מילים חדשות

When I was eleven, my parents told me that we were moving from Marseille to Haifa. I remember that I asked my mother whether there would be a bakery like ours near our new apartment. She laughed and said that Israel had bakeries too. She did not understand that I was not really asking about bread. I was asking whether anything familiar would still be there.

The first months were the hardest. Everything was new: the streets, the food, the noise of the buses, even the way people stood in line. In class I understood perhaps one word in five, and I felt invisible. I had always been the girl who answered every question; suddenly I was the girl who said nothing. At home I spoke French, at school I tried to survive in Hebrew, and in my head I lived in a strange place between the two, where I could not find the right words in either language.

Things changed slowly, and not because of a grammar book. My classmate Shira invited me to join the school choir. Songs were easier than conversations: the words came with music, and nobody expected me to answer quickly. By the end of the year I could sing in Hebrew better than I could talk in it, which my teacher found very funny.

Today, four years later, I dream in both languages. I argue with my brother in Hebrew, but when I am tired or sad, French comes back. My grandmother in Marseille complains that my French has an Israeli accent, while my friends here say that I still sound French when I am excited. For a long time this made me feel that I did not completely belong anywhere.

Recently I have started to see it differently. A person who speaks two languages does not have half of two identities; she has one identity that is larger than either. When my grandmother visited us last summer, I was the one who translated between her and my friends. Nobody else at the table could do that. For the first time, being "in between" did not feel like a weakness. It felt like a bridge.

So if you are new in this country and you feel lost between two languages, I would like to tell you what I wish someone had told me: you are not losing who you were. You are adding to it.

When I was eleven, my parents told me that we were moving from Marseille to Haifa. I remember that I asked my mother whether there would be a bakery like ours near our new apartment. She laughed and said that Israel had bakeries too. She did not understand that I was not really asking about bread. I was asking whether anything familiar would still be there.

The first months were the hardest. Everything was new: the streets, the food, the noise of the buses, even the way people stood in line. In class I understood perhaps one word in five, and I felt invisible. I had always been the girl who answered every question; suddenly I was the girl who said nothing. At home I spoke French, at school I tried to survive in Hebrew, and in my head I lived in a strange place between the two, where I could not find the right words in either language.

Things changed slowly, and not because of a grammar book. My classmate Shira invited me to join the school choir. Songs were easier than conversations: the words came with music, and nobody expected me to answer quickly. By the end of the year I could sing in Hebrew better than I could talk in it, which my teacher found very funny.

Today, four years later, I dream in both languages. I argue with my brother in Hebrew, but when I am tired or sad, French comes back. My grandmother in Marseille complains that my French has an Israeli accent, while my friends here say that I still sound French when I am excited. For a long time this made me feel that I did not completely belong anywhere.

Recently I have started to see it differently. A person who speaks two languages does not have half of two identities; she has one identity that is larger than either. When my grandmother visited us last summer, I was the one who translated between her and my friends. Nobody else at the table could do that. For the first time, being "in between" did not feel like a weakness. It felt like a bridge.

So if you are new in this country and you feel lost between two languages, I would like to tell you what I wish someone had told me: you are not losing who you were. You are adding to it.

When I was eleven, my parents told me that we were moving from Marseille to Haifa. I remember that I asked my mother whether there would be a bakery like ours near our new apartment. She laughed and said that Israel had bakeries too. She did not understand that I was not really asking about bread. I was asking whether anything familiar would still be there.

The first months were the hardest. Everything was new: the streets, the food, the noise of the buses, even the way people stood in line. In class I understood perhaps one word in five, and I felt invisible. I had always been the girl who answered every question; suddenly I was the girl who said nothing. At home I spoke French, at school I tried to survive in Hebrew, and in my head I lived in a strange place between the two, where I could not find the right words in either language.

Things changed slowly, and not because of a grammar book. My classmate Shira invited me to join the school choir. Songs were easier than conversations: the words came with music, and nobody expected me to answer quickly. By the end of the year I could sing in Hebrew better than I could talk in it, which my teacher found very funny.

Today, four years later, I dream in both languages. I argue with my brother in Hebrew, but when I am tired or sad, French comes back. My grandmother in Marseille complains that my French has an Israeli accent, while my friends here say that I still sound French when I am excited. For a long time this made me feel that I did not completely belong anywhere.

Recently I have started to see it differently. A person who speaks two languages does not have half of two identities; she has one identity that is larger than either. When my grandmother visited us last summer, I was the one who translated between her and my friends. Nobody else at the table could do that. For the first time, being "in between" did not feel like a weakness. It felt like a bridge.

So if you are new in this country and you feel lost between two languages, I would like to tell you what I wish someone had told me: you are not losing who you were. You are adding to it.