Alef: The NEXT Conversation

The Language Barrier

By Ruvym Gilman

This post originally appeared on Alef on 11-30-2009.

“Dai,” she said, giving me that exasperated look I had such a knack for eliciting. But I kept at it, being playful while she tried, unsuccessfully, to wash the dishes.

“Dai!”

I stopped, acknowledging the little bit of Hebrew I had managed to learn from her during the course of our relationship. She was a New York-bred Jew, Manhattan raised, and yet she used this language with me, all the while knowing that my foreign linguistic skills ended with the Russian I got from my family and six years of failure in high school and college Italian.

“Mi scusi, mi scusi,” I wanted to reply. “But why can’t you just speak English?”

We had, what you might call, a rocky relationship, the kind saturated with an on-again, off-again, up and down, yes and no sort of instability that I couldn’t totally rationalize or explain to myself. When I tried sorting through it all in my head, tried making sense of our inability to just be a normal couple, the Hebrew was one of the issues I couldn’t help but come back to. It made me feel like an outsider, someone who would never really get her because I had no way of communicating in a language she valued so highly. Add to that my sense of guilt – the constant, nagging feeling that I was less of a Jew because I didn’t know Hebrew – and you had me, disconnected from the beating heart, the life blood of my own people, disconnected from her.

When I came over her house for dinner with her family, she would sometimes absent-mindedly slip into the ancient semantics, seemingly forgetting that I was even there. As the two of us crossed Upper East Side streets, maneuvering between waddling old ladies, I would walk alongside as she had phone conversations I couldn’t understand. I wondered whether she was speaking about me, whether she was relaying some secret she didn’t want me to hear.

I saw how her face lit up every time she got the chance to speak it, how once when we ran into her friend at Max Brenner’s, after an introduction I quickly found myself excluded, unable to follow them, and so I wandered off to look at the overpriced chocolate. Half an hour later, when her body language said that she was ready to go, I came back over, gave the friend a cold handshake, and walked out. We argued about it outside, about how I had left her by herself, how I made no effort to even pretend I was interested in sticking around.

“I didn’t know what the heck you guys were saying!”

I got frustrated and jumped onto the subway, feeling bad about everything as soon as I was on the train, when it was already too late to crush her in an embrace and beg forgiveness by making her laugh. When I got above-ground, I called. I tried to keep my voice low while sandwiched between people. She sighed through the receiver, little exhales of disappointment coming through as static.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” she said.

There was always seemed to be something I wasn’t getting. Over the bad connection, I could feel her shaking her head at me.

I tried to be outspoken about how I felt, maybe a little more than I needed to be. But the language, it was just too much a part of her to ignore. She seemed almost incomplete without it, how could I ever fill that need?

I’d shrug.

She’d look away.

We’d repeat it all.

Maybe the real problem was me, my insecurity, my trying to justify the finale, the ultimate conclusion of our relationship. Nothing had ever come easily for us, nothing was ever second-natured in the way I wanted or would have expected. And so I needed reasons, real, tangible things to point to, to grasp and display so that I couldn’t simply say, “oh, we just didn’t work out.” The Hebrew was an easy excuse, something that we didn’t share and which contributed to the sense that we were very different people. Maybe it was just easier to write my own ending than to have one thrust upon me.

And then there was the sad irony, that months later, after the fact, I found myself signed up for Hebrew classes, studying to learn the same thing I never gave a chance when it might have mattered the most. I wondered at my stubbornness, my insistence at seeing the language as a contributor to our distance rather than what it could have been – an opportunity to grow closer to each other. Or perhaps it was also that same opportunity, the chance to get that closeness, which scared me enough to avoid it altogether.

Photo by Ed Yourdon, licensed under Creative Commons.

Graffitti Photo by Skinned Milk, licensed under Creative Commons.

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