Discovering the mother tongue
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lee Kofman
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Lee Kofman's biography and other articles by this writer
Philosophers say inner contradictions are a natural thing; they lie within the core of the human condition. I'd add that from the imbroglio of everyday paradoxes, there will always emerge one overriding paradox – one that defines the course of our lives without us even being aware of it.
The overriding paradox of my life began one autumn day, when I was 12 years old and stepped out of an El Al plane at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, along with my parents and two youngest brothers. I remember being dazzled by camera flashes, surrounded by media and confronted by a bunch of girls about my age, waving signs at me: "Welcome."
It was 1985, a hallucinated time in Russian history, after the death in 1982 of President Leonid Brezhnev, who had ruled the country for 18 years. He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984, followed by Konstantin Chernenko, who died just over a year later. It was an autumn of uncertainty before the later emergence of the man who would change the face of Russia forever: Mikhail Gorbachev.
On that September day, the Iron Curtain was still tangible, protecting the fairytale of communism. But my parents, the leaders of the Odessa dissident underground had succeeded in penetrating the curtain – after pestering the authorities for six exhausting years we were allowed to leave. With very short notice, we packed a few suitcases, got onto an almost empty plane (11 passengers, five of whom were my family) and took off for the "promised land".
BACK THEN, MY FAMILY – BEFORE THE HUGE WAVE of Russian immigration that inundated the Western world in the early 1990s – was a media curiosity. This explained the schoolgirls, who had arrived at the airport to welcome me to their school.
The following years at the school were confusing in their ambiguity and didn't resemble the excited welcome in the airport. I grew up in the shadow of a double message. I was often asked to give speeches for school events and would describe my childhood among the dissidents, the struggle against the KGB and how I'd refused to take the mandatory oath of allegiance to the party, part of a ceremony for 10-year-olds when joining the compulsory "Pioneers" youth movement.
Outside such special school events I was constantly told I was expected to be "like everyone else". My good manners were considered to be "too much, too Russian". I was told it was "impolite" to speak Russian and whenever I did something that my teachers or classmates disliked it was defined as Russian and wrong.
My high school years and army service passed in the shadow of the massed Russian immigration following the fall of Iron Curtain. Towards the end of my days at junior high school, I ceased being the attraction, the heroine. I remember those years mostly as one long struggle to prove that I was not one of those Russian immigrants. Their clothes were ridiculous, whereas I wore the famous sabra sandals and used slang in the Arabic manner, the way Israelis did, emphasising the guttural sounds. My accent almost disappeared. Only very rarely would my "r" roll in a slightly foreign manner. This would lead to the suspicious question: "Are you Russian?" immediately followed by, "Tell me, is it true that your men work for the Mafia and your women do it for 10 shekels?"
I became a typical product of Israeli society and took pride in the new image of myself I'd built over the years: I was an ex-army officer and a journalist, swimming like a fish in the water of Israeli reality. I was especially proud of the fact that all my friends were "native" Israelis or sabras. I was ashamed of my Russian past, as though it was my fault I was born somewhere else. It's difficult to admit but in those days, whenever Russian immigrants, looking lost, approached me on the street with questions, I would shrug my shoulders and say in Hebrew: "I don't understand."
DURING THE 1990s, ISRAELI SOCIETY DISCOVERED a new scapegoat: the Russian immigrants. They were blamed for all manner of ills: unemployment, prostitution, crime. Israelis claimed that these Russian immigrants received money from the government for nothing and took Israelis' jobs. In reality many lived on the poverty line. The immigrants didn't bother to dispel this image and became more and more enclosed in their own milieu. Their protest was mainly passive. They didn't try too hard to learn Hebrew and adopted a disdainful attitude towards Israelis, accusing them of being philistine and arrogant.
History made some sense of the situation. Israel is a young state at only 55 years old, a tiny piece of land (20,770 square kilometres) surrounded by much larger, hostile Muslim countries. Israeli residents live under permanent threat of war; their political and economic situation has never been stable. Israel is a warrior society. To survive, Israelis try hard to be united. The sabra culture has adopted tribal characteristics, including fear of the foreign. One of its superior values, though, is friendship, manifested partly in the famous army brotherhood. Many Israelis learn in the army that a united group functions best and they maintain these groups in civilian life. You see it in Israeli backpackers who make a big trip at the end of their compulsory army service, traveling en masse.
This tribal warrior culture has emerged out of necessity and has developed through many difficulties. Israeli society is composed of immigrants mainly from Eastern Europe and Arabic countries; however, there are also those with roots in Western Europe, North America, South America and even Africa and Asia. For centuries, Jews have lived throughout the world, absorbing different cultures. In order to unite them and create a society able to defend itself, it was necessary to create a hybrid, a mythological creature – the sabra: the tanned strong warrior who could also work the land. The new sabra, the clichéd one, emerged from the term that defines Israel – the melting pot. The "old" cultures had to be melted down into a new homogenous blend, out of which the warrior sabras could be shaped.
The mythical sabra was equipped with warrior messages, which again, served a clear survival function. One of the best-known Israeli mottoes is a saying, associated with the Zionist hero Joseph Trumpeldor: "It's great to die for our country!"
The massed Russian immigration of the '90s became a threat to Israeli society. Here was a huge mass of strangers, arriving all at once, holding firmly onto their culture and traditions, resisting the Israeli melting pot. And they didn't even know who Joseph Trumpeldor was! The media expressed the Israelis' collective fear. Mythological characters were created: the Prostitute and the Mafia Man. And so my ambiguous glory days at junior high school ended. A period of total denial took their place. I began to abandon my mother tongue.
A famous Israeli song from the 1980s (before the big Russian immigration) was sung by an Argentinean immigrant: "I sing in Hebrew in the morning ... but at night I dream in Spanish." Social anthropologists claim that the extent of competence in the language of a new country is a direct indication of an immigrant's sense of belonging. On the other hand, the better immigrants learn the second language, the more their mother tongue regresses, at least for a certain period. In my case, there was no "certain period", just a long deterioration. In my early 20s I could barely string together more then a few sentences in Russian.