languages

sorry for the short tid-bits of blog entries, but here's another piece i wrote a while ago on languages:

I want to share I sentiment I’ve been feeling, that I think will stay with me for quite some time.
To properly share what I’ve been thinking I’m going to share three anecdotes.

I’m sitting in a train compartment, with five other people including Tal Kita (an administrator on the trip), and a Bulgarian train director comes to collect our tickets. We discover that we do not have tickets but rather reservation slips. However, we certainly did not discover this by the director telling us. Very quickly we learn that the director speaks very, very little English, and is trying to convey his point in Bulgarian. Tal knows half a dozen words in Bulgarian and is trying to explain our case. She does so with few words and many more hand motions. Standing next to the director is a woman that speaks German and Bulgarian, and asks us, in broken English, if someone speaks German. Through all the ruckus, we are speaking Hebrew in our compartment as to not tell the Bulgarian woman our situation; as well as to mock them both. We then find two students on the trip, Micha, who speaks some Yiddish he learned from his family, and Ariela, who speaks German she learned in high school. Between them, and various hand motions, we finally are able to understand one another.

In Bulgaria, we visited a city called Plovdiv. Plovdiv is the second largest city in Bulgaria and was home to a large Jewish community before WWII, when the majority of the Jews made aliyah. In Plovdiv we visited a Jewish old age home and listened to the stories of the residents. Most of the speakers only knew Bulgarian and some Hebrew, so they required translators for the groups to understand. However, one group had a sweet woman that somehow knew Spanish. My roommate Danny, who was in that group, whose parents (from Venezuela and Mexico) spoke Spanish in the house, was able to communicate with the woman in Spanish. It then came out that the woman also spoke French, and was able to communicate with Natannah, who spent months there on an exchange program. Between the Hebrew (which most of the group could understand), Spanish (which Danny could translate), French (which Natannah could translate), and broken English, the entire group was thrilled to hear and understand her story.

The last anecdote took place last night. A Moroccan Jew came to speak to us last night with a tremendous life story: he was born in Morocco, went to college in France, studied Hebrew in college, made aliyah, and spoke to us in English. At the end of his lecture, I asked him a question. “I’m curious. You were raised speaking Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, with some French influence), you spoke French and Arabic at home, you studied in French and Arabic in France, studied Hebrew in college, speak Hebrew in Israel, are speaking to us now in English with a French-Israeli accent… what language do you think in?” He said a few very interesting things. He said, “When I read, I mostly read in French. When I speak to my family, I insist they speak in Darija. At work I speak in Hebrew. If I were in Morocco and talking about my feelings, I would speak in French. If you were to read my journal, sometimes I write from left to right and sometimes visa versa. If I stay in France for any more than a week, I dream in French. I dream in Hebrew now.”

There are countless conversations of language on Kivunim. How could there not be? After spending time in Greece, where efharisto, thank you and merci are all acceptable ways to say thank you, after experiencing such profound experiences as the ones I just shared, and living in a place where the street signs say welcome to Jerusalem, مرحبا بك في القدس, and bruchim ha’ba’im l’Yerushalim. It simply amazes me. I spent my entire life living in Manhattan, where I rarely was forced to encounter much else other than gracias at my corner bodega. And now here I am, speaking in Arabic to a kitchen staff member and my dorms, Hebrew to my councilor and English to my friends. What a world this is. In each country we go to, there will be no overlapping languages. Morocco – Darija, Spain – Spanish, Greece – Modern Greek, India – Hindi, the prospect of such a thing is mind-boggling. It was perhaps those moments that I mentioned above that really opened my eyes to the idea that people simply cannot communicate without language. Hold on. Don’t worry, I understand the simplicity of that statement. But the repercussions are tremendous.