Sometimes I can get out a complete Hebrew sentence, even if it is flawed. This morning in shul, for example, as I approached the washstand to perform my ablutions, the Levite who assists me was already in his accustomed place, standing upright and waiting for my arrival. I formed the words in my mind and said to him,
“Atah tamid nimsteh lifnei ani hegiah.”
(You are always present before I arrive.) He nodded in acknowledgement, I placed my hands over the wash basin, and he poured water over them from the silver plated cup.
What a thrill and what a miracle it is to speak Lashon Kodesh (the Holy Tongue) in the Holy Land! This ability is still new, tentative, and barely formed, but it is growing. It has not come easily and has far to go. Looking back over my gradual acquisition of Hebrew, however, might ring some bells out there.
I grew up in an English and Yiddish-speaking household in Brooklyn, the younger of two brothers. My parents spoke Yiddish to each other when they wanted to keep something confidential. Three of my grandparents were principally Yiddish speakers; the fourth, Grandma Rose, my Pop’s second wife (my father’s mother, Rivka, had died in middle age), spoke English well, but Pop hardly spoke to me, and my mother’s parents, my Bubbe and Zeide, communicated best in Yiddish, and as a result, I didn’t talk much with them. My parents tried to model correct speech. Mother especially disliked non-standard words and locutions, like “ain’t,” and my father stressed speaking up. He liked to hear what I had to say, not strain his ears to make it out.
In their day, classroom instruction included elocution. Students were expected to deliver formal speeches to the class and to school assemblies and were graded on pronunciation and enunciation. As first generation Americans, my parent felt it important to pass these skills on to their children. Yiddish, however, was not, in their view, important enough for conscious transmission to the next generation.
I had a reputation as a shy child, but I grew up in a very voluble family. At our frequent extended family gatherings, my father and uncles engaged in long discussions, often on political and money matters; my mother and aunts chattered while working in the kitchen about subjects I found difficult to follow. I interpreted much of what I heard by the tone in which it was spoken. My apparent shyness had a twofold cause: 1) It was difficult to get a word in edgewise, and 2) I hadn’t yet developed the conceptual framework or vocabulary to deal with those subjects.
In Hebrew schools, which I attended for two two-hour afternoon sessions per week for several years, the language focus was on acquiring mastery of rote reading from the Siddur. We also had lessons in modern Hebrew, using simple readers, but progress there was achingly slow. However, I can recall one scintillating lesson in grammar, given in the mid-1950s at the East Midwood Jewish Center, by an outstanding and progressive teacher, the red-headed and energetic Mr. Gittleman. One class – but I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t know what interactive pedagogical technique he used, but he engaged us totally. It amounted to an abrupt shift from the written to the oral tradition. Teaching conversation through conversing rather than exclusively through books made all the difference, but it only lasted one day. That was probably my first experience with Ulpan-style – or immersion – teaching.
My struggle to learn French in Junior High and High School was similarly laborious and protracted. Distractions were many, and the constant fear of being called on made me nervous about the whole procedure. In college, my French teacher, Georges Pistorious, a gregarious man, made the subject fun, engaged us in banter, and mixed in history and philosophy with his lessons. His warm, flowing personality and sense of humor opened up the subject for me, and I began to enjoy going to class. My grades rose from Cs to Bs. My best friend in college, Bob Greenberg, who took these classes with me, even majored in French! But I never visit France or Quebec, where I could have engaged in real-time, real-life conversation, and so I never acquired fluency.
My wife and I first visited Israel together in 1979, with our 13-month-old son. Our Hebrew was pathetically rudimentary – virtually non-existent. We engaged tutors from time to time, but the foreign language part of my brain was loaded with French vocabulary and constructions and leaped into action whenever I attempted to speak Ivrit. One of Yehudit’s distant relatives, a young woman, an architect who had studied at UC Berkeley, exasperated at our obliviously consistent use of English only, once exploded at me, demanding, “Why don’t you learn to speak Hebrew?!” I was taken aback. No one had taught it to me when I was young, and now, at age 34, I was hard put to take it up.
Why should she have minded? She had attended an American university, graduated from it with an advanced degree, and spoke excellent English. Why indeed? Because it was her second language, and it was an imposition to be forced to rely on it in her homeland. No matter how well she spoke English, it would still feel stilted in comparison to her mother tongue. My assumption of fluency was only a one-way street.
Back in Berkeley, our base of operations then, I took classes in Biblical and in Conversational Hebrew at Lehrhaus Judaica. My teachers were excellent, and I made slow progress, only to stagnate between classes. But I davened from the Siddur and studied Chumash, and in these ways pushed my self to enlarge my comprehension. I at least had the advantage of having learned to pronounce vocalized Hebrew at an early age.
We visited Israel again in the summer of ’86, in ’90 (when we studied for four weeks at Pardes, in the intermediate class), in ’95, and in ’98. In the fall of 1999, after our youngest child had graduated from high school and gone away to college, twenty years after our first visit together to the Land of Promise, we joined the Arad Arts Project, affiliated with WUJS (the World Union of Jewish Students – a Graduate Program in Jewish Studies), located in Arad between the Negev and Judean Deserts. We participated in the Artists’ Ulpan, and Yehudit ventured ahead into Level Bet and even earned a certificate of completion. There we began to use Hebrew on a daily basis, especially as we frequently found ourselves in a non-English-speaking environment.
