Linguistic recollection device on Ostrovski Street
Along from the wall where Jake was pushed and broke his arm sometime around 1986 was when I first spoke Hebrew.
I was standing with a group of friends in front of a pet shop.
I can’t remember whether there were cats or dogs for sale (they sold dogs in shops in those days, before Pets4Homes). There were tropical fish. A wall of bubbling aquaria with platys, mollies, guppies and angelfish.
Again, I can’t recall the topic of conversation.
For the preceding year I had been listening.
Taking in the spoken word. Absorbing the language, for, when I arrived in the country I had very limited command of Hebrew; Shalom, ken, tov and todah rabah.
The anti-Israel professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky was the first to write about what he called the ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD for short; this is a brain process that allows humans to speak a language idiomatically, that is, like a native.
The device switches off roundabout five or six – after that, if you learn a language that is different to your mother tongue (or any language, if, for example, you have been reared by a family of wolves), your language skills will be limited – there will be a subtle but detectable difference between you and your peers who from birth have been surrounded by that language with its accents, turns of phrase and idiosyncrasies.
This is not great if you want to learn a new language, making you destined to always sound foreign.
This is not to say that it is impossible to ‘talk like a native’ just very, very difficult.
Remember the scene in Inglorious Basterds where Michael Fassbender, playing an undercover Englishman, gives himself away by using the wrong fingers to communicate ‘three’ – that kind of thing.
For a year, as I say, I had listened to my peers. I imagine for the most, except when talking in English I was silent. I am not sure how I responded or behaved when a question was directed at me in Hebrew requiring a response. I suspect I either replied in English, made a gesture (this was a time when my aunt Faye told me to stop shrugging) or remain silent.
I suspect when I wasn’t ignored, I was considered odd.
I am not sure if before this age I was singled as the other. Looking back at my childhood I was always an outsider, whether the Jew or the dark skinned and black-haired boy amongst sandy Scots, he who couldn’t talk football (Rangers or Celtic) or, because of my family’s economic divergence.
Moving from a life in Scotland where your dad spends his days making pies to an absorption centre in pre-Startup Nation Israel was a big change.
And so, the trauma of this switch did things to me that I will one day understand, perhaps when I meet an appropriate therapist.
The point of all this is returning to language.
For a year, living in Israel I barely uttered a word of Hebrew.
Much of the time I was silent.
In today’s world I would have risked the label of selective mutism. This is when a person is silent, is unwilling although more realistically unable to talk, whether because of anxiety, social phobia, or neurodiversity.
Some people have remained silent for years.
I only didn’t talk when Hebrew was being spoken.
Thank you Addy/Elor, Jake, Naftali, and David for inclusion.
I listened.
I don’t know why I didn’t or couldn’t talk.
I think, looking back, in part this was because people who talked Hebrew with a non-Israeli accent were mocked.
Israel is a country where unusual accents are the butt of many jokes. Which is ironic as it is a country of many accents.
I have never coped well when people laugh or make fun of me, no matter how justified.
I don’t mind making fun of myself; that is something else.
And so, rather than being singled out for being the boy with the Scottish accent speaking Hebrew I was the boy who was silent.
Until that moment. At the pet shop.
My friend Naftali was describing the mating habits of a pair of hamsters when I replied to his comment.
In Hebrew.
These were my first words spoken in that language outside of my Bar Mitzvah or 1 on 1 Hebrew classes with old man Eli.
I remember my peer’s surprise.
I didn’t know you understood what we were saying. Was the first reply. Then wonder at my facility with the language. Shortly after, it was forgotten, and I started chatting in Hebrew, doing my best to sound like everyone else – the guttural rolling r’s and ch’s and so on.
I have always had a problem talking about something where I might make a mistake.
I suspect this is aligned with another modern concept of persistent desire for autonomy. Where a person struggles to adapt or adopt to the behaviour of others; someone who prefers, if possible, to beat their own drum or, in the words of Scot M Peck, take the path less travelled.
(I have recently checked to see whether Peck was writing about neurodiversity in his books – he wasn’t).
Some people can maintain a silence, others can’t stop talking.
An article I read yesterday said that collectivist societies prefer listening whereas individualistic ones – the West are more inclined to talking.
I am not sure where that places Israel and the rest of the Middle East. Probably halfway.
What is the lesson I take from this reflection?
When the time is right, the talking starts.
If you push someone to talk, perform, or act before they are ready, you might give them the encouragement they require, equally, set them back.
Think. Sisyphus.
