Measuring an immigrant’s Israeliness

August 29, 2006 - 7:40 PM by Sarah

Three years after immigrating from Connecticut to Israel, David Bogner on the ongoing difficulties of switching from Fahrenheit, inches, and cups to Celsius, centimeters, and grams:

. . . [E]ven as we struggle mightily with big things like language or the trivial things like the metric system in our daily lives… in the privacy of our home we still maintain some vestiges of our old way of doing things. Even though I know how many liters of fuel my car takes and the kilometrage I’m likely to get in the city and on the highway, I don’t have a clear sense how these things stack up on the ‘good/bad’ scale as I would if we were talking about gallons or mileage.

One exception to this partial cultural dumbness is my new hobby; beekeeping. Since I never gave any thought before as to how many pounds of honey a typical beehive should provide, I’m perfectly comfortable thinking of the honey yield from my beehives only in Kilos.

But there are some areas of our lives that have been harder to convert. The most obvious example is that we still measure our recipes using ‘cups’ and ‘teaspoons’. Any new recipe from an Israeli friend sends us scurrying to the computer to do a quick conversion to more manageable measures.

. . . For the record, I’m not a complete idiot. I have a pretty good idea of what is hot and what is cold when I hear the weather predictions at the end of the news. But that’s mostly because I hear the range of temperatures listed next to locations in the country which provides a ready key to anyone who knows basic Israeli geography. But when one of the kids gets a fever, I have no real sense if a particular temperature is hot enough to warrant a trip to the doctor or if it is perhaps hot enough to smelt copper ore.

. . . . Anyway, inside the house we continue to be a Fahrenheit family and use the handy computer conversion whenever we needed to relate vital temperature info to the pediatrician. But outside the house I have gamely tried to make the leap to Celsius.

For the past three years I have had the little ‘outside temperature’ indicator on my car’s dashboard set to Celsius and have made a concerted effort to take note of the number and relate that to how it actually feels outside. I honestly wanted to be able to instinctively understand the range of local weather the way I had in our old life. I wanted to be able to know without thinking that this temperature meant sweat… and that temperature meant to send the kids out with sweatshirts.

But after three years I have to admit defeat.

This past week while we were up north on vacation I reset the car’s outside temperature indicator to Fahrenheit. I did it mid-trip because it was hot outside… but I had no earthly idea how hot it really was. While we sat in front of Falafel Zehava in Beit She’an I repeatedly glanced at the Celsius temperature and it had absolutely no connection to what I was feeling outside the car. So I reached up and switched it to the more familiar scale and suddenly the world came into focus. It was 102F outside. That I understood!

When I made the switch on the car’s on-board computer I felt a little guilty. I didn’t point it out right away to Zahava or the kids, and even contemplated switching it back once we got home. But now that it has been a week, I realize I’ve made another small concession.

In the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. But just as with our big comfortable American appliances and Pyrex measuring cups graduated into nice safe ounces… I feel like I have reasserted control over a tiny part of my life that had been flapping freely in the breeze.

This newfound clarity has freed up a small part of my brain that can now concentrate on becoming more proficient in Hebrew… becoming a more assertive negotiator of Israeli commerce and traffic… and, of course, being the kind of father who knows whether to dress his kids in shorts or sweaters in the morning.