When we paid a visit to the health food store, for example, we were confronted by a situation in which the proprietor spoke almost no English; in fact, our rudimentary Hebrew was better than his English, though we lacked knowledge of the names of most of the products we wished to buy. Fortunately, his daughter spoken slightly better English than he and was occasionally able to serve as a translator.
So it was that we entered that tentative world in which we could not know if the person to whom we wished to speak – the bus driver, for instance – could understand the language we knew best, but who, if we tried to speak Hebrew, might answer in that language, and in a manner that left us grasping for his meaning. We can call this the linguistic twilight zone.
One of the features of this zone (sometimes referred to as “being illiterate in two languages”) is the infantilization of one’s mental capacity. One is thrust back into a stage of early childhood, the victim of an incomplete vocabulary and possessed only halting forms of self-expression. Just as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (i.e., the history of the individual recapitulates the history of the species), to learn a new language one must start at the very beginning, and “become a little child again,” in order to advance. Naturally, this process plays havoc with the ego, which does not easily relinquish its hard-earned self-assurance and accept this regression to an earlier stage of development.
Not only did I have to learn to admit my ignorance and accept demotion, as it were, to a pre-school level, but I was also overwhelmed by flashbacks to junior high and high school language classes, where I was often distracted by the feminine beauty around me and was unable to follow the lessons. But one may use this regression to one’s advantage. One can retain one’s mature intelligence and recognize that the acquisition of Hebrew constitutes an expansion of one’s existing vocabulary and adoption of new speech patterns, some of which resemble French usage. There are new ways to use the adverb “very” (m’od, placed after the adjective), to say “many” (harbay), to say “too much” (yoter midai). A lot of the words we learned became staples of our vocabulary and formed the basis for increasing command of the language. Once the Aleph level is mastered (though taking it more than once is not uncommon and is often needed), can Bet and even Gimel be far behind?
Some of us are slowed down in our acquisition of Hebrew due to our continued reliance on our native tongues – whether English, Russian, French, Spanish, or Amharic – in the social, professional, and intellectual spheres. If you read a Russian paper, listen to radio news in Russian, speak to your friends and family in Russian, and prefer to patronize stores where Russian is the lingua franca, then of course your command of Hebrew will not much improve. The same dynamic is true for speakers of every foreign language here.
The State of Israel, in many respects attentive to the needs of its new citizens, attempts to provide a bridge to absorption. English and Arabic, along with Hebrew, are legally recognized official languages, and Russian has attained equal status to these in regions where Russian speakers are numerous or predominate. English, considered the pre-eminent international language, is taught in public schools beginning in the third grade. Israelis do not all master it – not by a long shot! – but those that do, or , let us say, those that speak it with some proficiency, are prone to apologize, as they say, “for my bad English.” “Gevaldt! I wish I spoke Hebrew as well as you speak English!” I often reply. These self-conscious folks have studied hard for their Bagrut – the high school exit exam – and they expect themselves to be mistake-free. That’s a challenge in any language, even in the language one first acquires, and even more so in the second or third. But some do succeed.
At the age of 61, I am again enrolled in a Bet Ulpan – for perhaps the fourth or fifth time – and am enjoying it. I feel definite improvement both in class and in my daily encounters – in shul, in the street, and in the market. The correct words occasionally now spring unbidden from my throat or form themselves easily enough when I need to express myself. However, I am still, of necessity, mute when I would like to speak. This inability to adequately express myself in words, however, this enforced silence, is not always a drawback. If I simply listen, I might acquire deeper understanding than when I speak too soon, without due reflection. I also have recourse to pantomime, a traditional Mediterranean skill. And I believe in telepathy. It is obvious to me that when I am among people who think in Hebrew and speak in Hebrew, it becomes easier for me to also think and speak in Hebrew. Yet there is a caveat.
When we lived in Arad, I once spoke with a retired Professor of Chemistry, who had made aliyah in the early 50s from the U.S., which he had entered as a refugee after the Second World War. Upon his arrival in Israel, he explained, he had determined to master Hebrew, and to that end he read only Hebrew newspapers, listened only to Hebrew language broadcasts, and applied himself to learning the language. He knew, he said, that if he relied on languages he already knew, as a crutch, it would delay and impede his acquisition of Hebrew. This was the course of action he recommended to me.
I am a writer, and my native tongue, for better or worse, is English. I have labored, through all these decades, to find my voice and perfect my mode of expression using all the resources available to me in the only language I know well, and with whose extensive literature I am familiar. I continue to read primarily English language books, periodicals, and newspapers, write letters, essays, stories, and poems in English, and speak both colloquial and formal English. I do not want to give up this form of communication. Yet I also want to learn Hebrew. I have yet to find the perfect balance.
– This essay first appeared in The National Jewish Post and Opinion on February 14, 2007
