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The Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel

Well, there's that.

Got up this morning, turned on the radio while I had my coffee, and plopped down on the couch. It was at the top of the hour, so the news was on. As I'm half listening to the radio and mostly concentrating on getting the coffee into my body, the various news stories (most of which go over my head between the speed and the vocabulary) prattled on.

Then suddenly a group of words made their way into my head: "Michael Jackson", "Los Angeles", "heart", "was 50 years old".

And that's how I learned Michael Jackson had died.

Good to know it's not just me.

I've been a bit behind on my updates. I have a return date to the States, July 18th, so my life has become a little surreal, as life here comes to a close and my life-to-be in the US grows larger and larger.

Anyway, until I have something more substantial to write about, I'm cross-posting again from my friend Derrik's blog. His recent entry talks about one of the things I hate about Israel, and that I'm not even that keen about when I'm in the States: talking on the phone to strangers.

You don't know me, and I don't know you. So you don't know that I don't always pronounce or annunciate my words so well. Nor do you know that the better you do know me, the easier it is to understand whatever's tittering out of my mouth. So you're not prepped for R's that sound like a mouthful of potato and my general bewilderment concerning upon which syllable the accent falls. We should go for beers sometime.

And I can't see you, so I have no idea how you're responding to my faulty pronunciation and lack of annunciation. If only you knew how much sweat was involved on my end of the exchange. Or how I still dart out of the party when it comes time to order a pizza and everyone is in need of entertainment and knows the gringo needs practice.

Calling you on my own and setting up my service all by myself, big-boy style, was something that needed to be done. And I think we sailed through it pretty smoothly, given the conditions.

The rest of Derrik's post is at his blog, ¡derrik está aqui! ¡todo sobre tijuana!.

Crosspost: "Ghost Worlds"

A great story about a tour which reveals the lost Palestinian towns of what is now Tel Aviv, and about the other side of Yom Ha'atzmaut/Israeli Independence Day, known to some Arabs as Al Nakba/The Disaster.

In each village we heard the stories of relatives scattered in every direction of the Palestinian Diaspora: Gaza, Amman, Cairo, Baghdad, Nablus, northern Israel, Lebanon, Canada. The randomness of the results of those frantic choices resonated and overlapped in both familiar and unfamiliar ways with the Jewish Diaspora. Each guide told us how their families had come to leave their land, bringing alive the terror and uncertainty of the years 1947 and 1948, proving how academic are the debates about whether the Palestinians of the region were exiled or fled. Life was made unbearable in various ways, and eventually everyone in the region was pushed further and further south, first to Jaffa itself, then maybe to Gaza or the open sea.

Continue reading "Ghost Worlds"...

I guess I'm Russian now?

Living in Israel, I don't blend in. Between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority, my status as a tourist and an outsider is readily apparent. Normally this isn't more than cat-calls and people trying to get me to buy trinkets at their shop. Or the police randomly stopping me on the street to check my papers, but I digress.

There are a huge amount of Russians in Israel. Many of them have only one Jewish parent or one Jewish grandparent, which qualifies them for citizenship, but they don't have the typical "Jewish look"; the dark hair, dark eyes and dark complexion of Mizrachi Jews or the dark hair, dark eyes and pale skin of the Ashkenazi Jews.

Considering the tiny non-Arab, non-Jewish community in Israel and depending on where I am in the country, I am easily mistaken for being a Russian Jew both because it's a reasonable assumption and because of my looks. My Russian-like accent when I speak Hebrew doesn't help to rectify the situation either.

So two days ago, I'm standing at the central bus station in Tel Aviv waiting to head to the Machon, minding my own business and listening to the BBC on my iPod. A woman taps me on the arm and says something to me in Russian. I replied to her, in Hebrew, that I don't speak Russian. To this she shrugs in a dismissive kind of way, and continues speaking to me in Russian. After a minute or so I again said to her in Hebrew: "גברת, אני לא מדבר רוסית."

At this point she started to get really cross and raise her voice. In Russian. In public. At the bus stop in Tel Aviv. She's getting more and more frustrated that I'm not...doing whatever it is she wants me to do, and finally I say to her, equally loudly and in my best American-accented English, "I don't speak Russian".

This seemed, finally, to get through to her. I guess she thought I just didn't feel like talking to her, or was being a stuck-up Russian-Israeli kid who was too good to speak Russian to her; I don't know. She looked a bit sheepish and pointed at her wrist. So I got out my mobile and showed her the time, to which she gave a heavily-accented "תודה", and we continued to waiting for the bus.


Incidentally, "I don't understand Russian" in Russian is:
Я НЕ ПОНИМАЮ ПО-РУССКИ
ya neh pahneemahyu pah-rooskee


ETA:


Not me. Looks like me? I still don't speak Russian.