For those of you planning to come on aliya, let me offer one observation. The speed and thoroughness of your klita (absorption, acclimation) will depend on two things above all. The first is very general. The world is divided into two groups of people: those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and laugh with their partner or friends about it, and those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and cry with their partner or friends about it.

For an oleh, in many respects things have improved greatly in Israel, since the early 50s, and even since the mid-80s, when we arrived. Nevertheless, bureaucracy is still bureaucracy, and its impenetrability for Anglos has not been helped by the fact that English has had to cede some of its place in Israeli officialdom to Russian, Amharic, and, lately, French.

So, any oleh has to be very prepared for frustrations and setbacks. The best you can do is take comfort from the fact that you are accumulating stories with which you will be able to bore your grandchildren.

It is, of course, not easy to change your character. If you are a weeper or ranter, then developing a zen approach to the vagaries of aliya and klita is not easy. In contrast, the second factor on which a successful aliya depends is much easier to control. It all depends on a five-step plan that couldn’t be simpler.

1. If you are married to a fellow English speaker, then, as soon as you come on aliya, get a divorce.
2. Start mixing with, and dating, native Israelis, preferably ones who (or at least whose family) do not speak English.
3. Get married and have children, with whom you speak Hebrew, as soon as possible.
4. Meanwhile, find a job in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment.
5. Lastly, find all of your friends from within the non-Anglophone community.

In this way, you will be well on the road to mastery in Hebrew, or at least to a level of fluency in Hebrew from which you can see that most of the population doesn’t speak Hebrew any better than you do.

Now, I must add a disclaimer here. I can’t actually guarantee from personal experience that this method works. What I can state, categorically, is that if there is not a single one of these five steps that you manage to nail, your Hebrew will be embarrassingly weak.

‘Embarrassingly’ is, of course, a relative term. Some of our Anglo friends think that my Hebrew is pretty good. I am reminded of the joke about the little old Jewish man (these used to be jokes about someone other than myself) who comes to his wife sporting a smart cap, edged with brocade, and with the word ‘Captain’ emblazoned across the peak. “So, Sadie, what do you think?”, he says, to which his wife replies: “Morry, by me you’re a captain, and by you you’re a captain, but by a captain are you a captain?”

I freely admit that my ambitions in Hebrew are very….ambitious. (I hesitated there about whether to write ‘were ambitious’, but I’m not too old to harbour, indeed nurture, unfulfilled ambitions). I want to have the same command of Hebrew that I have of English (even though I realise that is, at this stage, less an ambition than a delusion). We have friends who came on aliya 10 or 15 years earlier than we did, who followed every one of the five steps above, and, as a consequence, who have an enviable command of Hebrew.

I admit that my Hebrew is not bad. I had a couple of head starts. First of all, a decade in Hebrew classes three times a week, and a childhood of going to synagogue on shabbat, and actually praying much of the time, meant that I had a sound basis in reading, writing and grammar.

Next, I spent a ‘gap’ year in Israel that included three daily hours of intensive Hebrew, six days a week, for five months. In addition, while visiting Bernice’s sister Sue and her family in Israel in 1985, we decided to come on aliya the following year and I started preparations to revive the Sleeping Beauty of my Hebrew.

In preparation, I took home with me 3 weeks’ copies of the Shabbat supplement of the popular newspaper Yediot Acharonot, and a novel in Hebrew. I read and reread those supplements, and they brought back a lot of my Hebrew. The novel was less successful. I had chosen Amos Oz’s My Michael, on the basis of reading the fist page and a half in the bookshop and thinking: ‘Well, this is pretty straightforward’.

What I failed to realise, until I was back in Wales, was that the opening of the first chapter finds the narrating central character in a state of traumatic shock, and barely able to articulate. From halfway through page 2, the sentences become more complex, and the vocabulary ever richer and more literary. Round about page 5, in my very own state of traumatic shock, I finally gave up. I must confess that, although I have read some short story collections and even one or two novels in Hebrew, Oz’s work is something I still read and enjoy exclusively in English.

For our first year in Israel, I taught in primary school, where I soon became aware of the importance of register – the style of language, the level of formality that one uses. Teaching a class of sixth graders, I used the word emesh, which had always been a favourite of mine. It means ‘last night’, and I was always taken by the fact that Hebrew managed to achieve with one word what would otherwise take two. When I used the word in the classroom, the class responded with derisive laughter. I discovered later that the word is fairly high register and a little old fashioned, and, on my pupils, it had the same effect as ‘yesternight’ might have had in English.

After that first disastrous year of teaching (which I might tell you about some other time, when I’m fully recovered from it), I worked almost exclusively in English, and, as a result, my conversational Hebrew failed to continue to develop as it might otherwise have done, At that time, almost my only regular reading in Hebrew was the weekend edition of Ha’aretz, a paper that I enjoyed principally for its arts and culture coverage.

This helped to create a situation where, after a few years in Israel, I could more or less hold my own in a discussion about Hebrew theatre or Beethoven‘s late quartets but, if I went to buy groceries at the corner store, I would find a friendly chat with the shopkeeper very challenging. Of course, as some of you know, the same is true for me in English, so maybe it’s not really a language thing at all.

This is an illustration of the fact that what we think of as command of a language is not exclusively determined by one’s knowledge of the language. It is, rather, bound up with an understanding of the culture. When I hear Hebrew stand-up, or watch a satirical show on TV, a large part of the challenge for me is that I am not familiar enough with all of the cultural references. Oddly enough, these days I have a similar experience when I listen to English stand-up or watch a British satirical show. I no longer know anything about British popular culture, and I have never fully immersed myself in Israeli popular culture.

Of course, to some extent, the same is true of language in general. Every time I go back to England, I encounter more and more vocabulary in the press and on TV that I am unfamiliar with.

The novelist Anthony Burgess left England in 1968 to avoid paying 90% income tax, and from then until his death in 1993, he lived in Malta, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, moving whenever his outrageous outspokenness offended the local authorities or the actions of the local authorities in each country offended him.

Over those 25 years, Burgess apparently waited anxiously for the publication of each new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which he had sent out to him. On receiving anew edition, he would turn immediately to the supplement, dedicated to “the treatment of those accessions and words which have become current over the last twenty years”. In my 1979 edition of the dictionary, the supplement runs to 324 pages.

Burgess would religiously scan these pages for terms and usages he was unfamiliar with, and in this way he ensured that he remained abreast of the language and could continue to write his wonderful sweeping novels in contemporary English. (At some point, I must devote at least one post to favourite authors of mine whose first name is not John.)

On a similar theme, we have good friends whose children grew up in Israel trilingual, speaking their own native Hebrew, their mother’s native American English, and their father’s native Danish. (For most of you, that probably narrows the field to either one family or none.)

I mention this because, as the children were growing up, whenever the family visited Denmark, people found the children enchanting, because they spoke the Danish that had been current among adults when their father had come on aliya a decade or more earlier, and, in the intervening period, Danish had replaced a lot of Danish vocabulary with English. If I remember accurately, barbecue and swimming pool were two examples. From my experience, in many languages such borrowing is regarded, at least in some milieux, as chic, and sometimes even de rigueur. It’s part of some groups’ weltanschaung. Capeesh?

To return to my theme: I find myself, at this stage of my life, growing no closer to an understanding of popular Israeli culture, and, consequently, contemporary Hebrew language. At the same time, I am being left further and further behind by the developing language and popular culture of the land of my birth. At this rate, Bernice may soon be the only person I can hold a coherent conversation with, and after the last year we’re starting to run out of stuff to say to each other.

And on that happy note….