Nathan returns to the United States from England

Nathan’s return from England to the United States marks both a practical departure and a belated recognition of what he had been missing. He insists that the Unnamed English woman and their parting were only one among several reasons he left, while his return to New York gradually makes home legible through the city’s unruly Jewish presence. The move does not resolve his uncertainty about England; it gives that uncertainty a new point of comparison.

Departure from England

By the time Nathan speaks again with the Unnamed English woman, he is no longer in his London writing studio: he says that he is living in America for good. The permanence of the move matters, but he resists reducing it to a clean explanation. When she asks whether he returned because England was too Christian for him, or because their relationship ended, he distinguishes the book’s account from his life: he left for many reasons, and their parting was one of them. The novel may make their separation appear to explain his departure, but his answer leaves the decision multiple and unresolved rather than assigning it a single cause.

The return also changes the conditions of their conversation. The Unnamed English woman says that she had thought about calling ever since reading his book, but did not know whether she should. Nathan answers that he, too, had considered the book’s effect on her marriage. Their renewed exchange therefore makes the published novel part of the return’s aftermath: the relationship did not simply end when he left England, because its representation continued to affect the woman and to shape whether they would speak again. Nathan’s homecoming is geographically decisive, but it does not erase the intimate consequences of the life he left behind.

Learning England through estrangement

The Unnamed English woman interprets the novel as having turned her into a foreigner in England and having made Nathan recognize that the country was not for him. Nathan accepts that her reading identifies something real, but complicates its direction. In her company he sometimes felt like an outsider; through her, however, he also became partly an insider and learned about the place. Knowing her did not make England transparent. Instead, it sharpened his awareness of how much remained beyond his understanding. Before their relationship, he had thought that some part of England was beginning to come through; as he knew her better, the country seemed increasingly remote, like spending half of each year in twelfth-century China.

That comparison makes the return more than a reversal of travel. Nathan does not claim that leaving England supplied complete understanding of the country or of himself. When the Unnamed English woman asks whether he understands everything now that he is back, he answers only that he understands something. His modest formulation contrasts with the total knowledge implied by her question: returning has altered his sense of belonging, not abolished the limits of what he can know. England remains difficult to read, and his time there has taught him that intimacy can disclose a place while also making its foreignness more pronounced.

New York and the recognition of home

Nathan describes the recognition of home as something that arrives during ordinary walks, not as a conclusion reached at the moment of departure. After returning to New York, he sometimes stops in the street and finds himself smiling; only after he has been back for a few months does he recognize what those moments contain. He has encountered something he missed and longed for, though its absence had not previously announced itself in an obvious way. The delay gives homecoming the shape of a discovery made in retrospect: familiar surroundings become meaningful through the feeling they release.

What he names is Jews, but not merely their presence as a demographic fact. He means a conspicuous, forceful Jewish life: appetite, anger, complaint, argument, impudence, and a refusal to accommodate everyone else. His emphatic catalogue defines belonging through public conduct and friction as much as through ancestry or religion. In New York, Jews get under one another’s skin and occupy shared space without shame; the very qualities that might make such a community difficult are what Nathan says he had been longing for. His claim that New York is the real obstreperous Zion extends the idea of home beyond private comfort into a loud, collective cultural presence.

The comparison is deliberately provocative. The Unnamed English woman points out that England also has Jews, but Nathan differentiates the experience he has returned to from that more limited comparison: what he missed was Jewish life with force. He then says that even Tel Aviv seems too Christian beside New York, and that after London even Ed Koch looks good. These exaggerations do not offer a neutral ranking of cities; they dramatize how return has recalibrated his perception. New York becomes the measure not because it is orderly or universally welcoming, but because its argumentative Jewishness feels unmistakably his.

The return in the wider history of displacement

Nathan’s attachment to home gains resonance against the book’s other accounts of movement across borders under political pressure. The Unnamed English woman recalls being watched while working at the American Library in Prague, where a job she had understood as literary employment became entangled with the Czechoslovak secret intelligence agency’s attempt to recruit her. She refused, as she later refused an approach from the Americans, and describes the resulting position as untenable on both sides. Her earlier interrogation after being found with Nathan in a hotel likewise shows how a private meeting could draw the attention of state authorities. Those experiences belong to her story, not to Nathan’s own account of returning, but they clarify the political unease surrounding their transnational relationship.

Nathan’s own remembered account of Prague offers a parallel, distinct form of vulnerability. In 1975, uniformed police demanded that he go to a station; he refused, shouted for the American Embassy, and eventually escaped by boarding a trolley while the officers consulted a plainclothesman. A Czech friend later told him that the police had questioned him through the night about Nathan’s repeated visits, and Nathan says that he could never again obtain a visa to Czechoslovakia. These episodes make clear that travel in the book is not simply movement between attractive settings: borders, surveillance, and the threat of exclusion can shape the lives and relationships carried across them. Nathan’s return to America is not presented as an equivalent escape from that political pressure, but it is a movement toward a place where, after months of walking, he recognizes a form of cultural belonging he had not known how deeply he missed.

Narrative significance

The return matters because the book refuses to let either England or America stand as a simple answer. Nathan’s experience of England is mediated by the Unnamed English woman, whose perspective makes him both more connected to the country and more conscious of his outsider status. His sense of America, in turn, emerges through delayed bodily recognition and through a specific image of New York’s Jewish life. The contrast does not prove that he now understands everything; it shows that home can be felt before it can be fully explained.

The woman’s challenge also keeps the novel’s version of events distinct from the life it represents. She asks whether its portrayal of England made her foreign in her own country, while Nathan acknowledges the force of her interpretation without accepting it as the whole account of why he left. Their conversation holds together the relationship’s ending, the book’s effects on its subject, and Nathan’s return without collapsing them into one cause. His departure is at once a consequence of several pressures, a separation from the Unnamed English woman, and the beginning of a belated recognition: in New York, home sounds less like an abstract destination than a voice that rises during a walk and names what was missing.