Chutzpah & High Heels Read online

  The teacher continues by introducing the semester’s itinerary, from grammar to tenses and from Israeli culture to history and field trips. One of the students asks where we will be going and the teacher mentions Masada, the Supreme Court, and the Golan Heights. When I hear the Golan Heights, I instantly smell the air there. It was in the Golan at only thirteen years old that I fell in love with the legacy of Israel.

  It was while I bounced around in the back of a Jeep surrounded by the lush hills. At that age, I was more interested in our new, strong, and handsome tour guide. I had checked my reflection in the rearview mirror as he was driving the Jeep like it was a tank. When he pointed at something with his rugged hands, it was like a command for my family to look. When he stopped the Jeep to get out, my parents, sister, and I followed.

  He stood in front of us, nearly six feet tall, with flowing, curly hair, wearing a T-shirt with ripped-off sleeves. I couldn’t tell if his skin was tanned or caked with dirt. Like a little child, he had turned in a circle with his arms stretched out and yelled, “This is the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights has an incredible story.”

  Standing still, he had told us the story in an irresistible Israeli accent, “Against all odds, we won the land we are standing on only twenty-six years ago in the Six Day War. We were attacked simultaneously by all of our neighbors, on all of our borders, by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. But we, our small country, which was only twenty-eight years old, won in only six days! And not only did we win, we tripled our country’s size in those six days.”

  As he told us the details of the war, it sounded like a modern-day miracle. A story that could have come right out of the Torah. I was almost able to hear the echoes of the fighting, the gun shots, and the tanks on the hillsides and in the valleys.

  I wanted to ask him if he had fought in any wars, but he was so cute and I was too shy. Instead, I just tucked my hair back behind my ear.

  He pointed to a valley and we all turned to look. “You see that road right there? On the sixth day, the IDF drove south to make the Syrian army believe that we were retreating. Then at night, we drove back up with our headlights turned off and surprise attacked the Syrian forces.” As the guide continued to tell us every detail of the six days as if he was recounting from his own experience, I imagined him in the trenches. Then he laughed and said, “And on the seventh day, we rested, just like God commanded.”

  “Break time,” the ulpan teacher commands, and I realize I missed the first half of class.

  When we get back from break, the teacher starts the class by saying, “We’re going to review body parts.”

  Oh, good: sex ed in Hebrew.

  The teacher asks two people to volunteer. No one does, so she picks the religious girl with the tight clothes and the guy from Uzbekistan. The teacher begins pointing to different body parts and we yell out the names.

  “Good. Now I’m going to point to a body part and first you have to say the name and then you have to tell me if it’s masculine or feminine.” She points to the teeth of the Uzbekistani guy.

  “Masculine,” we guess.

  “Wrong, it is feminine.”

  We go through almost every body part. Then she points to the religious girl’s large breasts protruding from beneath her turtleneck.

  Clearly liking the attention, the religious girl smiles and blushes.

  That is obvious. “Feminine!” We call out, trying to out-yell the next person as if we are in kindergarten.

  “Wrong!” our teacher says, pleased that she tricked us again. “I have a great trick to help you remember. All of the singular body parts are masculine, like, nose, mouth, and forehead. All of the multiple body parts and paired body parts are feminine, like legs, toes, eyes, etc. The two pair of body parts that are masculine are breasts and testicles. That is because men think that both are theirs!”

  On that high note, the teacher sends us on another break. While I’ve learned a cute mnemonic device, I feel like I have a lot more Hebrew to learn if I really want to be able to fit into Israeli society and effectively serve in the army. Even though ulpan is intensive—five hours a day, five days a week, for five months—based on all the games we play, the songs we sing, and the pictures we draw, we might be ready for second grade when our classes are over, but none of us will be productive members of society.

  A Grim Forecast

  The teacher is setting up a radio with a tape player. There are only six students in class today. Most of the students are dropping out of ulpan for various reasons, they found a job or a boyfriend. Some are just too tired to come. The shoeless Brit stumbles into class half-drunk. “Why are you late?” the formerly calm teacher now screeches at him. He responds, but no one understands him through his thick accent.

  Despite all the obstacles, I force myself to make it to ulpan every day. I’m even more determined to learn Hebrew now, since I learned that nearly everyone at Merkaz Hamagshamim works at an English-speaking answering service that has been outsourced from the US. If I wanted to stay in an American bubble, I would have stayed in the Midwest.

  “Listen carefully to the words. We’re going to discuss the recording afterwards,” our ulpan teacher states.

  She pushes play.

  BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

  To Israelis, those three beeps signify the start of a news broadcast on the radio and are like the ringing of an ice cream truck miles away for kids. No matter how far away or how quiet the beeps are, Israelis stop what they are doing and tune into the news. If Israelis don’t listen to the news every hour, on the hour, then they might miss the toppling of a government coalition, a failed peace deal, or an entire war.

  The announcer begins broadcasting. He’s talking so fast that I barely understand him. How am I going to be able to do a good job in the IDF Spokesperson Unit if I can’t understand the news?

  The teacher stops the tape. Rewinds it and plays it again. “Who can tell me what the headlines are today?”

