If you can hear my voice, clap twice

When I came home over break, I confirmed my farily-well founded suspicions that I'd gained some weight while in Israel. Now since I have very little expertise in estimating weight gain or loss, I thought I'd picked up twice as much as I actually wound up picking up. Oh, and a point of interest: who was the first to comment? I walk into Rivka's class: ".גדעון, אתה השמנת"; "Um, hi Rivka." But why am I telling you this? Because the story of one time I certainly gained weight is good, and it leads into a few interesting Israeliisms. Or maybe a few if we count the one above.

We arrived in Haifa in the middle of December, which was also known by its slightly more significant date of about ten days before the start of the month of Tevet. In other words, the week before Chanukah. Naturally we checked out the shuk (not just because this was the first time we could really get food in the shuk, but also because the Haifa shuk is not off-limits like--of course--Mahane Yehuda was--is--oops). In the course of walking around finding whose clementines were 10 agurot cheaper per kilo, I discovered a place called the Ariel Bakery (מאפיית אריאל) right in the marketplace. I tried their bread--and then their sufganyot (סופגניות). And then went to get some carrots and came back for another sufganya. And also when it was time to leave: another.

Every time I came back to the shuk during Chanukah (meaning for the next week, and I came about three times), I'd get a sufganya at the beginning and another one at the end and do whatever buying of healthy materials was necessary in between. This, of course, was probably-small physical but large mental weight gain (at least after I figured out what was going on).

That first time, before I left I walked down to the end just because I wanted to see how far the shuk went. By Machane Yehuda standards it's a pretty nothing shuk, so it didn't take long. At the end, almost at the final stall, I saw something funny. A woman was sitting in a low chair with twelve barrels in front of her arranged into three rows of four. I don't remember what was in the row closest to her but in the middle row were four barrels of fish. Just fish pieces, in ice: heads, middles, tails, cut up, whole, everything. And so of course under them in the net four barrels were those small, tasteless, chewy, individually-wrapped candies...

Pardon my French as I switch languages:

".אז אני אמרתי לה: "רק רציתי להגיד לך שנגרם לי לחייך לראות דגים על יד ממתקים...
"?והיא עונה במבטא רוסית עבה: "נו

".לא, סתם רציתי להגיד לך"
"?נו, אז מה"
"...כלום"
"?אז מה רצית לאמר"
".לא, אין דבר...ביי"

I'll try to translate, though beware that her facial epression and tone can be conveyed through the Hebrew without any description and that it's very hard to capture exactly what this is in the English. And that I'm not going to translate untranslatable words.

...so I say to her, "I just wanted to tell you that it made me smile to see fish next to candies."
She answers in this thick Russian accent [totally monotonously, with disinterest bordering on hostility]: "Nu?"
"No, stam, I [just] wanted to tell you."
"Nu, so what?"
"Nothing..."
"So what did you want to say?"
"No, never mind...bye."

So those are a few examples of stam Israeliisms. Now for a few incendiary ones.

At home we always do two or three brewings of tea. Wissotsky Tea, seemingly the national tea of Israel, can be dunked into a cup and taken out 10 seconds later and the color will be the right color (the taste is still nonexistant, but that won't change). But there's still enough flavor/color

left for a second brewing. So when my driver one day, Shlomi, found a tea bag on a paper towel on the counter and asked me why it was there, and after I told him, he came back with: "?מה, אתה פרסי"--"What, are you Persian?" Later, when I went into the smaller room of the station to read and listen to something besides VH1 or MTV or whatever other low-quality American TV imports they get here, and it crescendoed a little, he came out with: ".אה, אתה באמת הומו"--"Wow, what a homo."

They drivers also tend to laugh at calls for "general weakness", mostly corresponding to MADA code 001 "מחלת מבוגר" (adult-sickness). One patient I had lived in a youth village just south of Haifa and was burping the whole way from his closed, stuffy house to Rambam Hospital. Afterwards I asked Yaniv, my driver, how someone could get that much air to burp out and he said, as if to answer the question: "...עזוב, עזוב אותו...קיבוצ'ניקים"--"Forget him...kibbutznikim..."

Back By Popular Demand!

