דניאלה אריאלי

Commentary written by Prof. Haim Hazan

Foreign intimacy, an apparently paradoxical phrase, spells an emotional mood and behavioral mode that sprout in the breeding ground of the warm yet strifeful scene set in the arena of in-home care giving for frail older people. 

With a finely tuned ethnographic ear the book listens out to the myriad of voices reverberating the soundboard of the domestic interaction between the Indian or Filipino carer, the Israeli decrepit older adults, their families and friends as well as the various agencies and institutions involved in that transaction of trading workforce of an illusion of tender love. The safety of the home, therefore, is turned into a crossroad of mobilizing global human capital, of erecting bureaucratic fences, of providing for late life exigencies and of juggling kin and kith networks.  This contact zone where divergent cultural tracks are spanned and life stories and background histories meet, becomes a hothouse for emergent putative filial commitments alongside for resourcefulness and divisiveness, of genuine fondness interwoven into with facades of concern. 

At death gate, the inexorably dependent older people no longer indulge in life review and reminiscing. Instead, they spare their remaining means to safeguard their immediate survival. Like the strategies taken by their uprooted carers whose diurnal bed and body chores also bound them to the here and now the cared for are marooned in the present continuous with no clear and secure future in sight. Exiled to a shared place of alienation, both carers and cared for are engaged in a forced communal embrace of lived-in experience of disaffection. 

It is from this standpoint that Daniella Arieli sensitively and compassionately guides her reader through the life journeys of the book's protagonists as they reach the joint state of being tethered together by the chimerical bond of foreign intimacy.

Haim Hazan, Professor of Social Anthropology, Tel Aviv University.