Across and Down the Years

I was born just as my country’s language was being reborn. The Israel of my youth consisted of refugees and immigrants, each arriving with a dream and an accent. My parents, escapees from Nazi Germany, adjusted to life with few amenities, but life without German Kultur was unthinkable. Goethe and Schiller were quoted at the dinner table, and the Brothers Grimm were even scarier in the original. My father learned enough Hebrew to manage in business, but conversations at home were bilingual affairs in which he and my mother spoke in German and I responded in Hebrew.

It was the same all over. Mothers summoned their children for supper in a multitude of tongues, and we learned to plead for a few more minutes of play in all of them. Our school teachers reflected the makeup of the country: The homeroom teacher was an old Russian socialist who referred to us as “revolutionaries,” the science teacher arrived from Iraq, history from Poland, and humanities from Greece, naturally. The closest to a native Israeli was my first-grade teacher, Amalya, also my first crush, who regularly returned my love notes to her with the spelling corrected and “Thank you” sweetly scrawled at the bottom. They all spoke Hebrew, but the real Hebrew, the biblical, poetic gem, awakened from a 2,000-year slumber and lovingly revived, was ours to master. We were the first generation to speak it, and like today’s children lording their computer skills over their clueless parents, we enjoyed the power of linguistic fluency.

A good measure of how we were doing was the weekend crossword puzzle in Haaretz, the most cultured of the three major newspapers. It contained obscure biblical references right next to newly minted words, certainly not the language any of our educators were familiar with. Answers were published only a week later, so in the meantime we’d compare notes and compete for bragging rights. It remained a much anticipated weekend pleasure throughout high school and college.

I came to the United