So, in the grand scheme of things, what's three months--really--anyway? Come to think of it, it's enough time to drop an accent, to move cities, to break some rules, to hike and freeze, to learn both in a classroom and in the field, to learn to read, to go home--twice, sort of--and back again, to reconnect...

So maybe three months is a long time, and so maybe I'll just write a little bit about this past four-hundredth of the century, these 131,400 minutes.

The RENT allusion is appropriate because it was the music forced upon us, 30 of us, while we were doing our MADA training. What is MADA, the most clever ask. MADA is one of those funny acronyms that picks up letters when translated (see my section on languages further down). Magen David Adom explains, well, M.D.A. But fortunately that's unpronouncable, so the first A was added to make the initialism into an acronym. This is fortunate because I've already volunteered for MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Association's summer camps) and I would get too confused. Of course, this acronym means that I have worked for both מד"א (Magen David Adom, what I'm doing now) and in מדע ("science", what I did this summer) while in Israel.

None of this means anything, I suppose to one who doesn't know or is too simple to ask what MADA is. So you have to tell him to get his interest rolling. Magen David Adom has a monopoly on the Israeli ambulance system, so when 101 is called (like our 911), the local headquarters (מוקד) of the emergency response system orders one of its local units out to the scene. If the call is made in Haifa, I can be one of those who goes out on the call (נסיעה). I'm the bottom of the ladder in terms of what protocol allows us to do, which I think makes me equivalent to an EMT in the States. We can carry and talk to and fill out forms of patients, but we can't tell one to take his epipen or insulin (though we can remind him that he has it and should take it along in the ambulance). We had a sixty-hour training course given in the Jerusalem hostel starting two weeks after Thanksgiving which included a little physiology but mostly how we should treat certain conditions we come across. This included a lot of practical training as well, such as CPR (החייאה) and trauma support on dummies (Anne, of course) and also a massive multiple casualty incident (אר"ן--ארוע רב נפגעים) on the grounds of the hostel in which far too many of our poor Section Two comrades were killed. But at least our instructors told us that you improve every time you practice. There has to be another practice session before there's a bombing in Haifa, please. And since I don't think we're getting another session, there can't be any more bombings in Haifa.

Haifa, Haifa (in the words of David Broza)
חיפה, חיפה
עיר עם תחתית
הו הו הו
חיפה, חיפה
עיר עם עתיד
הו הו הו
חיפה, חיפה
עיר אמיתית
הו הו הו
A city with a lower section, with a future. A real city....

I moved to Haifa along with two other guys and five girls from Year Course on the 11th of December. Our accomodations are approximately one step below the Judaean Youth Hostel. The Abba Khoshi Absorption Center (מרכז קליטה ע"ש אבא חושי) is built like a motel with hallways that are topologically outside even though there was a door to go through and stairs to climb on the inside of the building. I have no roommate and a room that gives me far more free space than any of the other four rooms we have. Between the eight of us, in five rooms*, are five fridges, range tops, and radiators, two toasters, microwaves, and kumkums. The asterisk is because while I was back in the States, the problem of having no common space for our common food or to hang out was solved by the acquisition of a sixth room upstairs on the fourth floor. So now the toasters, etc. should be moving up there and the complaining will end as the pots and pans stop taking up space for the kids who'd had them in their rooms. 'Twill be rosy. Though I won't get at all into social politics.

(And I was just kidding about the inverted picture up there; this is what Haifa looks like from רח' יפה נוף ("Nice View Street").)

I will get into supposed-to-have-beens which may take me into three or four topics of interest.

1--The Subjuctive: There were supposed to have been Haifa apartments for us but Year Course un-acquired them during the war this summer, so they quickly had to organize a few cheap rooms after the ceasefire.

