Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Hebrew Enough for Me
By Danielle Selber
“Oh, you were in Israel? How’s your Hebrew?”
A simple question, deserving of the simplest of answers. Yes or no, Danielle – do you speak Hebrew?
Yet all I could manage was to sputter, “Sort of. I mean, yes! But not perfectly, I mean, pretty well, I can speak it and understand it, but reading is a challenge, my handwriting is atrocious, and really it depends on…” I trailed off as my well-meaning neighbor inched slowly away from me, sorry he had asked.
Hebrew, my first language, my mother tongue, my mother’s tongue, my many thousand year old link to our biblical fore-bearers, a language resurrected after centuries of dormancy, the language of the country one passport says I call home…and yet, I can never quite remember how to say “frying pan.”
Growing up, my Israeli mother did her best to infuse my plushy brain with Hebrew from the start. My first word was “garbayim” – “socks” (a strange first word in any language, really), and before I was six I had already been to Israel four times. My mother is one of eleven siblings, all of whom live in Israel except her, and none of whom speak more than elementary English. I spent my childhood summers in my uncle Yosi’s shuk (market), always finding the best pomella in his endless fruit stands; hearing Hatikvah as a lullaby each night; being lifted onto my Uncle Masud’s shoulders to pick lemons on his farm; singing along with Kippi Ben Kippod on Rehov Sum Sum, Israel’s versions of Big Bird and Sesame Street respectively. With all those years of “immersion,” Hebrew should come to me like water to the vine. But, as my family trips to Israel became less frequent, my Hebrew fell away and wasn’t missed. I took four years of French and one year of Latin, and by the time those endless conjugations made their home in my head, Hebrew was barely a memory.
In college, I rediscovered my Judaism and connection to Israel, and naturally tried to stir up emotions with my old flame, Hebrew. But she wasn’t having it. Wronged and abandoned, every Hebrew word I tried to relearn wrestled itself out of my wanting mind like a cage fighter on crack. I remember sitting in the car with my mom one winter break, pondering nothing at all, when I suddenly asked, “mama, how do you say ‘seatbelt’ in Hebrew?”
“Chagura betichut,” she answered absentmindedly.
I looked at her in horror. ALL those syllables, just to say SEATBELT?
“I’ll never learn this stupid language,” I muttered, silently cursing my mother for allowing me to forget the language I once knew with such ease.
Four college-level classes, three dictionaries, one intensive summer ulpan, a year in Israel, and countless Israeli CDs, movies, and children’s books later, I am happy to report that yes, I finally speak Hebrew. Inflected, colloquial, well-meaning, outdated, accented, error-ridden, jumpy Hebrew. I speak in tumbles of verbs and idioms, always slightly misused and never quite meaning what I was trying to get across. My handwriting is illegible, a testament to having lost Hebrew before I actually learned to write it, and let’s not even talk about my reading comprehension. I always speak too quickly, tripping over tenses, sometimes accidentally branding myself a boy, to the delight of my little Israeli cousins.
And yet.
I fall over laughing at Hebrew You Tube stand-up comedy clips. I teach Hebrew school and almost never mix up the letters ‘khaf’ and ‘kaf.’ I have spent extensive time with my Israeli family, going weeks without speaking a word of English because there was no one there to understand it. My boyfriend and I drift from Hebrew to English, sometimes pausing to look up words that evade us. When I’m out and catch Hebrew floating through the air, I whip my head around and follow the voices, listening to a Yemenite mother scold her children in delicious Hebrew and Arabic blends, or an Israeli couple argue vehemently over the price of tomatoes.
I am proud to be able to say I speak Hebrew – not flawlessly, not fluently, not articulately, not perfectly – but just enough for me.
Photos by David55king and naama, licensed under Creative Commons.
