Look Who’s Talking

Learning Arabic is a struggle but a chance encounter with a stranger makes it worthwhile.

by Yael Bellin

‘Ahalan wa sahalan,” (hello) my Arabic teacher repeated to the boy sitting to my left.
“Ahalan biki,” (hello to you) he replied. It was my first day of high school. My Arabic teacher was teaching us how to greet each other. I sat uncomfortably in a stuffy room filled partially with strangers and the other half with people I had known since elementary school. It was a small class, 12 kids with only one other girl. Before I knew it, all eyes were focused on me.

“Uh...” I replied blankly. “Ahalaa?” I asked quizzically.
My teacher smiled, “Ahalan wa sahalan.”
“Ahalan wa sahalan” I repeated.

Already confused on the first day of Arabic? Not a good sign, I thought

to myself. By the time my 40-minute Arabic class was over, I knew this was not heading in a good direction. I began to wonder why I chose to study Arabic instead of Spanish or Latin. This was a question people asked me over the course of the year as my complaints about my difficulty with the language increased and I never had a good answer for them.
“Spanish is an easy A,” my friends would say to me. “Why don’t you just switch into Spanish with us?” This move was very tempting. Arabic was anything but easy. My teacher, a Syrian Jew, created fun lessons that involved musical chairs and decorating our classroom with signs but when it came down to it, I would always leave class wondering if I would have enough time to complete the work Arabic class entailed. Homework would take me up to 40 minutes each night plus extensive studying for tests. But something inside of me would not let me quit. My gut feeling was to keep it up.

I never really came up with an answer to the simple question, why Arabic, until this past February. I found myself on a Friday afternoon in Lodi, New Jersey at the DMV getting my permit validated. Afterwards my mother, sister and I decided to stop in a nail salon nearby. We were about to enter the salon when some Arabic words “Falafel” and “Shwarma” caught my eye on the wall of what seemed to be an Arab grocery store. After leaving the salon we decided to go in out of pure curiosity.

We walked in and were greeted by a strong smell of za’atar. Hanging from the ceiling was a TV screen playing a black and white movie in Arabic. Next to me was a rack of newspapers, most of them in Arabic. I picked one up and tried to decipher the headline. “Egypt refuses......with Islam and Muslims”. That was about as much as I could make of it, but nevertheless a start. I took the newspaper to buy it for my Arabic class.

I browsed slowly through the store reading the labels of imported products, most of which were written in Arabic. The store was practically empty except for a man who looked about to be in his mid- to late-60s talking in quick, fluent Arabic to the man behind the counter. There was also a man and a woman together, probably husband and wife. The woman was wearing a hijab, I recognized her as one of the test takers at the DMV.

We waited on line and when it was our turn the man behind the counter greeted us in broken English. I placed the newspaper in front of him and my mom asked how much it was. The man behind the counter did a double take, he looked at the newspaper and then at us. The man who he had been talking to did the same and asked, “Do you understand this?”

“Iywa!” (Yes) I exclaimed. The man’s eyes practically bulged out of his eye sockets in total disbelief.

“How you know Arabic?” he asked.

“I learn it in school. I am learning formal, but not spoken Arabic.” This came to him as a total shock. A teenager, pale skinned with brown hair and green eyes wearing a black skirt would be the last person he would expect to talk to in Arabic. I just wanted my mom to pay and to get out of there before this light-hearted moment turned into a political disaster.

“What is your background with Arabic? Is anyone in your family an Arab?”
“No, I’m just studying it in high school”

“What high school is this? Eh, I mean where are you from?” he persisted.
“We are Jewish,” my mother finally admitted after another awkward pause. Uh oh.
“Oh I see. Hayeetee chayal bitzavah bimitsrayim,” (I was a soldier in the Egyptian army) he said in flawless Hebrew. Now it was my turn to be shocked. I quickly calculated that he probably was a soldier in the Six-Day War and probably did not have such good feelings towards Israel or the Jews for that matter. I decided not to pursue this conversation of his knowledge of Hebrew any further but rather to smile and nod in order to preserve this moment.

“Well, we are proud of you!” he concluded.

We thanked the two of them and left. I went to sleep that night with his words in my head. What could he possibly be proud of? He doesn’t know me, I wondered the entire Shabbat. The two of us, potential enemies, found a bond in something I was so sure I would never succeed in.

I recently chose my classes for next year. Although it will be a struggle I opted to take third year Arabic. Will it be hard and stressful? Yes. Will it require a lot of work? Yes. Will I ever regret it? Definitely not.

So to answer my question of why I decided to take Arabic, it’s for moments like these when, at the end of the day, you have something to be proud of. n

Yael Bellin is a sophomore at Salanter Akiba Riverdale High School in the Bronx.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization