December 26, 2004

Alison on Aliyah:  A World of Inexpressibility

            I’m procrastinating right now.  Actually, I am doing anything and everything to avoid a huge project due this week, which is literally ripping apart the tenuous strands of hope I have built up that I will ever have mastery over the Hebrew language.  I conducted a “life history” interview last month, which lasted barely an hour and a half and took every ounce of concentration I had to understand and respond appropriately in Hebrew.  And it has taken me over a month to transcribe the damn thing.  I spent almost eight hours, straight, on it yesterday and ended up with four pages of transcript, corresponding to roughly ten minutes of the interview.  You do the math.

            It’s not the time that bothers me.  It’s not the intense frustration, the wondering if that word is “to shout,” or “to open,” or “to prevent.”  It’s not even listening to myself on tape, sounding like a complete moron while I try to put together a sentence that makes sense.  I suppose what gets to me the most is not knowing when the situation will change.  I know I’ve only been here for fifteen months, and I certainly know that the progress I’ve made – from the second to the sixth ulpan level in eleven months, from “how do you say ‘to complain’?” to being more or less fluent on the street – is amazing.  But sometimes my frustration with what I have yet to master outweighs my pride in what I have already achieved.

            I began a combined Masters and Ph.D. program in social psychology at Ben Gurion University a little over two months ago, and set off on a journey of truly uncharted waters.  I have yet to meet another native English speaker here, certainly not in my program.  I am taking six courses, all in Hebrew.  Although my statistics class might as well be in German, for even when I understand the professor, the concepts are completely foreign to me.

I spend most of my time in class jotting down the words I don’t recognize, while the students sitting near me read over my shoulder and try to write the translations.  Most of the theoretical readings are in English, but I am determined to write my papers in Hebrew and I have already given one presentation in Hebrew as well.  I spend my free time with the other four girls in my program, speaking only Hebrew and struggling to understand what is going on.

            There are days that I feel fairly pleased with myself, when I walk out of a class and am pretty sure that I understood about eighty percent of what went on.  There are other days when I leave a room having absolutely no clue what we talked about for two hours.  And then there are the times, more often than not, when I think I understood, and reacted accordingly, and then find out later that I missed some critical word or sentence and therefore got it all wrong.  This is the worst part of this particular stage in my language acquisition, and can make for some very embarrassing moments indeed.

            In truth, this has been undoubtedly the most humbling experience of my life.  Learning a language is not easy for anyone, but I am particularly unskilled at it.  This has taken painfully hard work and long nights of studying.  I rarely see great leaps of advancement; rather, each step forward is tentative and accompanied by at least two steps back.  Sometimes I catch myself speaking almost fluently; other times it seems to take hours to squeeze out the simplest of sentences.

            I have learned a powerful lesson about myself through this process.  When I lived in the States, I took for granted the fact that I could express myself clearly and articulately, and that people could understand me immediately.  As is probably obvious from my writings, I thrive and depend on this skill.  Only after I have been faced with a thorough inability to make myself heard and understood, have I realized how truly debilitating it can be to live in a world such as this.  I have had to let go of parts of myself that used to be central to my identity:  my security in my intelligence, my desire to make a good impression, my willingness and ability to participate in what is happening around me.

All of a sudden, I have become a person who makes mistakes in the most basic of sentence structures; who gets smiles of encouragement and/or amusement while trying to express a strong opinion; who sits quietly with a mountain of things to say but no facility to say them.  My friends here at school refer to me as “nice,” “quiet,” “sweet.”  I can say, on no uncertain terms, that I have never been described as such in America.

            A friend of mine, who is in a similar situation at Hebrew University, joked the other day that she understands now how the Czechoslovakian immigrant in her sixth-grade class must have felt.  Indeed, this is what I have become – the foreigner who is trying desperately to fit in but is nowhere close to succeeding.  But there is hope.  Yesterday I heard myself counting in Hebrew, and sometimes I even catch myself thinking in it.  It’s happening.. albeit very, very slowly.  And when this process is complete, no matter how many decades it may take, I will know that it was my greatest accomplishment.