Last week I went with my wife to the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. The nursery school teacher somehow managed to take a picture of the little one that was acceptable for the online visa-application forms, so we were finally able to register and set a date for an interview at the consulate.

There were a few particularly scary items on those forms. I knew I could trust myself, but I had to ask my wife some things before marking “yes” or “no” in the security-related questionnaire.

“Tell me, did you ever take part in genocide?” I found myself asking her in the living room, with the children listening. “Were you ever a member of a terrorist organization?”

“No,” she said. “Are you nuts?! What’s with you?”

“I have to hear it from you,” I told her, and went on: “Have you ever been in contact with anyone who was ever a member of a terrorist organization?” Here I looked her straight in the eyes to make sure she was telling the truth. “No,” she replied firmly, and I bought her answer.

“Is that what they are asking?” she wanted to know.

“Yes, you have to answer all these questions in order to enter America,” I replied, and continued: “Do you intend to marry an American citizen and remain in the United States?”

“What?!” my wife snapped back. “I have to see that question.”

“Forget it,” I told her and hid the forms. “I’ll write ‘no.’”

Armed with the right forms for applying for what is called an exchange visitor’s visa, we arrived at the consulate’s entrance right on time. There was a long line leading to the outer booth, where a young woman seated behind glass, which I could have sworn was bulletproof, received the arrivals. We took our places in line.

It took me a few minutes to take in the fact that the uniformed security guards standing at the entrance to the consulate were speaking Arabic between themselves. It always surprises me, this thing with Arab security guards. True, I’ve already grasped that the guards in the malls, at the International Writers Festival last month at Mishkenot Sha’ananim and in other venues in Jerusalem are from the eastern part of the city, but I can’t quite grasp this situation.

I’m not talking here about Arabs who served in the army and were placed in security positions, but about Arabs like me who have never touched a weapon and are manning the security slots. They’re never armed, it’s true, but rabak! It rattles me when an Arab checks under the car hood and exchanges a couple of sentences in Hebrew with me in order to check out my accent. But I was happy now.

“Stand in a single line, please,” the girl behind the glass requested through a loudspeaker, and we all closed ranks. My wife and I did likewise, because like everyone else, we wanted a visa to America. You know how it is in the West. Even though the clerk is an Arab, just like the guards, they have different rules, it’s a different culture, and a line is a line – maybe it’s some sort of an admissions test – and no one here wants to wreck his visa prospects because he didn’t stand in line like a civilized individual.

“Did you notice that everyone here is either an Arab or an ultra-Orthodox Jew?” my wife whispered to me, and I replied, “This is Jerusalem – what else is there?”

The line advanced rapidly, and after we passed the polite young woman in the booth, we went by the Arab guards, too. You’re not allowed to take in mobile phones, so we left them in compartments at the entrance. For an instant I felt uptight, cut off and frightened by the sheer fact that I was not going to be available. “I am available, therefore I exist” – in a twinkling I had grasped the meaning of life.

After security, you enter a large waiting room with seats, and windows behind which are more clerks. The long lines move along relatively quickly, and the clerks are unfailingly courteous and smiling, even though some of them are not Americans but Arabs and Israelis.

“This is what I call service,” I whispered to my wife as we left our fingerprints in a machine and handed over our documents. “You’re right,” she said, and told me about a girlfriend of hers who spent two years in America and related that “Life in the United States is a lot more comfortable.”

“What do you mean ‘comfortable’?” I asked with discomfort.

“For example, if you go into a supermarket and there are no carts they bring you one – there are workers whose job that is.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she replied. “And she also told me that there are no lines at the checkout counters, because if there is pressure, they straightaway open a new counter. There’s no waiting.”

“So we’re going to the United States because shopping in the supermarket is easier?”

“And for the children’s English.”

Unlike my wife and children, I am very anxious about the looming trip. We will be living in southern Illinois, where the winters are like the ones you read about in books. I imagine myself shoveling the snow off the driveway and trying to defrost the frozen windows of the car, and already I feel that all I want is to be back in my own home with the tea and lemon and all the rest of it.

I will be teaching there, and that scares me very much; I have no idea what kind of teacher I will be. My tasks include teaching Hebrew, and when I think that I will have American students who go off speaking Hebrew with an Arabic accent, I get more than a little freaked out.

But my biggest worry about the United States is the kids. Right now they are enthusiastic and excited about the year-long stay, but I sometimes suspect that they think it’s like a family outing and haven’t grasped the implications of a different language, a new culture, another type of society and the inevitable acclimatization problems.

“It’s easiest for the children,” friends assure me, but I don’t believe them. I’ve already enrolled the youngest in a preschool in the neighborhood where we’ve rented a place for the year, and I will enroll the older ones in public schools that are supposed to be good. I perused sites that rank schools and I contacted the local government for information.

Going through the visa forms beforehand, I had been thrown by the “race” rubric. I looked for Arab but could find no such category. There was white, black, Hispanic and Asiatic, but no Arab. I looked on the Internet to find out what we are and discovered that in the United States, people coming from the Middle East or North Africa are considered whites. That really surprised me, because I never considered myself white. I now remember the moment when I checked the “white” box on the forms: I grinned with a leer and knew that I was going to be a racist – and how I was going to be a racist! Especially after 40 years of experience with this.

“That’s us,” I said to my wife when our name was called through the loudspeaker: “Kasuha.”

“Kasuha?” she asked, puzzled.

“Believe it or not,” I said to her as we made our way to the clerk, “a white folks’ name.”