After registering for the ulpan last week, I walked into a café on campus to buy a bottle of water. Being a frugal person (some would say packrat), I had saved a few 20-shekel notes from a previous trip to Israel. Naturally, I brought them with me, and I tried to use one of them to pay for the water. "Mah zeh?" asked the girl with a frown. "Zeh kesef," I said. Eyeing me warily, she said (in English), "That's not money." Apparently, these 20-shekel notes are so old they've been taken out of circulation and aren't good anymore. Another girl asked me incredulously how I had obtained these shekels as if I'd just stepped out of a time machine.
I took the bus back to the city center, and on the way home to my new apartment I passed a man who was sitting in a wheelchair in the street. He gestured to me, and I made my now habitual reply ("Ani lo medeber ivrit"). It quickly became evident that he didn't speak much English, but the encounter didn't end there. I figured out that he wanted me to push him down the street a few blocks, and, trying to be a good Samaritan (though not in Samaria), I complied. Thinking as most reasonable people would that a busy city street is no place for a man in a wheelchair, I tried to wheel him up on the sidewalk, but for reasons I could not fathom and he could not explain in English, he vigorously and resolutely insisted on remaining in the street. He tried to make small talk with me with the small English vocabulary he possessed.
"Jewish?"
"Ken."
"New York?"
"Ken."
"Of course," he muttered with a tone suggesting that New York Jews were not a rarity in Israel.
"Native New Yorker?"
"Lo, Florida."
"Ah, Miami," he said knowingly.
"Lo, Tampa." (I figured he'd never heard of Largo, Florida, where I grew up.)
"Atah sabra?" I asked.
"No, from Eastern Europe."
"Poland?"
"No."
"Russia?"
"No. East Germany. You know it?"
"Never been there."
A pause, and then, "You're twenty years too late."
These experiences got me to thinking about time. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested that in a sense Americans had no past because on the Western frontier "the nearest neighbors are ignorant of each other’s history." Even today, long after the frontier has disappeared, geographical mobility perpetuates this state of affairs. But here in Israel – even in the new and modern city of Tel Aviv – I find that remnants of the past have a way of sticking around and lingering in the present.
3 comments:
My totally unsolicited language learning on the fly tips:
#1 - Worry about meaning, not about perfection. This goes for both listening (i.e. try and get the gist of what people are saying and don't get hung up on individual words you don't know) and speaking (i.e. just keep talking, don't worry about mistakes). I think this is often the biggest difference between people who learn and people who fail to learn.
#2 - Use the language as much as possible. Even if people want to switch to English with you, insist if you can. The only way you get better is with practice.
#3 - Learning a language well enough to really get by in an immersion situation is tough, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's also fun, though. (OK, that's not really a tip, just an observation.).
Thanks, Carly. I appreciate these tips, and I think they will be very useful. In keeping with #2, I've been trying to speak short, simple Hebrew sentences with everyone from the bus driver ("Are you driving to Namir Road?") to the girl who sells me my coffee every morning at the university. (She's aware that I'm American and humors me despite my persistent mangling of the language.) It's helping me to get ever so slightly more comfortable, linguistically speaking. :-)
My experience has always been that the language comes faster once I stop worrying about it. In Montreal it took about 3 months to get through the accents, but then I was chattering away, making up all the words I didn't know (or at least cobbling them together). Oh, and local TV really really helps.
At least you can read it so if worst cames to worst, you could always revert to the liturgical Hebrew- i.e something like "I sought out the King of the Universe(ity) but could not find him. I checked the Sea and the Sky and the crash of the heavens, and Egypt, and also the doorposts of my house and my gates."
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