Ask any new immigrant what they remember as their first Hebrew words and the answer, I discovered, was often a lesson learned the hard way.
By LIAT COLLINSHebrew Hear-Say logo(photo credit: )
There is a commercial for the peanut-flavored Israeli snack so popular and well known that it hardly needs advertising: "Abba, Imma, Bamba…"
This hatif is so common that it wouldn't surprise me if Bamba were the name that some local kids first called out, even before the more usual Mom and Dad.
Rosh Hashana being a time of new beginnings, I started wondering recently about first words. Kids grow up on the folklore of their early utterances and any mistakes they make are considered cute. Ask any oleh hadash (new immigrant) or veteran Israeli (Yisraeli vatik) what they remember as their first words - outside of Hebrew school - and the answer, I discovered, was often a lesson learned the hard way: A mistake so painfully embarrassing that the new word would be a Hebrew lesson for life.
Several of the friends and colleagues I asked admitted having suffered "verb-al" difficulties, in particular.
Deana Fein, a Jerusalem attorney, said: "I remember when I came to kibbutz on Hachshara with Bnei Akiva, I kept using the wrong version of 'to wash' in Hebrew. I think that as many words as the Eskimos have for snow, the Hebrew language has for washing… There are different forms in Hebrew for washing dishes (lehadiah kelim), launder (lechabes), to wash your hands or other parts of your body (lirhotz), rinse (lishtof) etc. Add to that the rules of Hebrew conjugation and it lends itself for a lot of confusion and laughs."
But at least it's clean.
Many is the new immigrant who has learned the hard way that eggs (beitzim) are the Hebrew equivalent of "balls" in slang. Asking the waiter the equivalent of: "Don't you have any balls this morning?" is not likely to improve the service.
Sometimes there's a delayed reaction. Another friend, Abba Engelberg, recalls: "When I first came [to Israel] I used to read the Hebrew paper with a dictionary. I came across the fancy word, for me, 'hasha'on mefager' (the clock is slow). Not yet having a car, I used to travel by bus. One day I was late for work and arrived at the bus stop just as the bus pulled away. In order to get it to stop, I called out as loud as I could: 'Ani mefager,' which I understood to mean: 'I am late.'" To his credit the bus driver stopped, let Engelberg on, and was solicitous: Not what you would necessary expect in response to a passenger yelling out: "I'm retarded."
Jerusalem Post Christian Edition editor Gershom Gale says the first word he learned in ulpan was "sfog" (sponge) because that's what the teacher was using to clean the board. "And I've been a 'sfog' language-wise ever since," he adds.
Up Front editor Amanda Borschel-Dan discovered that not all words are as sweet as they sound, or even as useful. She asked an Israeli friend in the States her favorite word. The friend loved the sound of lashleshet and passed it on. "It was another year before I learned what it means: bird droppings," she notes. Well, it's not something you can easily drop into conversation.
Post letters editor and columnist Judy Montagu recalls wondering how the word Tnuva, which she'd seen on lots of billboard ads, could mean milk, butter and cheese. How was a new immigrant to know it was the name of the company?
My former high-school geography teacher also had a case of mistaken identity. When she and her husband came to visit me in Tiberias many years ago they apologized for being late but had an original excuse: As they had approached the town, they had seen lots of signs saying: "To Egged," which they assumed must be an important historical site. Only after they had battled their way into the Egged bus station did they finally figure out their mistake.
More than one (misguided) person recalls mistaking a sign saying: "latekes" - to the ceremony - to be a sign pointing to where "latkes" were available. When there are no vowels, it's hard to get the point. After a year in the country, most realized that we don't even call those typical Hanukka pancakes latkes in Hebrew, but levivot.
Lawrence, another Jerusalemite friend, who arrived at the outbreak of the first intifada, notes: "The first topical Hebrew phrase I learnt during my first week in ulpan was 'hafarat seder' [disturbance of the peace]. This, I suppose, about sums up life in Israel. I would have thought that by now there should be a pop group with that name…."
Which only goes to show it doesn't matter what your first words were as an immigrant as long as you can still have the last laugh.
liat@jpost.com
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