This photo was taken by the highly acclaimed Israeli photographer, Alex Levak, in Jerusalem in 1996, across from the Kings Hotel. The image appears in Levak’s book, Our Country, published four years later, and is reproduced here with his permission. When viewed from a wide perspective, paying attention to the context in which a woman is dragging a heavy couch, this image is rich with Jewish-Israeli collective symbols of home and belonging. The location is at one of Jerusalem’s most iconic intersections, where the modern neighborhood of Rehavia in West Jerusalem meets the historical past of Jerusalem’s Old walled city, and where the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem stands just a few meters away. The image invites the viewer to reflect on the profound meaning attached to this place. The Kings Hotel was among the first to be built in Jerusalem after the establishment of Israel in 1948; the Great Synagogue was dedicated to the memory of the six millions Jews who perished in the Holocaust and to the fallen soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces; Rehavia is a neighborhood associated with German-Jewish culture, and with upper-class Ashkenazi Jews.

Yet, when we return our attention to the woman right at the middle of the image, the concepts of home and belonging shift from their collective and solid, even glorified and poetic, meanings, into much more fluid, flexible and negotiable ones. Crossing King George Street with this very heavy couch, this woman seems to be in the middle of a heroic effort to arrive, to find—to arrive and to find—a place, a place to settle down; a place where she can put the heavy couch she has just found, a couch on which to sit, to rest, to feel a degree of safety and comfort. As a sort of counter-narrative to all the collective symbols surrounding her, this woman, with this heavy couch, provides an individual, improvised, practical and casual meaning to these wonderful concepts: home and belonging.