Language Memoir: A Return to Hebrew

Abstract

Language Memoir:A Return to Hebrew Sheila E. Jelen Review of: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) ( Seattle, University of Washington, 2018), edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg In compelling essays that range from literary meditations to pedagogical prescriptions, from literary analysis to personal memoir, What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) presents itself as the fruit of a new discursive community, one that is unique to Americans in the field of Hebrew studies. This volume brings together a group of contemporary scholars, novelists, and poets to speak to the question of how to re-engage Americans – children as well as college students, synagogue goers as well as secularists – in the study of Hebrew. What We Talk About is an invitation to Americans, like myself, who have straddled countries and languages, have found themselves teaching materials in American classrooms that don't always match up with the in-depth research they are doing in Hebrew, to tell their stories and to brainstorm future directions. In her own contribution to What We Talk About, Sokloff points to memoirs by "multi-lingual individuals who come to terms with incorporating more than one language into their lives," such as those authored by Richard Rodriguez, Eva Hoffman, Alice Kaplan, and Aharon Appelfeld.1 She encourages those whose native tongue is not Hebrew, but who have followed a Hebrew path, emotionally, academically and spiritually, to write "language memoirs" as well. In that spirit I would like to begin this review with my own, abbreviated, language memoir. All four of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors who had chosen to move to the United States instead of to Israel in the years after the war because [End Page 445] they felt that they had suffered enough. Subsequently, a generation later, I was born in the United States, but when I was about a year old, we moved to Israel. My brother was born just after the Yom Kippur war and my parents decided to leave Israel and return to Chicago, where I was raised. Whatever Hebrew fluency I had obtained in my day care environments in Israel was soon lost. When I pronounced Hebrew with an Israeli accent at my orthodox Jewish day school in Chicago, the children laughed at me, so I retrained myself to speak with an American accent. My education was profoundly Zionist – with many summers at Camp Moshava, a Bnei Akiva camp in nearby Wisconsin, and half a day from kindergarten through 12th grade dedicated to Hebrew and Judaic Studies. I remember the first Hebrew conversation I learned to conduct: Teacher: Shalom, Mah Shmekh? [Hello, What is your name?] Me: Shmi Shulamit. [My name is Shulamit] Teacher: Me'ayin at Shulalmit? [Where are you from Shulamit] Me: Ani Mi-America. Me-Ayin Ata? [I am from America. Where are you from?] Teacher: Ani Mi-Yisrael [I am from Israel] My formative Hebrew language experience took place in high school at Ida Crown Jewish Academy where my teacher, Mrs. Bass, refused to call me by my actual name (Shulamit) for all four years; instead, she called me Yocheved. In Mrs. Bass's class I read Agnon for the first time ("Tehilah" and "ha-Mitpahat"); I read Bialik ("El ha-Tzipor" and "ha-Matmid,"); I read Tchernichovsky ("ha-Adam Eino Elah"); I read Yizhar ("Efraim Hozer la-Aspeset"). I learned to conjugate verbs in every declension with every exception and to insert vowels into Hebrew texts. I took the Bechinah Yerushalmit. I joined my close friends at Camp Ramah the summer after high school but since I hadn't attended that camp as a camper, I didn't really have a natural peer group there. Instead, I became close to the group of Israelis who were dispatched by the Jewish Agency to work at the waterfront and in the woodshop, to lead religious services and Hebrew sing-alongs. I learned in one particularly awkward conversation that there is a difference between "lehitkaleah" (to shower) and "le-hitlakeah" (to burst into flames). I learned, as well, that "mah nishma" does not mean "what is heard...