1A--The Corollary: Eldad Dann, head of Rambam Hospital's blood bank and nine-years-ago Akiba parent, showed me pictures of how Haifa, and in particular Rambam, looked this summer. There are a few shots that show four or five rockets (טילים/רקטות/קטיושות) falling in the Mediterranean in one shutter-time with images of damage on land in the foreground. The hospital, the most major in all of Northern Israel, had to move its regular ER and trauma patients into the bunker in the basement in order to ensure enough open beds for the soldiers and civillians being flown in from as far as southern Lebanon and Tveriah. But I guess the more interesting side-story is the visit to the Danns in the first place. I called them the first week I was in Haifa and asked whether I could see them soon, like that weekend maybe, which ended up working out. So I was there for the first night of Chanukah. I didn't immediately recognize Hadas when she and Nir picked me up at the bus stop, though I imagine that if I'd recently seen pictures of her even from 10 years ago that I would have known it was her right away. Only Maya and Nir were home and since they were the babies back when they left, we looked at the albums and all the usual stuff you do when you see people after a decade. If there is any usual stuff you do, because odds are a meeting like this one wouldn't happen outside Israel. Roi (or was it Roe?) is near Arad now, doing some special trainings and tests and stuff (מיונים) for a future position in the air force. Shani was out at a local Chanukah party on Thursday night, but came back Friday morning. I didn't know what it was going to be like to suddenly see her nine years after they flew out of Chicago. [For those of you who don't know: the Danns were one of many Israeli families that comes to U of C for a few years, sends their kids to learn at Akiba, and then comes back here after the parent/s are done with residences or whatever in Chicago. Shani was in my class from kindergarten through second grade (see 1B later) and I remember always being at their house or the older kids coming over. And since we have no pictures of the August day they left, what I remember of it must be a real memory.] Would it be like seeing an old friend or would it just be like asking someone to randomly place me in Emek Izra'el for the weekend? In its different forms, this was the question I was asking myself the whole weekend (during which I spole almost no English and managed to read an entire page-long article about the assassination attempt on Haniyeh). By the end, I knew it was like visiting an old friend because we still had חומר (stuff, I guess) to talk about from the past. Since I didn't spend so much time with Shani and didn't get to see Roi at all, I'll just have to go back.

1B--The Meta-Corollary: On my way home from Israel for Naomi's bat mitzvah I heard a voice on the plane and said to myself, "That voice is unmistakable; I'd recognize it anywhere." I looked up and wasn't then at all surprised to see my kindergarten teacher standing two people in front of me. Really, a voice like that is a dead giveaway. So I showed her pictures of the Danns (or at least the five of them I saw) and also Rafi.

2--The Subjunctive: I was supposed to have been in Fejje, a neighborhood of Petach Tikva, for the Israel Experience section of Year Course. Why exactly I didn't end up there even after I was told that's the placement I'd received I won't get into. But anyway, I was told I was going there, I told a few people I would be going there, and I'm not there. I'm glad to have gotten MADA--probably the only person in MADA now who put it as a second choice. Fejje would have involved living with a family for the three months and volunteering in a school/community center and tutoring mostly Ethiopian kids in English and math and stuff of that ilk. Since most of the families were said to not be great in English, this option would have immeasurably improved my Hebrew (also because I'd be speaking in the schools).

2A--The Corollary: While I didn't get that placement, I did have several very unique encounters with the Ethiopian population in Israel. They were less than a week apart, too: Thursday the 16th of November and Monday the 29th of Cheshvan. Way, way back many centuries ago I wrote about switching into the Lost Jewish Communites class from the Arab-Israeli Conflict class. The major reason I did so was that a class like LJC had to be done in Israel where we could take field trips to visit the different communities we were studying. As part of this, Tobi somehow organized with the Jewish Agency (סוכנות) for our class to meet the week's group of Ethiopian immigrants at Ben Gurion Airport. There's some politicking going on in Israel; one side wants the rate to be raised to 600 per month, the other wants to keep it at 300. I don't remember whether the change went through, but there were about 80 people, many of them children, on the flight we met, so it seems that at the time, at least, the rate was 300 per month. None of us speaks Amharic and none of them speaks English or Hebrew, so when we brought them bouncy balls and bubbles--and showed them digital cameras, which absolutely floored them--we had to rely on simple universal symbols like the smile. We I don't know what we would have done if, say, the smile were a symbol of war in Ethiopia. I guess it demonstrates an emotional connection in the brain that the muscle movement of a smile is associated with being happy. That experience--waking up at quarter to five to take a minibus to the airport, waiting in the cold for the guards to show up, waiting for the Sochnut representative, going onto the old tarmac-airfield (the way it used to be) with its skeleton of a baggage claim and up to the room with "Welcome Home" written in five different languages, waiting for the first creaks of footsteps coming up the stairs...singing Heveinu Shalom Aleichem and giving the kids candies (first show how to unwrap) and flags, playing with each other in improvised sign language, listening to the airport guy address them in Amharic (how to open their plastic-wrapped sandwiches, how to eat them as a single unit and not to pick out each piece and eat it individually), waiting for them to pick up baggage and being there when newcomers were met by family members who'd already made it to Israel....and then playing some more with the kids outside--simply amazing.

