Running Between Languages

V POLEG

My parents discovered socialism when I was eight months old. They moved from Tel Aviv, where I was born, to a kibbutz in the southern desert of Israel, where they would share their belongings and get the same basic salary as everyone else. There, at this utopian community in the heart of the desert, they would leave their baby in a Children’s House – a place in which babies and children would spend every night, away from their parents. Perhaps we each have our own starting point, and this version of radical socialism was mine. In the Children’s House there was no adult to look after us during the night. But there was a recording machine that could detect cries if they were loud enough, so that a rotating Night Guard would drop by if needed. By the time I was four years old, some children would learn to get out of bed and walk towards the point where the machine was fixed to the wall, stand under it and only then begin to cry – making sure the night guard would detect their cries and come to soothe them. Every morning I made a pact with myself: tonight, I’ll walk towards the machine, say that I’m scared, and ask the night guard to come. Every night, I woke up and walked the long corridor until I stood under the machine, a four-year old observing the rickety wooden device, tracing the moon and the way it changed in the window next to it, and never managed to utter a word.

Fast forward to London, Holborn, St Clement’s Lane. I’m in my twenties, sitting in a weekly poetry writing class. Outside it is raining heavily and the windows are shaking with such ferocity that I fear they’re about to break. We’re reading a poem by Seamus Heaney, and I can hardly understand what’s going on. My English is so weak, I’m not sure what to make of the title because I don’t know what ‘Naturalist’ is. In the first line, I can recognise the words Year and Heart. Great words to carry a poem, for sure, but not enough to carry my understanding of this line. At the end of the session, I ask the tutor if she could send us the poems we’re reading each week in advance. Time, I discover, is all I need in order to wrestle with this difficult language. The tutor replies that unfortunately she won’t be able to do this. Time, I’m reminded, is never available when it comes to language, because language happens fast.

Sometimes you have to write in a foreign language even when you’re acutely aware that you’re writing against all odds. Language always felt difficult for me, and from a very early age I felt that the language I was given quite simply didn’t work. So many things happened in my life by the time I turned five, that as a child I felt strongly that – somehow – I had to find a different language. But since there was no other language available for me, I had to invent one. I started to create songs in what today we would describe as gibberish. I would walk for hours in the outskirts of the kibbutz and invent songs in my own meaningless tongue. As a child, there were too many things that I didn’t understand about the world around me, but I think I already sensed a rather crucial thing: that it is always better not to understand something on a literal level than seemingly understand it completely and still not get what’s going on. My parents separated a couple of years after moving to the kibbutz. Turbulent years followed until, when I was five, I moved with my mother and her new boyfriend to another kibbutz, an even more far-left utopian community, a twelve-minute cycle ride from the Sea of Galilee – ‘the lowest freshwater lake on earth’. Here, too, I was welcomed into a Children’s House and here, too, was a machine designated to detect cries through the nights. But there was also something new: the nights were often punctuated by howling siren alarms coming from the then-perilous border with Jordan. Here, I learned once again that children express fear in at least twenty-four different ways. There were twenty-five of us in this new Children’s House. I knew that I was not the only one who was terrified, and yet only two of us were crying in response to the sirens’ high-decibel descending and ascending wails.

Back in London, it takes me three months after I arrive to decide that what I really need to do is write poetry. Poetry of all things. There is a strong force in me that needs to write – finally, now, I can’t wait any longer. And there is also a strange confidence: something tells me that I will be able to wrestle with this difficult language. To a certain extent, I don’t mind that I don’t understand most of what I read. After all, by now, not understanding is my comfort zone. And perhaps that is one of the reasons I’m drawn to poetry – a space in which one is invited to get lost. I want to dive into English and see what happens. And English is not enough. I want to dive into French and Italian too, I want to swim in languages. Note to self: when you’re back home later this evening, check what ‘naturalist’ means.

English: what a language. All those possibilities of time and space: twelve different tenses and three conditional moods! All those prepositions! At school, I was very weak in English as a foreign language. In fact, I was one of those pupils who weren’t able to concentrate at all, on any topic. I was too busy missing my father who steadily faded away until he completely disappeared from my life. I couldn’t sit still during lessons, was often thrown out of class and failed at every subject apart from Sport and Art. I wanted to be outdoors – play ball games or go for a run. But later, when my friends became experts at smoking and getting drunk, I knew that if I followed suit, nobody would notice – just as nobody seemed to notice that I spent so many hours out of class. Spending the nights in the Children’s House, away from the adult world, we were left to calculate the risks around us on our own. Perhaps some children hoped that if they pushed themselves to the limits, some help would even-

1 3

F e a t u r e s