abluetruedreamofsky: Writers in Israel

I haven't posted anything in a long, long time. Well, not that long if you think of it in terms of the history of the Holy Land, and that would be appropriate, as Peter and I are now here in Eretz Israel, to teach our six-week course in creative writing at Bar Ilan University.

Who wants to read about this? I'm not sure, but I'll start writing a few things here in case anyone is interested. We've been here one week, and only now am I starting to feel that all the rest of me (brain, for example) has caught up with my body; a ten-hour flight means you're a long, long, way from home, and it takes the brain longer to make the trip than it takes the body.

The first thing I'll say is that anyone who blithely told me before the trip, "Oh, everyone in Tel Aviv speaks English," was wrong. Really, everyone here speaks Hebrew. Probably some people only speak Arabic. Some people ---many, perhaps---also speak a little English, and a few more are bilingual (and are from, you know, Brooklyn.) Taxi drivers, bus drivers, the guy in the market, the halvah pusher---they speak Hebrew. Our students, the woman running the Pilates place, the scary girl seeing us through customs when we arrived---they also speak English.?

Boy, do I wish everyone here spoke Spanish. Or English. Or even French. Even my French is better by far than my Hebrew. Not being able to speak and understand fills me with panic and dread. Even though there is always SOMEONE around who speaks English, I just wince at not being able to understand the most basic things. I've added "Do you speak English" and "I don't speak Hebrew," to my basic greetings and "please" and "thank you." (The basic greeting of hello and goodbye was pretty easy, being "shalom.")

I'm now trying to master "sabada" which sounds enough like Spanish's "sabado" that maybe I'll remember it, even though it doesn't mean "Saturday," it means "cool." I hadn't realized before how good my Spanish is---in Spanish, I can compare things. In Spanish, I can express a variety of emotions from boredom to excitement, love to hatred. In Spanish I can ask questions, from where the bus is to where you're from and what you do for a living and whether this weather pleases you or not. In Spanish, I now realize, I can kind of, you know, TALK. In Spanish I can even be funny, and can always add "-isimo" to indicate the adjective is even more so, or "-ito" to indicate it's less.?

In Hebrew, I'm lost. Even though I knew the alphabet when I arrived, and a couple of basics like how to make some words plural, there is nothing to hang onto here for me as there is in a Latin-based langauge. There are no cognates! (except the new arrivals to the language, like "autobus" and "telefone."). There is no synaptic leap I can make from "blue" to "lavah." For every word, I need some insane mnemonic, like remembering "sabada" by thinking of "sabado."?

Okay, perhaps more on this soon, plus the history of the Middle East. If you have time.?

Source: http://sarahvanarsdale.blogspot.com/2012/08/writers-in-israel.html

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