Prepare yourself to swallow all your diamonds and your rings

And all your 'tiquey, shiny, windy things

Don’t scare yourself, the photos in the newspapers are blurred

The radio is broadcasting a word

Beware yourself, the neighbors aren't neighbors anymore

They're leaning with a glass against your door

Take care of yourself and hoist into the air your disbelief

Just go ahead and give yourself relief

Get ready for your inner emigration

Get ready to be alien inside

Consider all your social obligations

The borders of your foreign order bride

You won't ever have to leave your nation

You won’t have to even try

Just make a secret inner emigration

And you won’t ever have to say goodbye

Well Hanna was at home in the Berlin cabarets of '32

But in '33 the weather turned and the brownshirts all turned loose

The rumors they were bad, her Sozi lover Alex was getting scared

He heard his name was on a list for having red friends and brown hair

He wanted to get out and Hanna could have gone with him to his family in Ukraine

But instead, she took a walk out in the rain

Through her Berlin, and thought about how this weather, it would pass

And how things had always worked out in the past

She made a kind of inner emigration

She started to feel alien inside

With all the social marginalization

Her sense of place was starting to be tried

But she couldn't bear abandoning her nation

She didn't want it all to pass her by

So people make their inner emigrations

Till, one by one, they have to say goodbye

Well, Sasha had heard about the emigratzia

And the talk wasn't just in the family anymore

But in the Kharkov streets there was a kind of thaw

"We're going home!" said old Saminsky

When he filed his application to leave

And Anya already had family in Tel Aviv

But Sasha didn’t know:

Two hundred years among Slavs being called "Hebrews,"

He knew they’d only be called "Russians" among the Jews

And then on the Prospekt Lenina ovtobus

He heard the Saminskys lost their apartment and were denied their pass

The weather seemed like it was never going to pass

He chose to make an inner emigration

He chose to keep his alien inside

And all the bureaucratic frustrations

He chose to keep his status bona fide

And what's the bother of finding a new nation?

A border isn't art, it's just a frame

Just make a secret inner emigration

The holy land and exile are the same

Anat was a Sabra

The daughter of a Sephardic Kibbutznik nurse

And a Yekke lawyer from Bonn

She fell in love with Khais

Born in a PLO refugee camp in southern Lebanon

And they married in Cyprus

He almost got arrested living with her family in Ramat Gan

So she tried wrapping her hair and serving coffee with his family in Hebron

But that didn't work either

Then they thought about leaving to live with her cousin David in Brooklyn

But he and his boyfriend Patrick wanted to get married

And were maybe moving to Berlin

So she went to the Jaffa beach and stared at the sea

And thought about how someday all of this would pass

If only she could find someone to help Khais pass

Should she make an inner emigration?

Tell me what you think she should decide

Considering the couple's situation

She'd be better off as someone else's bride

She and he comprise a kind of nation

The kind we build inside when we're alone

But if they just make inner emigrations

Then they'll only have a home when they're at home

Compare yourself

What does this all have to do with you?

How does your experience ring true?

You're where, yourself?

You aren't suffering anyone's regime

You're free to follow every little dream

Be fair to yourself, you needn't be oppressed to feel alone

You don't have to be driven from your home

To spare yourself from feeling like a part of the control

With an internal diplomatic role

So make a kind of inner emigration

It's a kind of shift accomplished easily

We all have made our disassociations

Whether on the job or in our family

And what could be more irrelevant than nations

When everywhere you go, it's buy or sell?

But if we all make only inner emigrations

Then everything will only go to hell