and washed off the driveway. But I couldn't rinse off the fear and unease that stuck with me over the next ten days, until I finally decided to look for a new place nearby.

I'd decided to come "home," to spend several months in Cleveland, though I hadn't lived there since the early '80s, just after I graduated from college. I rented a house in a diverse neighborhood near where I taught deaf children back in the Cleveland Public Schools in 1980 and began to settle into my new home. Those first weeks in Ohio were dreary and felt more like winter than spring. But I took that in stride — gray skies and long winters are part of the landscape here.

I'd gone to see the Rabbi because I wanted to discuss my Jewish identity as a non-observant member of the "Tribe," during this time when being Jewish in America is complicated by a rise in anti-Semitism, Israel's war of attrition in Gaza, and the ascendance of Trump and the Republican Party. What does it mean to be Jewish without traditional belief in God/why does being Jewish even matter?

The rabbi, a young woman in her mid-30s who conducted my mother's funeral service last year, didn't have any easy answers. But she did get me thinking about my various identities: gay, Jewish, hard of hearing, and a Clevelander who has lived in Boston for many years, and how I'm still trying — at 68 — to integrate them all, to find my place in the world.

Since I'm semi-retired and teach writing classes online, I can live anywhere. And with a gap in my schedule and no real short-term commitments in Boston, I decided to check off an item on my bucket list, to return to this gritty city on a Great Lake where I was born in the late 1950s, and to see what it feels like to live there today.

Back in the '50s, Cleveland was the 7th largest city in the US, with a population of almost 900,000 people. Today, after white flight, the 1960's riots, and redlining, the city has only 360K; like Detroit, my hometown has lost 2/3 of its population.

Walking around downtown, the inner-ring suburbs, and my neighborhood on the city's edge, I see lots of empty storefronts and few people on the street. At times, Cleveland seems depopulated, as if its former residents were called to rapture, and I was left behind.

At times, I've wondered if I made the right decision to return, to stay here for even a few months. It's strange to be here without my mother, to be both without her presence and my role as her long-distance caretaker, a process that went on for 15 years. The wound runs deeper, the loss more present here, in the city she lived for 90+ years, than in Boston, where I have more space, more distance.

And yet on some level, being back in Ohio feels right, if only for now. (Though probably not in the long term, as I'm in a blue bubble in Northeast Ohio in a state controlled by Trump-loving MAGAs). In my seventh decade, and in the midst of the chaos in Washington and in the broader world, I'm trying to figure out what it (my life) all means, and why I'm here — in this city and on this planet.

Maybe this is just a fancy way of saying I'm spending some time staring at my navel. Or maybe this is a worthwhile "hobby" for my retirement. The bottom line: I'm trying to make the most of the limited time I have left, however long — or short — it may be.

Judah Leblang is a writer, teacher, and storyteller in Boston, and the author of the memoir, Echoes of Jerry. Find out more at judahleblang.com