”Ayn lee mah luh-hats-HEER.”
“I have nothing to declare.”
This past week’s orientation meeting for the Ulpan classes was a baffling introduction to Israeli pedagogy. At 5:20 pm, I showed up ten minutes before class was scheduled to start. The room was dark, and the teachers were still smoking outside. Finally, the two women exhaled, stubbed out their cigarettes, and walked inside, where they noticed me. “Are you here for the Ulpan?” the shorter one asked. I nodded.
Ten minutes later, I was one of two students in the room. Like the good graduate student I used to be, I had dutifully taken a seat in the second row, and produced a pen and a small notebook. What a nerd I was, but, then, I had long ago come to terms with that. And, anyway, wasn’t this so-called nerd paradise? It turns out that, even among extremely bright scientists, there exists the same social-grouping-trends and instant labeling that most people think doesn’t exist outside of high school. Wrong. Once a nerd, always a nerd. I exuded so much nerdiness that the cool postdocs (the ones who had to ask for paper and who left to answer their cell phones) were careful to sit far away from me.
The teachers examined the classroom as though they had never seen one before; the shorter one tested the sliding vertical dry-erase boards, impressed with the Institute’s amenities. The other wandered by a row of folding seats and raised one eyebrow. “Padded!” she said to me, scandalized. Then she gave me an appraising look, and asked something in Hebrew. I looked back at her.
“Do you speak Hebrew?” she asked. No, I said.
“Can you read or write it?” No, I replied, and thought, That’s where you come in.
Gradually, more students began to arrive; most sat in the last three rows. One fair-haired guy wandered in and started chatting confidently in Hebrew to one of the teachers. Showoff, a small voice inside me said. The shorter teacher, a woman with short black hair, looking lawyer-ish in a purple blazer and black pants, beamed at him. The other teacher strode around the room; she was as tall as I am, and looked as though she were about to lead an aerobics class. Her shirt resembled the front of a Converse sneaker, laced up with a wide shoelace. I thought absently that she would not have passed the James Irwin Charter High School Dress Code for Teachers, or, for that matter, the dress code for students.
Once it looked as though the last of the students had arrived, the shorter teacher cleared her throat and looked at us. We numbered about thirty.
“Shalom, shalom, shalom!” she called out, and then launched into a monologue. In Hebrew.
Half the class understood her, nodding and laughing at what were evidently appropriate spots. The rest of us, including two friends sitting next to me, listened glumly.
The tall teacher eventually turned to us and translated a few words: “First, we will take down your identity numbers. Please give us your passports.” For the next twenty minutes, the tall teacher would stroll around, collect five or six students’ documents, and take them to the other teacher, who then wrote down our names and passport numbers. Then the first teacher would wander back, return that set of documents, and collect another.
In the second row, my friends and I muttered, Would it not be a thousand times more efficient to have us pass that thing around the room and fill it out ourselves?! “This is the way things work here,” said the guy sitting next to me, with a sigh. “Do we really start tonight?” he asked the tall teacher, optimistically retrieving a pack of cigarettes from his bag and looking toward the door. “I mean, for the whole two hours?”
“Yes, of course we start learning tonight,” she replied, lounging against the podium at the front of the room. I could tell he badly wanted to ask, Well, when?
Soon enough. Once the last document had been returned, the first teacher left with our vital statistics. The other teacher introduced herself and whipped out a dry-erase marker.
“Ani Rebekah,” she said, gesturing at herself, and repeating it a few times, for good measure. “Ani me Israel.” Well, that was easy enough. “Me ain at?” she asked each student. Where are you from? We proceeded around the room, revealing the international nature of the Institute’s student body; students hailed from countries including Serbia, Australia, Russia, India, Germany, England, Italy, and Slovakia.
When she got to me, I said, “Ani me America.” She rolled her eyes and said, “America, America.” I waited, wondering if this was a political commentary. She shook her head.
“The U.S.?” I tried. She gestured with her hands: come on, come on. “Colorado?” The rest of the class snickered and I decided that I did not like them very much. My two friends valiantly kept straight faces. What more did she want? My street address?
“America, Africa, Asia,” she said in an exasperated manner, pointing the marker at me. “These are all continents! You cannot be from America. Please! There is North America, South America, Latin America.” She ticked them off on her fingers.
Yes. I was a Continentist. Worse, an Americanist. Whatever you called it, I had committed a Geographical Tragic Flaw. Strike One.
“I am from the United States! Ani me Autsod Habrit!” she insisted, and came over to where I was sitting to make sure I Got It. Cupping her ear at me, she cocked her head. Feeling all of about twelve years old, I repeated the phrase, and when she went back to the board, wrote it in big dark letters in my notebook. Give me a break, I thought. “I’m an American” is my identity. But apparently I had just stuck my big semantic foot in my mouth.
We continued the meet-and-greet session. Rebekah next had people identify their professions. Oh, goody. Everyone in the room was a postdoc. They replied: My profession is biology, physics, mathematics, bioinformatics, chemistry. Then I was up.
My profession is literature, I said. The rest of the class laughed, and Rebekah staggered back as though I had said I was a stripper.
“What?” she asked in disbelief. “Here? At the Institute?” More laughter.
“No.” This was not exactly how I’d pictured things going. How could I have made an enemy of the teacher in the very first hour of class? “I’m not a postdoc,” I explained.
She shrugged, and briskly told me the word for “literature,” which I forget. Siffrit? It sounded like “suffer.” How appropriate. After Rebekah had established where everyone came from, what their profession was, and whether they were married or not, she fired off a stream of Hebrew to the advanced level of the class. From what I understood, they were to jot down a short note that proved they could read and write Hebrew, and then they could leave, while we illiterates learned the alphabet. The advanced ones looked immensely relieved to be rid of us, and scattered. The rest of us gazed forlornly toward the door, but Rebekah pressed onward. She began to write down the first four letters of the alphabet (placing them between two horizontal lines, as though we were learning to write in cursive all over again), then the vowel signs (which aren’t letters in Hebrew, but a series of lines and dots), and short words.
The twelve of us who knew we were resigned to temporary illiteracy started to write down what was on the board in desperation. I squinted and frowned as I tried to distinguish between the formal and informal versions of the unfamiliar letters, and the teacher caught my look.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Are you unhappy? Is the Hebrew alphabet too hard for you?”
Sarcasm, I learned in my first year of teaching high school, is pedagogically destructive to students–not to mention highly insulting, when leveled at adult students. I gave the international mime-gesture for, Heck, no, everything’s fine, thanks kindly for asking, and forced a smile. At this point, I figured my chances were better, not using any language at all. Rebekah turned back to the board, and I had an instant urge to write in my notebook so my friend could see, “Whatever! Like, she is SO mean!” Then I remembered that I was twenty-eight, and twenty-eight-year-olds had to deal with the cranky real world in a responsible, mature way. Twenty weeks of this?
I could hardly wait for recess.