Yiddish Summer
Unsurprisingly, people frequently asked me: “Why learn Yiddish? What kind of 20-something wants to speak like a bubbe?” For me, learning Yiddish was part of an interest in Jewish life in America before mass-assimilation. The post-World War II generation of Ashkenazi Jews that followed the Holocaust learned almost nothing of their parents’, or grandparents’, native tongue, abandoning Yiddish for English or Hebrew. What little Yiddish my mother heard from her grandparents manifests now as only a handful of words—shabbes (“Sabbath”), shmate (“Rag”), goyim (“Non-Jews”). Still, those bits and pieces of another world always intrigued me.
Of course, it is only in retrospect that I see how Yiddish has always played a role in my life. My trajectory into the program at the National Yiddish Book Center really began the summer before, while I was working as a summer research fellow at the University of Miami. One day, as I conducted research in the library, I stumbled across the writings of Emma Goldman, the notorious early-20th Century anarchist. The more I read about her, the more I discovered the major Yiddish anarchist movement with which she was associated.
Wait, what? Yiddish… Jewish… anarchists? I had certainly never heard about radical activists in religious school. My Hebrew school, catering mostly to reform, observant-twice-a-year types of Jews, was more of a bar/bat mitzvah mill that taught us to read Hebrew and not much else. On top of it, we learned the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew despite the fact that the vast majority of us were from Ashkenazic backgrounds. The Jewish cultural life that flourished before the Holocaust—an impressive body of literature, music, and theater—was completely absent from the curriculum. As my grandparents passed away long before I was born, there was very little of that world left in my family. I had to discover it on my own.
When I started reading about the Jews coming to America at the turn of the century, something clicked for me. I already knew a great deal about the Holocaust, but for the first time, I read extensively about the pogroms in Russia and about the struggle faced by Jews upon arrival in the United States. Along with the Italians, the Irish, and many other immigrant groups, most Jews were poor and were treated like scum. I wanted to know what life was like for my great-grandparents who came to this country from Eastern Europe, had to learn a new language, and had to make their way from scratch in this antagonistic environment.
Jews largely abandoned Yiddish culture and many of the ethical values and political ideals that came along with it. I think this picture, a poster advertising free English classes for immigrants in the 1930s, captures this decline. In the process of becoming successful “Americans,” Jews sacrificed anything that would mark them as “Old World.” This poster promised to teach immigrants the language of their children, the same children who became the next generation of Jews, and who had to juggle a new American identity with the Jewish traditions of their fore-bearers.
Now the trend seems to be swinging the other way. Comfortably integrated into American society, young Jews of my generation are reclaiming the traditions of their grandparents and great-grandparents, making those traditions their own. The resurgence of interest in Yiddish culture is evidence that people like me seek a better sense of cultural continuity. After all, you can’t know who you are until you know from where you come from.
Poster image from Wikimedia Commons. Book images from Thenestor and Brownpau, licensed under Creative Commons.
Slicha, Lo Midaber Ivrit (Sorry, I Don't Speak Hebrew)
By Micah Gurard-Levin
Growing up as one of the few Jewish kids in my school, and even now amongst my peers, people are often confused by my answer when they ask, “Can you speak Hebrew?” Having been raised in a Conservative synagogue community, I respond, “No, but I can read it…aloud. I can pronounce it, but I can’t understand it.” People wonder how that’s possible. How can one read such random looking characters, dots and lines, but not know what they mean?
Since announcing at my confirmation that I didn’t believe in God, I have identified as a cultural Jew. A Jew who loves Shabbat services in Hebrew, even though I don’t understand them. A Jew who cringes at spoken English during services, even though I do understand it. A Jew who, while traveling in Israel as a NEXT Fellow on a Taglit-Birthright Israel bus, acted more like a three year old child while sitting next to the Israelis in the group, pointing at billboards and bus advertisements, sounding out words even though they had no vowels. A Jew who was discovering an ability to read Hebrew like an Israeli, but still couldn’t understand. Ironically, the Israelis on the bus [is that a new verse to The Wheels on the Bus song?] would ask me the same question that my non-Jewish friends asked: “How can you read that if you don’t know what it means?”
Why don’t I understand Hebrew? Why can’t I speak Hebrew? Why, as a cultural Jew, do I lack the ability to participate in one of the most obvious cultural practices of the Jewish people—the ability to speak the language of the people?