2B--Just like Shavuot is 50 days after Pesach, Sigd (SIG-id) is 50 days after Yom Kippur. It's a holiday established by the Ethiopian community as sort of a return-to-Zion holiday. Even though a large fraction of the community now lives in Israel, it was decided that the holiday should remain (which I think makes sense in its own right) because of the third temple/mashiach, etc. So pretty much the entire Ethiopian population of Israel--religious and not--gathered on the Haas Promenade (הטיילת) south of the Old City. The religious leaders all stood up on a stage with colorful dresses and umbrellas. We asked a few people what was going on (this was all in Amharic) and got mostly agreeing accounts: the head guys were reading something and then there would be a singing explanation. One guys said he was reading the Torah in Amharic, just like Ezra gathered the population to rea the entire thing at once. Another guy said it was the Laws of Shabbat, again with explanations, but if that's the case it can't be "our" laws of Shabbat because they were all codified after the Ethiopian community separated from the larger Jewish community. (When did this split happen? Well, when the community first started coming to Israel, they couldn't believe that there was dirt and crime and that there was no Temple in Jerusalem.)

3--The Subjunctive: If I were to commit a logical fallacy, I could take Atari's line רק מילה בעברית חודרת אל עורקי and say that nothing else has interested me linguistically. I lived on Givat Ram campus for six weeks and managed never to notice the sign for the Academy of the Hebrew Language (האקדמיה ללשון העברית, kind of like the Chemistry Monks except for Hebrew) that was a hundred yards past the entrance to my chemistry building there. But when I went back on Thanksgiving for a pickup game, I wandered around before the start and found the sign. Why was I reminded of it? Because a member of the Academiah came to our Hebrew class (אולפן) to talk a little about stuff beyond just the "Ben Yehuda was nuts and his kid was mute and now we speak Hebrew here" spiel. I've gotten interested in places where Hebrew just grabs entire random concepts from other languages (mostly English because my German is running away and crying). For example, let's take the units of time: day, hour, minute, second.... Now, the ordinals or cardinals, I can't remember which and I'm not connected to the internet while writing this: first, second, third, fourth.... Hebrew, now (time): ...יום, שעה, דקה, שנייה; and (numbers, feminine): ...ראשונה, שנייה, שלישית, רביעית. Those who can read Hebrew should immediately understand what I'm getting at here: where English happens to use the same word, "second", in the two meanings, Hebrew takes its word for the numeric "second" and uses it also for the horological "second". Straight from English.

3A--The Corollary: I've been in parts of Haifa (and...other parts of Israel...) where I can't read anything written on the signs. But as I'm around signs like these more and more often, I've started to learn to read them. My Russian reading, at least in my head, is fairly decent. I'm still quite a slow reader, and don't understand what I'm reading, but my ability to convert letters into thought-noises in Russian has increased tremendously since living in Haifa. The only time I've been able to understand everything was when I went into a Russian book-and-music shop in Jerusalem's central bus station (ת"מ--תחנה מרכזית). But that's only because words like "pianoforte", "Tchaikovsky", "concerto", and "Brahms" don't change their meanings so much just because they're written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

3Ab--The Equivalent Corollary: At the same time, and probably even more impressively, I've begun to teach myself the Arabic alphabet. This isn't from a book or Wikipedia, though. This is purely from street signs. All I have to do is find a street with some letters I do know and some I don't and I can deducec the rest. So far the hardest word has been בית because the ב and י look the same except for the number of dots (which I'd always thought represented vowels, like in Hebrew). Also I'm pretty sure that ז only differs from ר by a dot above. But I know אבדהוזחילמםפרשת, at least in most cases. Hebrew and Arabic both add letters when taking names from the other language. For example, there's a neighborhood in Haifa called Hadar, הדר. When it's written in Arabic, though, it gets an extra alef, so it would look like this: הדאר. Same in the other direction; one of my Arab drivers spells his name, Tabash, with the extra alef: טבאש. Or there's the Iranian threat from איראן.

