“Eet ees oh-kay, you can speek een Eenglish.”

August 28, 2006 - 12:04 AM by

As an American immigrant in Jerusalem, I can verify this observation by Rock of Galilee:

I was thinking about one of the big culture differences between the north and the center of the country, especially Jerusalem where we lived out the war. In the north, if you speak to someone in accented Hebrew, even in broken Hebrew, they will smile, help you out and reply to you in hebrew, probably slower then they would have spoken normally. This is true even for Israelis who speak perfect English. They like to help immigrants integrate and they even expect it of them.
In Jerusalem, if you speak to someone in Hebrew with an English accent they immediately switch to English. It doesn’t matter how good your Hebrew is.

There are probably a lot of reasons for this, one of them being that big city life is just so busy that they don’t have time for language issues.

By the way . . .

I got home from shul on friday night and all of my children were still up, to my great surprise. My wife said that she was upstairs with the boys and she heard a big boom and the house shook. There were no sirens, no warnings, no nothing, so the kids stayed up for the entire friday night dinner (and behaved excellently) and there were no more interruptions so they went to sleep in their own rooms and we weren’t sure what it was. The next day we ate lunch at our neighbors and in the middle of lunch there wasn’t so much a boom as a rumble which caused the house to shake. We’re still not sure what it was, but the general feeling is that an unexploded katyusha got exploded.

Tags: • Category: A New Reality, Immigrant Moments 

Comments

2 Comments on “Eet ees oh-kay, you can speek een Eenglish.”

  1. Gray on Mon, Aug 28th 2006 11:17 AM

    2. …or it was a sonic boom from an F16…

  2. Nominally Challenged on Mon, Aug 28th 2006 3:26 PM

    3. I think that in this country, an adequate response to “eet ees oh-kay, you can speek een Eenglish” is “yes, but you can’t”. That should get them for their presumptuousness. When my Israeli friends laugh at a Hebrew word that I might have ‘invented’ (and I’ve invented some real goodies in the last ten years), I simply switch to lightning speed English in an Aussie drawl. They’re soon begging me to go back into Hebrew :-)

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