Borders

by Anna Paprott (Germany)

Making a local connection Israel

The year I finished school I had been chosen as one of eight German students to go on an exchange trip to the Lower Galilee, complete with bus tours of historical sites, lunch in a kibbutz and several ceremonies to reflect on our city's involvement in the Holocaust. Arriving in Tel Aviv in the late evening, the humidity felt like walking into a glass wall. The culture shock hit me with full force the next morning when breakfast was served warm, including fish and eggplant, and soldiers sat next to us with machine guns on their laps and shakshuka on the table. A bus took us to the north-east of the country, where it was so dry and hot that even our exchange partners complained. They showed us their school, and we received an engraved thermos as a gift from the council before being collected by our host family for the weekend. My host father was amazed by my Hebrew skills, which consisted of being able to greet him and ask him how he felt (I was unable to answer the question being directed at me though). The family, my exchange partner, her sister, her parents and grandfather, lived on a small farm overlooking the Sea of Galilee and a landscape of cacti and olive groves. My first meal was a pizza, not very traditional but at least completely kosher, and I understood what my exchange partner had meant with Jewish hospitality when her mother helped me to a second serving while I was still working on my first. I spent the weekend plugging green figs from a tree and breaking them open on the spot to eat the soft interior. I visited the cows and was introduced to some neighbours and friends, who hang out smoking shisha and listening to a mix of Israeli and English pop music. I spent a lot of time trying to expand my knowledge of Hebrew and, although I had been instructed not to talk about politics or religion, I found myself more than once entangled in conversations with my host father about just about anything. About how scared he was to have his teenage daughter being forced to enlist when she finished school and fight for something she had no say in. How coexistence was working just fine in some places, like his workplace, and how they all hoped for peace. A couple of days later we would hear the news of street fights in Jerusalem having broken out over the installation of additional security measures at the Dome of the Rock, a place holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Communication turned out to be the most difficult with my host grandfather, who spoke as little English as I did Hebrew. He was a Survivor, and I was a shy teenager, German and a goy. But we turned out to have a thing in common after all: Yiddish. My interest in Yiddish was the reason I had been chosen for the trip in the first place, although people had repeatedly told me that it was a useless and dying language. But with my basic Yiddish skills and some luck in pronouncing German words in just the right way, we made it work and bridged a gap that spanned nationality, religion, age, and almost a century of history. In the evenings, an endangered Germanic language was heard at the dinner table, while we overlooked the Sea of Galilee and the Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian borders - with their mine fields and barbed wire.