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August 2001 Issue

Fashlot B'Ivrit: When Hebraic Triumph Goes Wrong

By Mati Milstein

JERUSALEM--Let me set the scene for you: I am sitting in a hip café at the top of Haifa's Mount Carmel. I am with a beautiful girl and everything is right on target. I am suave, I am cool, I can speak the language. We finish our meal and the waitress, also a beautiful girl, asks us if we want dessert. I am good, I am in the groove, I want a hot drink. I turn casually to her and answer, "Ken, b'vakasha. Eizeh shtuyot khamot yesh lakhem?"

Meaning, of course, "Yes, please. What hot bullshit do you have?"

Both beautiful girls cracked into uncontrollable, hysterical fits of laughter. I wanted to run out of the café--down the mountain, up the coast, across the Lebanese border, through Beirut and onwards up into Turkey.

Instead, I sat there. And suffered considerably.

It happens to everyone. Somewhere between Sinai and America many of us seem to have lost that special linguistic gene that enables us to learn and gracefully speak the ancestral tongue.

Sure, there are moments of Hebraic triumph, but there are also times when we simply lose it in mortifying moments best swept far beneath the Oriental rug.

But for the educational and comedic benefit of every dedicated student of modern Hebrew, I have painstakingly reassembled some of these classic Semitic snafus.

Let me introduce Ruddy Halimi, a new immigrant from Paris and a combat soldier in a parachute battalion. He walked proudly and confidently through Tel Aviv with his uniform, rifle, and polished red boots. Unfortunately, the army paid less attention to teaching its soldiers basic Hebrew vocabulary than it did to teaching them warfare. Ruddy will tell the story himself.

"I did a mistake one time so funny," the native French-speaker meticulously wrote me in broken English. "Someone ask me about a direction. He ask me how we can go to Kikar Rabin. I answer him you must to turn left on the next makhzor."

Unfortunately, Ruddy substituted "makhzor" for "ramzor," the correct Hebrew word for traffic light, thus accidentally telling the poor man to whom he was given directions, "You must turn left at the next menstrual cycle."

"Ahaah!!" Ruddy wrote me in French. Or English? Or fractured Hebrew?

Hanah Fisher, a Tel Aviv resident originally from Chicago, ran into trouble visiting her Israeli friend Kobi at his family's home.

Kobi's younger sister, Shiri, was a beautiful amateur model. On that particular evening, Hanah was in the yard examining Shiri's photographic portfolio with Kobi, Shiri, another five brothers, their parents, and numerous random friends and neighbors.

Wanting to compliment Shiri on the stunning photographs, Hanah turned to her and gushed, "Wow, eizeh goufah yesh lakh!"

Rather than saying "Wow, what a great body ("gouf") you have!" as was her intention, Hanah accidentally said, "Wow, what a great corpse you have!"

The 27 siblings, 45 neighbors, and 87 members of the extended family screeched to a halt, silent, and turned to stare in horror at Hanah. Five years later, she has yet to live down the corpse compliment.

It seems there is no limit to how early in life a budding Hebrew student can start making mistakes.

Albuquerque newspaper editor Tema Milstein, (no relation to the author), spent a traumatic year in Israel with her family when she was nine years old.

"I thought I had really made it," she said, "when the Israeli kids in my fifth grade class asked me if I could speak Hebrew yet and I answered, "Kaka, kaka."

Meaning to say "Kakha, kakha" ("So, so"), Tema actually answered "Doody, doody."

"They thought it was very funny and had me repeat it several times," Tema recalled. "I thought they were just impressed with my handle on the language, until my only Israeli friend at the time pulled me over and insisted in English that I stop repeating it for them and told me what I was saying. Needless to say, I was mortified. Of course, that was only the beginning of a long journey of mortification as a fifth grader learning Hebrew by being thrown into a Hebrew-only Israeli school."

Even journalists are not immune to such mishaps.

Blake Lambert is a Jerusalem-based radio reporter whose very livelihood depends upon his comprehension and expression of the Hebrew language.

"I was trying to improve my still lackluster Hebrew," Blake recalled in a world-weary, rather resigned fashion. "My friend Yamit, an Israeli native, was telling me about her ghosts (shedim)."

Suddenly intrigued by the topic of conversation, Blake asked her, "'What about these shada'im (breasts)?' She started laughing and I was clueless. And yes," Blake admits, "Yamit has pretty good breasts."

"S" (who refused to let herself be publicly identified) spent time in Jerusalem working as an aide to a prominent Israeli Knesset member.

One day, S answered the telephone and took a message for a fellow parliamentary assistant. She wrote (or thought she wrote) in Hebrew, "So and so called re: such and such a document. When you return to the office, I can show you what she's talking about."

However, in spelling the infinitive form of the verb "show," S inadvertently left out the alef and spelled another word which sounds exactly the same: "L'harot."

Everyone in the office got a good laugh out of S's parliamentary memo. It actually read, "So and so called re: such and such a document. When you return to the office, I'll get you pregnant."

By the way, S no longer works at the Knesset.

We will study hard, we relentless students of the Hebrew language. We will immerse ourselves in Hebrew books, newspapers, and movies. We will never give up. From one glaring social faux pas to the next we will persevere until one fine day we will all be able to say, correctly and coolly, "Yes, please. What hot drinks do you have?"

  Mati Milstein writes for The Jerusalem Post and The New Mexico Jewish Link and also works as a freelance writer and photographer. He lives in Jerusalem and can be reached at midbar7@hotmail.com.

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