“Sha-hu-NAH.”
“Neighborhood.”
Occasionally, in this house, we have exchanges like the following one that make both of us gape at what we perceive to be unfathomable deficiencies in each other’s education.
Me, shocked: “Are you sure you never heard of Sesame Street? Or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?”
My husband: “No, we didn’t have those. They did show a cartoon once a week, though, before bedtime.”
Me, even more shocked: “Once a week?!”
I prefer not to mention exactly when I stopped watching Sesame Street; as an older sister, it was my duty to watch the show with my brother.
There’s a lot you’ve missed out on if you’ve never seen these shows (the fading cultural iconography of the Eighties notwithstanding): you wouldn’t know who Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, or the Cookie Monster were. Nor would you still have the Count’s song ringing in your head: “One-two-three-FOUR-five, six-seven-eight-NINE-ten, eleven-twe-e-E-elve.” Or, “Would you be my / Would you be my / Won’t you be my neighbor?”
Of course, kids growing up in other parts of the world have their own cultural references, without knowledge of which, you seem to have landed straight from Mars. When my husband first brought home a trio of “Kinder Surprise” chocolate eggs, I apparently regarded them as fascinating specimens of another planet.
“You’ve never seen these before?” my husband asked me in an incredulous tone, after returning from a Friday-morning trip to the corner store to buy the weekend edition of Haaretz. He popped open a box to reveal three foil-wrapped eggs, each the size of an elongated golf ball. The foil featured a roly-poly jovial egg-man, the Kinder Surprise mascot, decorated with a white background, and orange and chocolate-colored stripes. “This is terrific chocolate! Look: white and dark.” He twisted open the chocolate egg shell (as you would gently twist an Oreo), and out rolled another egg–this one, with one orange and one yellow half. Inside the egg was a toy (some assembly required) and a tiny scroll of instructions.
“Wow!” I breathed, entranced. The U.S. chocolate monopoly known as Hershey’s has evidently kept the Kinder people (who could apparently infiltrate the iron curtain but couldn’t get into the Pennsylvania suburbs) out of American kids’ vocabularies.
The toys fit in the center of your palm; so far, we’ve constructed a small airplane with a propellor that spins, two puzzles, a train engine with moving wheels and struts, and a whole series of trademark-infringing-Ghostbuster-kids figurines.
The chocolate is addictive. A box of three eggs costs about twelve shekels.
Yesterday, in the corner store where we usually buy the Kinder Surprise eggs and mid-week staples, one of the owners was in a jubilant mood.
“Maccabi Tel Aviv won last night!” he cried, as I showed up at the checkout stand. “They’re the Euroleague champions!”
“That’s great,” I said.
“We drank a lot of vodka,” he confessed, ringing up my apples and yogurt. “It was a marvelous victory!” Other members of his staff, a woman with dark hair and a wide smile, and a tall, pale teenage boy, were standing near the doorway, talking about the game in Russian. The previous evening, while thousands of Israelis were tuned into the Euroleage game, my husband was listening to the Czech hockey team lose to Russia; I thought it best not to bring this up.
“How much are the cherries?” I asked, pointing at the plastic boxes at the end of the checkout stand.
“Fifteen shekels,” the owner said, still reminiscing. “Excellent win!” Then he looked down at the cherries. “No, you don’t want ‘em; it’s still too early in the season. They’re ra’A!” (It’s best not to translate that.)
Hi, neighbor.
