March 22, 2006

Alison on Aliyah:  Aliyah Is Never Over

            A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a good friend of mine, an Israeli who has followed—in fact, been largely responsible for—my aliyah progress over the past two and a half years.  When I told him that my aliyah and klita (absorption into society here) are still the focus of a great deal of attention for me and tend to involve daily struggles in many domains, he looked at me witheringly and declared, “Alison, it’s over.  You’ve done it.  Your aliyah and klita are complete!”

            I couldn’t believe that anyone could actually believe that that was true.  And then I started to wonder if this is really the general belief about aliyah—that after a year or two, it’s a done deal, with no more struggle and no more difficulty.  When I asked my friend why it is that people who made aliyah over twenty years ago still refer to themselves as olim chadashim (new immigrants), he didn’t have an answer.  I told him that this might be the first clue that his assumption that aliyah is an experience or concept that ever ends is a complete falsity.  Indeed, I admitted, I feel more like an outsider in Israel now than I did on my first trip here at age seventeen.  Every day I come face to face with something else that I thought I understood but then realize that it is, in fact, now totally foreign to me.

            I have been coming to terms with this more acutely over the past few months, since passing the two-year mark and starting to see that these feelings may never go away.  I also just started attending my fourth and final semester’s classes at Ben Gurion University, and, although there are days that I see tremendous improvement in my Hebrew, I have begun to wonder whether I will ever be truly fluent.  I find that while in the mornings, I can speak freely and with few to no mistakes, my competence wanes exponentially as the day wears on and my exhaustion grows.  By the time my 4:00pm class rolls around, I can barely string together a comprehensible sentence to save my life, and my notebook becomes filled with words that just don’t compute in my over-taxed brain by that hour.

            And then yesterday I experienced an official low point in my Hebrew career.  I was at the library, accessing some articles I needed to print out from the online system.  After sending the articles to the printer, I took my handy copy card, which had about 60 shekels on it for this express purpose, and semi-absent-mindedly plunked it into the first printer I came across in the library.  About 15 pages came spinning off from the printer before I glanced at the card reader and realized that my money was rapidly disappearing—much more rapidly, in fact, than it had the previous time I had used it.  I watched in dismay as 60 shekels turned to 40, and then 15, and then 2, within a matter of seconds.  I had a sinking feeling that something was wrong, but I figured that perhaps the library’s printer was more expensive than the other one I had used in the student center, and perhaps I was just paying for convenience.  I took my now-deflated card and proceeded to refill it, adding another 60 shekels of my hard-earned money.  I returned and continued to print out the remaining 15 pages of course articles.

            Right around this time I happened to notice the multiple, huge, glaring signs pasted to all available surfaces surrounding both the computer screen and printer, all screaming in Hebrew, “COLOR PRINTER ONLY!  1.70 SHEKELS PER COPY!  ONLY USE FOR COLOR COPIES!!!”  I realized that I had just paid approximately 30 times more than the normal price for each page I had printed, and why?  Because Hebrew just doesn’t come automatically to me the way English does.  When I would look around a store in America, the labels and signs and directions would simply enter my brain instantly, with nothing that I would really define as active effort.  This kind of “latent reading” is simply a function of one’s familiarity with one’s mother tongue.  Here in Israel, everything takes painstaking effort for me to understand fully, and there is no such thing as skimming a page or getting the basic idea of an article, without spending hours sounding out words with a dictionary at my side.  So at most opportunities, and particularly when I am tired, I simply ignore written Hebrew.  Without taking the express effort to read those signs on that printer, it was as if they didn’t exist to me.  And last week, I paid 400 shekels in late fees because I have been ignoring all the utility bills I get in the mail that I can’t understand.  Avoidance has become one of my best friends, and after two and half years here, I find this utterly depressing and frustrating.

            On the other hand, I gave my first presentation in Hebrew a few weeks ago—a full 90 minutes of speaking only in Hebrew in front of 20 native-speaking academicians.  I was quaking in my boots and desperately hoping I was making some utterance of sense out of the jumble of foreign gobbledygook in my head, but I got through it.  I even got some applause at the end (either because they liked it or they were thanking God it was over!).  I also took my first test in Hebrew a little while ago, and got an 88.  I still don’t know how I managed that one.  I suppose aliyah is a matter of taking the good with the bad, the highs with the lows, the little satisfactions with the bigger disappointments, the minor and hard-won accomplishments with the huge, sweeping, dignity-crushing failures.  And I definitely don’t think my aliyah will be over anytime soon.