Guest Lecturer

Before coming to Israel and beginning Ulpan, I would have balked at listening to a lecture in Hebrew, but now it has become the highlight of my week. I am not sure if that denotes a lessening of expectations or a rise in my own confidence. Either way, it was terriffic.

Today my level got to hear a lecture and participate in a question-and-answer session with Eli Amir, the author of "Tarnegol Kaparot", a text read by almost every Israeli at some point in their school career. The novel tells the autobiographical story of Eli's move from Iraq to Israel in the 1950s, the years of the first major aliyah. His life is the unfortunately standard tale of a religious family giving up their wealth and position to move to the Promised Land, where they were forced into temporary camps with tents instead of houses, no prospects for jobs, a foreign language, and an almost total lack of religion. The bulk of the novel focuses on how Eli found a future working on a kibbutz despite the many ideological and emotional obstacles that posed.

One of the most interesting aspects of the speech was the lack of animosity felt by the author. From the way that era has been portrayed in film and text, one would imagine him to be full of loathing for the establishment that offered him false hope and a total remodelling of his existence, but during the Q & A he actually professed admiration for what the kibbutznicks achieved, and he finds promise in the idea of a melting pot, pointing out that if it hadn't been for the massive numbers of immigrants that overwhelmed the system (the population of the country more than doubled in two years) the transition from Iraqi to Israeli could have been very smooth. He sees a similar scenario in the segregation of Ethiopian-Israelis into largely Ethiopian schools today, which is causing the exact rifts that were avoided sixty years ago.

Another point he raised is that the problem with today's kids (my phrasing, not his) is that they lack the capacity to dream. He noted that for Western youth, the world, information, and wealth are more accessible than ever before, but we have no idea what to do with it all. We want to be rich. Or we want to travel. Or we want to be smart. But what will it lead to? Where is the ideology? Is there anyone today who could potentially see through the large scale implementation of a dream such as Zionism or Communism? Perhaps such people exist, but do we hold these individuals in high esteem?

While my Hebrew may not have advanced today, it was the most challenging and interesting day of Ulpan thus far. Then I was lucky enough to come home to find Rina toiling over work for Candesco. Who would have thought that going to school would be so much better than staying at home, playing on the computer?