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.
Hebrew for Hanukkah
By Adam Oded and Rafi Samuels-Schwartz
With our third issue, “Tongue Tied,” winding down, and Hanukkah just around the corner, many of you may be wondering why we at Alef chose this time to focus on language, and in particular, Hebrew. Well, believe it or not there is a method to our madness; this confluence of Hebrew and Hanukkah was not simply a random coincidence of scheduling.
But first, some brief history:
About 2200 years ago, our ancestors faced an attack on their religious practices. The Seleucid Syrian Greeks under the rule of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, banned Shabbat observance, circumcision, and Torah study. In public ceremonies they attempted to make respected members of Jewish communities eat forbidden foods. Antiochus’ efforts were aimed at attacking the things that made Jews different from the rest of the Greek-speaking world. Some Jews, like the Hasmonean family (sometimes called the Maccabees), rose up against these decrees and fought back. The Jewish victory over the Syrian Greeks represented the triumph of Jewish identity over forced assimilation.
A little over 100 years ago, the Hebrew language was resuscitated into a living language after being relegated to ritual use for nearly 1800 years.  Today, Hebrew is spoken not only in Israel but in Jewish communities around the world. Outside the Untied States, Hebrew has supplanted Yiddish as a Lingua franca of the Jewish People, enabling French Jews to talk to Russian Jews to talk to Brazilian Jews,to talk to South African Jews.
The connection between Hebrew and Hanukkah, while not immediately obvious at first, is still striking. Without the cultural victory (to say nothing of the military one) of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greeks, Hebrew would be dead. Not, to quote Miracle Max from The Princess Bride, “mostly dead,” but entirely, and totally finished, and the last two weeks on Alef would have featured stories about learning Greek.
So, as Alef moves into Issue #4, “The Holiday Season,” we wish you all a Happy Hanukkah, and a Chag Urim Sameach. And, no matter what language you speak, go easy on the latkes, folks!
Image provided by mfajardo, licensed under Creative Commons.
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
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