The Mother Tongue as a Second Language

READ BY THE AUTHOR

I come from a zealously secular Jewish background. No one knew anything past Matzah and lox. My ancestors, eastern Europeans who fled before they could be massacred by the Jew killers of their late nineteenth century, threw off the yoke of their parents Hebrew. They were united by Yiddish as their music, at least the little they had left by the time I came around. My mother used the vestiges of that lyrical language on me and then to coo at my own boychicks with a likely mispronounced affection.

In preschool I fell in love with Judaism, where I danced the original line dance of a hora and began to hear the dissonant but mesmerizing sounds of Hebrew. Harsh and passionate, it wormholed its way into my mind even though I couldn’t know what it meant.

At holiday dinners and with my best friend’s family who let me tag along as they worshiped in their synagogue, I tried to recognize certain words, but it all felt like an unintelligible, something, something, mostly ending in a firm throat cleansing ch.

Throughout the course of this iteration of myself, I’ve met travelers like me, who trip over faith that wasn’t taught, but feels inevitable. So I felt when I went to Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn and saw that they offered Hebrew as a second language. But I was terrible at it. The Hebrew aleph bet felt like a score to a movie I should have learned, but got to right before the closing credits rolled. 

I labored through each barely recognizable Hebrew letter and then word. Over and over. Judaism is embedded, woven into my psyche, passed down through ancestors I’ve never met but loved nonetheless. Its language, not so much.

What I can do in English--the connections and clauses, the point and counterpoint, even the tense is beyond me in Hebrew. Which I thought was temporary as long as I was willing to do the hard work it took to get closer to the mother tongue.

When I moved onto school at Brandeis University, my Hebrew didn’t improve until I met a friend, a girl from Israel who seemed so worldly and spoke perfect English as well. We went through cartons of cigarettes while she patiently sat with me in dorm lounges pouring over the Hebrew version of Dick and Jane -- Ami v Tami. 

A great miracle happened when she invited me to come stay with her welcoming family in Israel one summer. While I’d been trying to pick out sounds individually, the eem endings from the oat ones, the masculine from the feminine, immersed on ancient streets, I took up the accent. One day I didn’t have it. The next it showed up.

So now I had the accent, but I still couldn’t speak when I met my Israeli born husband a few years later, though he brought me to Israel and bumped up my Hebrew game just a bit.

I have since delved into the Biblical Hebrew so different from the informal language of the Israelis today. The Old English to Israel’s current vernacular. Similar characters, different show.

The hardest challenge for me is to speak beyond my own anxiety though I managed enough to be able to hide things from my children when my husband cooperated and didn’t translate directly into English and repeat just to be sure he heard me right. 

“You said I should only give him $25 dollars?”

In the end, though they deny it, the children didn’t need the translation. Instead they got up to let the dog out in any language.

I began coming to Israel to visit my family here (they are his, but after 25 yrs and endless good times, I’m claiming them), it was touch and go and gave me a glimpse of what it was like to be a stranger in a familiar land.

In the beginning everyone starts in a near perfect English they all have. But ten minutes in and they’re talking to each other and I lean forward, hyper vigilant, trying to figure out what they’re saying and where to interject. But of course I can’t form sentences quickly enough. By the time I switch it in my head, translate my answer, come up with it and am ready to give it a go, the conversation has moved on.  

Language, as you must know by now, is my magic, but in Hebrew I’m stumped. And I sputter through anyway, with a proper accent, and the likely incorrect conjugations—all with little comprehension.

I’m not complaining. I don’t mind the occasional opportunity to retreat from a conversation without expectation.

In English my conversations often end in a nod of recognition and a spark in the eye. In Hebrew I get yelled at, spoken to like I might have a hearing impairment. “Meat or olives in the hummus?”

Osmosis and context have helped me tremendously so that I can understand the gist. It’s the details that get lost on me. That we are discussing where we should eat, I understand (and is a good bet in any given context), but what we’re having is a menu of words I try to pick out like the first kernels heated on a stove. Chinese? Deli? Best hummus. Or the inevitable, glidah, ice cream which is the most fabulous reward for a hard earned day in every language, and a word that always gets my attention.

Communication is mostly possible with an agreed upon form. And most people in Israel speak English. But it has also given me a greater understanding of how difficult it must be to puzzle into a new life and a new language as an immigrant anywhere. 

We are here for a family wedding and I met, as I always do, that same friend from the Brandeis lounge where I began my journey into Hebrew. We went into a restaurant on Tel Aviv’s pulsating Mediterranean coast and she did all the talking, even asking for the menu in English. Afterward we went outside to smoke a few and catch up on the directions life has taken us to since last we met--language entirely irrelevant.

I didn’t tell her, but I understand most of what was going on. In the last few trips I’ve noticed in retrospect that I don’t switch my brain to English in my mind or opt out. Instead I think I can finally sight hear, so that I don’t need English as my intermediary. I can’t say that I’m fluent, but I muddle through better than I ever have. 

It has been an interesting journey for me into this ancient language, the vernacular with no vowels and few soft endings. Its music is ancient and breathing, as people are and will be. No matter which language we learn to speak.