The first ten days, chapter 3: Crossing (or occupying) the divide

It is rather a fascinating thing to be in a country where you understand nothing, and where there is a fear (however slight, here, and even slighter by the fact that we get to choose to be here) of letting others know who we are. It would be horribly amiss to suggest that anyone here had been anything but entirely courteous and sweet and inviting. People try to guess what you want and sometimes just decide to give you more than you could possibly ask for. Sometimes they get so excited about their products that they just keep feeding you samples until you are too full to actually want to buy anything else (like the falafel shop that fed us each several falafel balls while we tried to express that we wanted falafel sandwiches, which we were, by that point, no longer hungry for).

And our language has improved – we feel it in the way we can transition from new letters to old ones, from sounds that used to make our throat ache but now no longer do. The transition between a guttural “R” and the rolled “R” of Spanish, for instance, is no easy task. Now it is not simple, but not impossible, either. And we can be courteous with people, and frequently ask for what we want (or for close enough to what we want) so that we actually get it (perhaps even before we are full). One of our teachers gave us each a simple children’s book today – about the level that we might read to Huck, complete with lift-able pages and a mirror on the last page. Considering that this is the start of our second week with a foreign alphabet, it feels exciting.

And, contrary to what we had been told, not a single person has asked us about our religious affiliation. Perhaps it is only because we can’t go that deep into a conversation yet, but even the people who speak passable English have completely ignored the area. We did, however, have one small moment, when one of our teachers was trying to remember/figure out how to pronounce “Ben” – it is not a common name here. She said, “I got it! It’s Bingamin!” And I misheard her, and assumed it was like the Hebrew, and said, “Yes! Binyamin.” And she turned a little white. She said, “That is OK in here, but out there don’t say that, because people will hear and think, ‘oh, he’s from Israel. He’s Jewish.’” Daph and I turned a bit red, and hearts thumping, got through the last few minutes of class. I am farely sure that she has, by now, put two-and-two together, and, combined with questions about visits to Israel (she says, “Call it Palestine here. It could be dangerous”), realized that we are Jewish. It doesn’t seem to have changed much of anything, although it has heightened my desire to bring her homemade rugalach. . . .

But it is also clear that our two cultures come from a common stock – on our first day of classes, when we were learning how to pronounce letters, one of the teachers stopped us, and said to me, “Do you have an Arab mother? Do you speak Arabic?” Apparently my accent (however limited the scope) was passable. Days later, at our local produce stand, a man started jabbering to Daphna about the hail. When she didn’t understand, the owner of the stand translated that we were American, and another woman in the stand said Daphna looked Arab. She proceeded to ask if Daphna’s parents had also been born in the States, or if they were born in this part of the world.

Strange how it all works.