  One student summarizes the news about another terrorist shooting in the West Bank, another Kassam rocket falling in the city of Sderot, another corrupt politician, and another traffic accident. Despite Israel being in the global news every day, the news never seems to change.

  As I’m taking notes about Israel’s security situation, I think back to when I first decided that I wanted to join the army.

  I had gone out again with Orli and some of her friends to a club. Pushed around by the thumping music and pulsating crowd, I became separated from the group. I looked around for Orli, but couldn’t find her.

  “Hi,” some guy said to me in unaccented English.

  “Hi,” I yelled back, thinking that I must really stick out as an American.

  After introducing himself as Daniel, he asked, “What are you doing in Israel?” The club was so dark that I only caught a glimpse of him when the flashing colored lights hit his face.

  I told him in English that I was on a volunteer program. “What about you?” I asked.

  “I moved here from the States with my parents about five years ago. I’m in the Israeli army now.”

  The loud boom of the music in the night club transported me back to the day that I had fired an M-16 for the first time. I had served in the Israeli army for four days during my six-week teen tour to Israel. Our officers, who had been only a few years older than us, were responsible for our lives and safety, while our parents didn’t even think we were responsible enough to take care of the family pet fish. We had followed everything they said like a life-or-death game of Simon Says.

  “Silence!” our officer had yelled.

  No one dared to move.

  “Lie down on your stomach.”

  We did. No one had complained about the scratchy blanket on the desert ground.

  “Put your legs straight back behind you.”

  We assumed the position.

  “Move your right leg to a 45-degree angle.”

  We moved our legs so that they looked like a lop-sided V.

 
“A commander will come around to put the gun in your hands.”

  We had all held our breath.

  Our commander came to me. She put the gun in my hand. It felt dead. It was cold and hard.

  “Switch your gun from safety to semi.”

  I had been too afraid to move, but I flipped the switch.

  “Aish! Fire!”

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! We pulled the trigger three times.

  I felt the kick back of the gun through my entire body. The gun felt alive.

  I set it down and stopped moving. As I lay on my stomach, the smoke from the barrel and the dryness of the desert filled my lungs.

  I stood up and slowly backed away from the gun, like I had backed away from the Western Wall the first time I had visited it.

  When handing in my army uniform the next day, I thought about all the Israeli girls and boys who had to join the army at eighteen and give two or three years of their lives for the country’s security. If I had grown up in Israel, I too would have been joining the army at eighteen. But instead, I went to college, and while I was deciding between a beer or a shot of vodka, my Israeli peers were deciding whether or not to take life or death shots.

  “Can I get you another shot?” Daniel, the guy from the bar, asked me. I suddenly realized how much I admired him for being in the army.

  “Yeah, thanks. By the way, what do you do in the army?” I asked, trying to play it cool.

  “I serve in the IDF Spokesperson Unit. It’s sort of like doing media relations for the army,” he said.

  “Wow!” I said out loud, with envy. The famous picture at the beginning of the Intifada that showed an Israeli policeman with a baton standing behind a bloodied teenage boy popped into my head. The New York Times had plastered it on the front page of its paper with the caption “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount.” The world assumed the soldier had just beaten the boy. But the bloodied boy was actually a Jewish boy from Chicago, who had just been dragged from a taxi and beaten by Palestinians. The policeman was rescuing him. It was as if the media intentionally wanted to make Israel look bad. I thought to myself, if I could learn Hebrew, I could serve in that unit too. Suddenly, the party experience in Israel was no longer fulfilling enough for me. As I slammed my empty shot glass down on the bar, I decided that I would join the IDF’s Spokesperson Unit.

  The ulpan teacher knocks on my desk. “Jessica, are you with us? What was the headline?” she asks me, supposedly for the third time.

  I don’t know the answer. I can’t even try to fake one. I’m too busy thinking that when I join the army, I’ll change those headlines.

  When I think about the Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped and lynched at the start of the Intifada, I get angry. I had learned that the next day, the international media apologized to Arafat for airing the bloodshed and condemned Israel for defending itself. I wanted to change that dynamic. I worked so hard during my volunteer program trying to get drafted into the IDF Spokesperson Unit. I mentioned to anyone I talked to: random people on the bus, at the grocery store, and in coffee shops, that I wanted to join the unit to see if maybe they had a connection. Just by doing this, I found somebody who had been in the unit a few years earlier, another person who had served about ten years earlier, and even an officer who was currently in the unit. While all of these people had plenty of advice, such as “You don’t know what you are getting yourself into,” and “Don’t get your hopes up,” no one was able to help me get in.

  Everyone in the class starts gathering up their notebooks and homework assignments when the teacher dismisses us. On my walk home, I realize that ulpan will be over in a few months and I still don’t have any plans for what I am going to do afterwards. I haven’t made any progress on the army front. I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to get drafted for nearly a year. I had meetings with soldiers in the unit who told me not to even bother trying because only people with protecia get in. I talked to people in the unit’s reserves and they basically laughed at me. I called the drafting office, but they just hung up on me.I feel as if I’m at a dead end and I don’t know where to turn. This dream may not come true. To get in, I might need a miracle.

