My Nephew, Whoever He Is in Hebrew

I had just dropped my brother in law and nephew at the front door while I looked for parking, which is basically a true test of any driver’s capabilitues in Israel. Having found a spot, I was now trying to explain to the yeshiva security guard who I was and who I was looking for.

My Hebrew, after 12 years of living in Rehovot(Aliyahversary was Aug 12), and being corrected by my family all the time, is functional. Serviceable. Well, to me, maybe not to the people I am talking to at the time.

What it is not, apparently, is good enough to explain the specific family relationship between a man and his brother in laws’s son, because I stood there in front of the security guard, a perfectly patient man waiting for me to finish a sentence, and I had absolutely nothing.

The word for uncle, I knew. Dod. Easy. Similar to Dude (Shemesh) which is the word for a hot water boiler, which is either a coincidence or a statement about uncles that I choose not to examine. The word for aunt is doda. Fine.

The word for nephew, though, the word I actually needed at that precise moment, that word had simply never lodged anywhere in my brain. I had apparently been moving through Israeli life for over a decade without ever once needing to introduce a nephew in Hebrew, and the bill had come due. To be fair, we have had 3 others spend time in Yeshivot over the last few years, but I guess I never had to use the term nephew, in Hebrew.

This illustrates something real about how one absorba a language in daily life: patchily, unevenly, with enormous gaps in exactly the places your life hasn’t taken you yet. I know the Hebrew for “Go to the mamad” (the safe room) because that sentence has been relevant to my life in Rehovot. Sadly.

Anyway, the security guy, to his credit, found this funnier than I did. He offered a few options. Ben ach, he said, which literally means son of a brother, a phrase with the warm poetry of a legal document.

He also mentioned achyan, which is apparently the actual dedicated word for nephew and which I had not recalled from earlier Israeli life up to that point. I repeated it several times, the way you repeat a new word hoping it will stick, knowing it probably won’t until you need it again in another embarrassing context.

What people outside Israel might not fully appreciate about making Aliyah as an adult is this: you are not learning a language in a classroom and then moving somewhere to use it.

You are learning it in real time, under real conditions, in front of real people, many of whom are politely pretending not to notice that a grown adult just blanked on a basic kinship term. Or called a sink, a harp.

Your kids, meanwhile, are dreaming in Hebrew within three years and will correct your pronunciation without visible regret. My youngest recently admitted with a sigh about my accent the way only teenager can sigh, which is to say, with her entire body.

The nephew, for what it’s worth, had no idea this went on, and would probably think the whole thing was hilarious.

When I told the story at dinner that night with the kind of detail and dramatic pacing my stories take on, the part where I said “hu… the son… from my wife’s… brother… ” apparently was too funny for all.

I am pretty sure there is almost nothing better for my family than watching me fail in slow motion at something that one was supposed to know.

Achyan. I know it now. Maybe 🙂

Filed under lessons learned through mild public humiliation.

The language keeps finding the holes in me, and I keep patching them one embarrassing scene at a time.