I haven’t discovered why, all of a sudden, I have a burning desire to learn to speak Hebrew, but I can’t help but draw a parallel between my evolving Jewish identity and the development of modern Jewish culture that took place seven decades before Israel became a state in 1948. When Jewish people began immigrating en masse to Palestine in the late 1800s, they didn’t speak Hebrew, but rather spoke their native languages, as well as Yiddish. Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, a Lithuanian Jew who moved to Israel in 1881, felt compelled to revive Hebrew as a daily spoken language, giving new life to a language that had been relegated to use only in prayer and the study of Torah.
The rebirth of Hebrew as a modern language served as a unifying cultural practice which allowed Israel to become a nation, and not just a land of Jewish people of disparate European origins.
Perhaps my desire to speak Hebrew is that simple—it’s about unification and a sense of belonging, about wanting to identify as being ‘just Jewish.’ The more involved I become in the Jewish community, and the more time I spend in Israel, the more I, oddly enough, feel like I don’t yet belong. My struggle isn’t about religion—it never has been. My struggle isn’t about keeping Kosher—I don’t and probably never will. My struggle is about wanting to meet an Israeli, in Israel or elsewhere, and rather than say in English, “I’m Jewish and I’ve been to Israel,” to speak in Hebrew and share the inherent bond of being Jewish. But it’s not just about proving that I belong—I want to feel like I belong. I want to be able to eavesdrop when I’m in Tel Aviv on the beach. I want to read Ha’aretz in Hebrew and not in English. I want to know what the heck I’ve been reading for eighteen years. No longer do I want to look at Hebrew the way a non-musician looks at an orchestral score. I want meaning. I need meaning. I want to be ‘just Jewish.’
Photo by JP Puerta, licensed under Creative Commons
I am ×לזה
By Ally Iseman
Hebrew. Jew. Jew. Hebrew. For me, the two have always seemed inseparable. Perhaps that belief was the initial reason I saw myself as alienated from the Jewish community. As a young girl I always felt like I was sitting on the sidelines of something, like everyone who spoke Hebrew was privy to a delicious little secret that I could never understand.
I’ve never had a head for language. Perhaps because of the way in which I was taught: translation through memorization. Or perhaps I just never had as powerful a passion for French and Spanish as for Hebrew. My only exposure was once a week at my Reform Synagogue’s Saturday school, these muddled sounds we had to memorize in the form of prayers. The reason and passion behind those prayers, along with the meaning of the words that comprised them, never having fully been explained to me, were simply chores with no deeper meaning, a means to a grade. Here began the process of dissociation from my Jewish identity.
Being raised by parents who barely had a grasp on their own Jewish identities let alone the language, I had no ties holding onto me, no warm, fuzzy feelings anchoring me to the bosom of my Judaism. So I lost it. My Jewish identity fell away layer by layer over the course of my adolescence. My heart wasn’t in the preparations surrounding my Bat Mitzvah. I couldn’t fake a connection to all these words I didn’t understand. So I did the unthinkable. I forfeited the party, the money and the ridiculous amounts of attention and I did not have my Bat Mitzvah. I denounced all connection, never really spoke about it among my friends (although I always remained “The Jew” to them) and began playing hookie during Hebrew school.
The one thing I never lost, however, was my pride in my Hebrew name, ×לזה (Aliza.) Not the story of the Jewish people, not the history nor the food, but my name through the filter of the Jewish culture, however much of a mystery it was to me at the time. We picked our own names in French class. We chose pseudonyms in writing class and nicknames in clubs after school, but these were all so arbitrary. Aliza was different, felt different. This name had roots.
Although I was told by one of my Israeli friends that it is a “grandmother’s name,” my connection to it never failed. Aliza means “joyful” in Hebrew and I’ve recently discovered that Aliza is also another name for Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish people and the capital of the state of Israel. Aliza has become my heart, as well, and the center of my Jewish identity.