3B--The Meta-Corollary: Given the language choices for my voicemail, Hebrew, English, Arabic, and Russian, I've chosen Arabic. I know most of the numbers now, except 3 it seems. I guess no one with a 3 ever leaves me messages. Strange. Actually I'm not sure about 8 and 9 either.

3C--From Bad to Worse: For the hour-long bus ride back from Holon after the Samaritan field trip, I tried to "decode" the mezuzah. I made progress in the same way that I'm making progress with Arabic; translating because I know what the translation is supposed to say.

3D--Yeah Right: I can't read the Ge'ez alphabet, which means that the Ethiopian music CD I bought at Sigd written only in Amharic will either go forever untransliterated or will take me hours to convert.

Now, just to cover more--a little more--of the parallels introduced at the top:

While spending the weekend with Danny and Grandpa in the Golan with Danny's adoptive army family I spoke only with an (admittedly fake) Israeli accent. After seeing that it wasn't so hard to do, I decided that when the Jerusalem ulpan ended, I would switch. It didn't feel right to just walk into class one day and speak differently; that's why I waited. But I basically realized, "I sound like a moron," so whenever I was speaking out of class I used my adopted accent. Now that the Jerusalem section is over, I'm not going back, except if there's a shva under the ר or if I'm describing the cemetary ("Har Herzl"--you try it! I choke on my tongue!). The resh isn't the only difference between the "old" and the "new", which means that even someone who can't make the guttural R can improve how he sounds in Hebrew. The vowels are much shorter (I don't know technical names for any of these; again: no internet connection right now), which is why Israelis make fun of the American accent by saying, "Towdaw Rawbaw." It's supposed to be "Todah Rabah" and you know it. Or think about words that Israelis don't say properly in English, like "examination"; they pronounce it more like "exeminésheen". Just induce from all of these how Hebrew is supposed to sound and you too can pretend to be Israeli. (Send just three monthly payments of $199.99 to the address listed below and receive a free dictionary when you sign up today!)

Going home? Well yeah, the second time was obvious; pat yourself on the back. But the first time? Well that should have been obvious as well: "...when I went back on Thanksgiving for a pickup game, I wandered around before the start..." What, I was going to go to Givat Ram and not check out Beit Bretter? Yeah, right. So unfortunately I got there just after 6 PM, which is probably when Totzach and everyone else leave, so I'll try to see them when I go visit Ronny sometime. There was a really loud group of Israeli kids in our dining room with an obnoxious clown/MC/DJ. But then I went around and took some pictures, like of our minyan-chuppah and of the clowns between the chemistry and life sciences buildings.

If I broke any rules and you were supposed to hear about them, you probably already have. On the other hand, if you feel you should have heard about them, or at least the interesting ones, and you didn't, just email me and I'll see what I can do. While I didn't end up at Midnight Mass, I was off by a non-prime and non-composite number of dimensions (physically and not mathematically speaking).

Um, before I forget, let's deal with addresses. If you should want to send me anything (Becca, this one's for you), my address here is, I think:
Gideon Klionsky
Abba Khoshi Absorption Center
Room 1357
133 Hameginim Street
Haifa, ISRAEL

Otherwise, if it can be slow (and if you don't want to deal with things like me moving before the letter gets here, which could happen near the end of February or so), then maybe just send to the original address in Jerusalem. My phone number hasn't gone anywhere; it's still (from the US) +972-526-000406 and from here 0526-000406.

And that's the way it is. Good night.
Gideon Ige.cx עוגקןנ
Ughdsl Gideon ועיגדך
dsgui eoigc גדעון