  The Not-So-Merry Virgin

  It’s a Friday afternoon. Everyone’s in a rush to get their errands done before Shabbat starts and everything closes down.

  I’m in the post office to pick up a package. I’m staring at the clock. I know that as soon as it hits 12:00, the tellers will simply close their windows, gather their things together, and get up and leave, no matter how many people are still in line.

  I’ve now been a citizen of Israel for nearly two months.

  As ulpan continued, I got braver about using my Hebrew out in public. I started preparing for upcoming conversations by practicing them in my head. I prepared on the bus, in the street, while sitting by myself in a café. People would look at me strangely because I probably looked crazy, talking to myself.

  While still learning, I got myself into situations so awkward that I would have preferred getting on a bus behind someone who had sweat dripping from his brow, a suspicious bulk in his stomach area, and was yelling “Allahu akbar.” There was the time that I meant to ask a waitress for cos mayim, a glass of water, and instead asked for koos mayim, pussy water. Another time, I tried to ask shop owners if I could put a flier on their knisa, entrance, but instead said kinisia, church—not the best mistake to make in Israel. Or there was the time that I meant to ask a sales person if I had to wash a shirt by hand, but instead asked if I could masturbate it. And most embarrassing was the time that I told a date that I would l’redet lo, go down on him, when I meant to l’redet alav, make fun of him.

  Besides vocabulary, I’ve also been working on improving my accent, since my Hebrew teacher told me that it really bothered her. She had told me to change it as if it was as easy as changing my shirt or my hair color. My biggest problem seems to be pronouncing the letter resh, a guttural r that is rolled. I had asked Orli for help and she had suggested that I gargle water while trying to say a resh. All I ended up doing was getting saliva all over my face.

  Despite these embarrassing mistakes, my Hebrew is improving.

  Impatiently, I look at the post office slip. Why can’t it at least be easy to get mail in this country?

  After thirty minutes of waiting, I’m finally at the front of the line. I look up at the clock. The minute hand is quickly approaching the number twelve.

  I squeeze the postal notice in my hand. I’m excited to see what is in the package. I hope it is a care package from my parents.

  I used to be very timid while in line in Israel. During my first trip to the grocery store on my volunteer program, a woman started screaming at me while I was waiting in line at the register. I was busy reading a special weekly newspaper called Gate for Beginners when someone tried to sneak in front of me. At the same time, someone pushed me from behind. Not sure where to address my first complaint, I looked behind me.

  “Why push me?” I asked in broken and hesitant Hebrew.

  “You give her la’akof. You need to put heart,” the woman behind me said in Hebrew.

  “What?” I asked, translating her words in my head literally.

  “You give her la’akof. You need to put heart,” the woman repeated loudly, as if I had a hearing problem instead of a comprehension problem.

  “You no to need to push me,” I said.

  “You no l’tzricha l’kroa b’tor. Yesh harbeh anashim . . .” she kept yelling at me, but too fast for me to understand.

  Back then I wasn’t prepared for the grocery store on a Friday in Israel, which feels like a looting scene. Since grocery stores are closed on Saturdays, people are in a rush to buy food for the weekend. Trying to pull food off the shelves, especially the tomatoes and cucumbers, can prove to be a violent, if not life-threatening task. It feels as if a war has been declared and people are going mad, trying to stock up on necessities for the next month. Forget the terrorists! I needed t
o be more aggressive at the supermarket to survive in this country—or else I may starve. The woman ahead of me in line turned around and began yelling at the woman behind me. I felt helpless. I hoped that she was sticking up for me, but now that I know Israelis, I know that they argue just for the sake of arguing—as if it were an Olympic sport.

  Back in the post office, I notice a teller chit-chatting with some tourist. “Can I come to the window?” I ask her.

  As if she is a judge, she snaps, “I’m not done with my current customer. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  Without thinking, I quickly yell back at her, “You are done. You’re just chatting with this tourist and that doesn’t count.”

  And with that, my yelling virginity pops. I initiated my first argument in Hebrew. And it looks like I might win!

  I hear my ulpan teacher’s voice in my head, “The Israeli spirit is to question authority, to speak up and out, and to look at things in a different way. Israelis don’t just do something because they are told to, they want to know the reason why and if they don’t agree with it, they will say so. For instance, Israeli students often don’t even bother to raise their hands when they want to argue with the professor.”

  Then the tourist yells in English that it is none of my business. But I refuse to talk to him in English, since I can now yell in Hebrew.

  “It is her business. In fact, it is everybody’s business,” a man behind me yells, as he motions to everyone still in line.

  Then everyone joins in the yelling. A woman behind me starts telling the teller how she should be doing her job and the teller says that she does not need a lecture.

  I look around, almost proud that I started a commotion. I no longer care about my package. I stand a little taller and straighter, thinking to myself that I am becoming an Israeli. I’m becoming stubborn, rude, obnoxious, and straightforward. Even though my innocent American appearance makes me look like Dorothy wandering around the Land of Oz, I’ve learned to hold my own in this country. A sweet, innocent Midwestern girl could never survive in Israel, much less its army, without chutzpah!