THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, April 19, 1985
25
O
The problem for
all immigrants
to Israel from
English-speaking
countries is that
you can get by
in Israel without
Hebrew.
BY HELEN DAVIS
Special to The Jewish News
o n
The worst of not being fluent in
Hebrew after living in Israel for five
years is that I am forced to tell lies.
Small, white ones. But still lies.
"How long have you been in the
country?" Israelis ask after patiently
enduring my fractured sentences.
"Oh," I reply, "about two years."
Too humiliating to admit that after all
this time, the language of the Bible
still baffles me.
The fault is mine; the Israelis cer-
tainly did their best. When we arrived
we were installed in an immigrant ab-
sorption center, a small village on the
outskirts of Jerusalem, where new-
comers from the four corners of the
world live for five months or more
while they learn Hebrew, find homes
and jobs and prepare themselves for
life out there in Israel proper.
My husband and I were full of con-
fidence and ambition, my husband and
I. Getting the language under our
tongues was just the first step on the
path of eventual integration into the
society of our choice — a technicality, a
matter of concentrated effort and ap-
plication. We are, after all, intelligent,
well-educated people. Right?
Early every morning, we put our
children into kindergarten and
crossed the street to the language
school to spend five hours wrestling
with the heat and Hebrew under the
stern tutelage of Sarah, a skilled lan-
guage teacher who was fiercely deter-
mined to drum this ancient tongue
into her motley class.
There was a dentist from Boston, a
doctor from Moscow, a linguist from
Kharkhov, a lawyer from London, an
insurance man from Johannes-
burg . . .
The problem was not to get the
words into our heads, but to spit them
out again. Hebrew is a language of
hawked gutterals, rolled r's, rouhded
vowels — almost impossible for a
tongue so long molded to English.
We were doing OK until fate and
maternity intervened. I went off to
have our third child and my husband
was made an offer he couldn't refuse —
a post on an English-language news-
paper where he needn't (and' doesn't)
hear Hebrew all day long. End of lan-
guage school.
We struggled along at home, but
our hearts weren't in it. There were
always lists of apparently more press-
ing things to do, and merely surviving
in this hectic society consumes all the
energy we've got.
Our children, however, have no
such problems. They've absorbed it
like fresh air and sunshine.
My eldest, Ben, has become my
translator. When his teacher tells me
something in rapid-fire Hebrew, with
lots of animated gestures, I stand smil-
ing and nodding warmly, catching the
drift but not the detail. "Er, darling," I
have to ask him afterwards, "what was
that all about?"
"Oh, mummy," he sighs scorn-
fully, and offers a translation which I
have to presume is correct.
When a gas station attendant
mutters something incomprehensible
to my husband, it's the same charade.
He turns to me: "What did he say?"
And I turn to Ben in the back seat:
"What did he say?" It reminds me of
the immigrant children at my school
back home and their parents who
didn't spika de language. Now it is our
turn to be the parents with the funny
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