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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.
Tags: Hebrew, Old Country, Tongue Tied
4 Responses to “Hebrussia”
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It’s so fascinating how one language can inform another, and I don’t just mean those that fall into the same family. I think you’ve highlighted some interesting issues that every language learner encounters, and I would be intrigued to hear stories about the ways that people mistakenly think they’ve understood a word in one language based on their knowledge of another, I’m sure many of us have done that too.
I’ve struggled with — and abandoned — learning the aleph-bet for ages. I never seem to have enough patience to actually immerse myself in it. On the rare occasion when I recognize the letters, the elation is underscribable. I’ve got a bit of a talent for languages — I speak Spanish and French in addition to Russian and English — so not being able to grasp the fundamentals of Hebrew is very unnerving.
On another note (and to respond to Emily), I know of cases when Spanish learners would say “embarasada” thinking it meant embarassed, when in reality it means pregnant. So they’d wonder why they were being congratulated all of a sudden.
It’s not a coincidence that Shin and Sheh are so similar, because they are in fact the same letter. That is, Sheh was borrowed directly from the Hebrew alefbet! The backstory goes as follows:
In the 9th Century AD, a Greek monk named Cyril travelled to Kievian Rus with the goal of spreading the Christian Bible. As he met with this primitive slavic nation, one thing stood out as a clear obstacle to his goal: the slavics didn’t have any system of writing! So Cyril made up a new alphabet for their language, still called “cyrillic” to this day. This alphabet was based mostly on the Greek alphabet. However, Russian has more sounds (and different sounds) than Greek, and there weren’t enough letter in the Greek alphabet for all the Russian sounds. Therefore Cyril borrow letters from Hebrew.
Why Hebrew of all languages?
Because the only way that Cyril was able to talk to the slavics was through Hebrew, with Jews serving as translators. Cyril knew both Greek and Hebrew (as Hebrew is the original language of the Bible!)and the Jews in Eastern Europe at the time knew both Hebrew and Slavic. So of course, after Greek, Hebrew was the next logical language to pick letters from!
[...] I forget, I also wrote Hebrussia this week for Alef magazine, about the combination of Hebrew and [...]