My Birthright Israel trip was the catalyst for beginning my journey. Even though I felt the language barrier with my Israeli counterparts on the bus, there was something even deeper, even truer of an understanding that went beyond words. It was in Israel where I got my first taste of Kabbalah. The way every part of every letter of every word expressing every Jewish idea has a hidden importance and a much deeper meaning. Suddenly these Hebrew letters, which had up to this point caused me so much confusion and strife, now seemed to make things in my universe come into alignment and make sense. This part of me that had been dormant for so long was now awake and it was hungry! Not speaking Hebrew was no longer enough of a reason to deny such a huge part of myself. No reason ever really was, nor will ever again be enough for me to do that.
I’ve come back from Israel with a fire, a craving desire to know more, to explore the Judaism within myself and within the world around me. Hebrew is no longer an obstacle I feel I must work through despite my lack of comprehension, but rather my impending study of the language will open up yet another avenue in which I can explore my innate Judaism.
I am Aliza. That is my name, and more. I now know what it translates to in English, but I am now also beginning to understand what it means to me; that identity, that sense of belonging, and I am joyful.
Photo by rogerimp, licensed under Creative Commons.
Hebrussia
By Vicki Boykis
The first day of my first Hebrew class on my first semester of college, I figured out that Russian and Hebrew were exactly the same when I saw that the letter “shin” (ש ) looked exactly like the letter “sheh” (Ш) in my first language – Russian. I was tremendously relieved knowing I’d be able to slack the whole semester with Hebrew and Russian much closer than I’d first believed.
I’d spent the summer feverishly, hungrily trying to learn Hebrew with the zeal of the members of the first aliyah. I went on my second emotion-filled leadership trip to Israel in the August before I started school. On the trip, I decided it was embarrassing that I didn’t know any Hebrew beyond b’seder (”Alright”), sababa (”cool”), and the urgent eifo sherutim (”where are the bathrooms”). I was also sure that Israelis were constantly talking about me. Why else would they be laughing?
I zealously self-administered the alef-bet that summer, watching the way the unfamiliar, uncomfortable letters moved in the wrong direction on my laptop screen and trying to memorize ways to write them. It never occurred to me that this was the same path my fellow Russian Zionists had taken a hundred years earlier: going from Russian, and sometimes Yiddish, to Hebrew. In their wake, and in the wake of the early 1990s post-Soviet aliyah to Israel, they had left imprints of Russian on the Hebrew that I had also hoped to make my own.
On my first day in Hebrew class, watching the teacher, Ruti, scrawl curly-scary cursive across the board, I didn’t expect that in a few short months she would use the word balagan in a sentence and I would snap to attention. Balagan means mess in Russian, a pandemonium. In Hebrew, I would find out, it meant the same thing, and was used to describe messy situations, from the Middle East peace process to a traffic jam in Jerusalem.
During those first couple weeks, we ventured beyond shalom. This was when we paddled into those uncharted territories of kal, pa’al, and piel- the phantasmagorical verb structures. But then, jobnik, nudnik, and other –niks would somehow pop up, from the Russian ending “nik” which means doer of whatever the “nik “is attached to. Shkolnik (the last name of Levi Eshkol before he went Sabra) means schoolboy in Russian.
We crept deeper and deeper into the jungle of Hebrew verbs and everyday objects I didn’t know -kiseh, ofanayim, miklat- and I without latching them on to any other European languages I knew, I felt small and completely detached from a connection to the Hebrew language and to my own Hebrew culture.
But every now and again, a small beacon of Russian would light my way. Every time my Israeli friend said, “Nu,” I would be reminded of the same Russian word, what my parents said when they were impatient with me. After I procured a mangal during my internship in Tel Aviv, I was happy that I was able to do so with the knowledge that mangal in Russian, just as in Hebrew, means a small portable grill.
At the end of my formal learning of Hebrew in college, I finally became comfortable using the language, speaking it out loud to myself. I’d even begun to dream in Hebrew (dreams that, for some reason, included Moshe Dayan 90% of the time.) As I was penetrated this strange and wonderful language-my peoples’ language, I finally realized that Russian-my other peoples’ language- already had. As I wandered into shin, I wasn’t alone, because sheh was there right along with me.
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