30/4/00

Daughter of the mother tongue

          With so much drama telescoped into a mere century of cataclysmic events, you watch a frail old man or woman struggling among the throngs, and you wonder: what have they done, or seen, what part large or small did they play in nation-building, what incomprehensible saga of survival burnished their lives?
          In a city like Jerusalem, where everyone has a story, the smaller heroes and trail-blazers are common enough to go unnoticed.
          Like the old woman who can't remember much anymore, but who has so much to remember. Dola Wittmann, completely anonymous to most Israelis, has a remarkable place in our history: she is the world's oldest native Hebrew speaker.
          Dola learned the language from her father, who reinvented it. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's surviving daughter is now in her late-90s, and is no longer fit to be interviewed. I am privileged to have been acquainted with her since a time when she could enthrallingly narrate her past.
          During my first of numerous chats with Dola, about 15 years ago, our hours-long interview was interjected by occasional "harumphs." Every time she dipped into another language for a bon mot, her husband Max voiced his displeasure. "You can say that very well in Hebrew too," he grumbled.
          Max, who passed away a few years ago, was actually more stalwart a devotee of Ben-Yehuda than even Dola. Worldly and cosmopolitan, Dola readily spoke other languages as well. Max adamantly refused.
          When Max asked for Ben-Yehuda's permission to marry his daughter, his answer, she recalled, was: "I will grant permission dependent on your answer to two questions: Will you live in Eretz Yisrael, and will you only speak Hebrew?" Max promised to do both -- and true yekke that he was, never, ever compromised his promise.
          It did not even concern Ben-Yehuda that Max was Christian -- and German to boot. He pointedly did not ask Max to convert (he never did). "Speaking Hebrew, and speaking it here, was all that mattered," Dola explained.
          "Since then, I never left the country for any reason," Max said proudly, "and never spoke anything but Hebrew."
          Max devoted his life to the study, advancement and usage of pure Ben-Yehuda Hebrew, and he was certainly one of the world's top authorities on the subject. Whereas Dola would merge foreign elements into her speech, and adapted, to an extent, to the language's evolution, Max would not. A telefon was still a sach-rachok, just as Ben-Yehuda decided it should be.
          Dola lit up when I asked her if Ben-Yehuda had a sense of humor when he created the modern language. "Oh, yes, definitely! There are many examples of whimsy in his choice of words." For example? She laughed. "Clitoris. He decided on dagdegan, from the root l'dagdeg,  to tickle."
          Thanks to her father, she said, one of the greater joys of learning Hebrew is guessing the meaning of an unknown word by its root letters.
          She was also prone to toying with the language. Responding to one question, she flashed a smile, cocked her head, and responded, "Kachi-kacha" (with the stress on both second syllables) -- then explaining that it was a marriage of kacha-kacha (so-so) and the French "comme çi comme ça." That one, as I recall, Max let go without comment.
          Some of Ben-Yehuda's coinages never became popular, consigned to linguistic curiosity (and to the vocabulary of Max). Only the Ben-Yehuda family ever used the word badura for tomato; milav, for "sport," was taken from the Arabic, but swiftly became defunct. The oddly foreign-sounding petrozilia prevailed over Ben-Yehuda's netz halav for parsley. The delightful chen-chen (thank you) was perhaps too genteel for the clamorous nation-in-the-making, but it survived among a few "old-fashioned" speakers, by now winning some popularity as a hip colloquialism -- an ironic revival.
          Max was able to recount Dola's childhood just as vividly as she could, because as a member of the Ben-Yehuda "language army," even as a little girl, she was responsible for helping entrench Hebrew as the local lingo. Dola's early years, and the language's, were one and the same.
          "Ben-Yehuda would gather the children each evening, and tell them all the new words he had created, or rediscovered. The children were required to pass them on." Max, a tall, white-haired, coolly Teutonic gentleman, warmed only when speaking about Ben-Yehuda and his language. "Dola was younger, so this was already more established by the time she learned to speak. A child would be sent to the grocer to buy rice. He would ask for orez, and the [Yiddish-speaking] grocer would say 'vus?' (what?) The child would then point to the rice and repeat 'orez' -- that's how the language, word by word, was first spread."
          Ben-Yehuda introduced to his household two pets, a dog and a cat -- one female, the other male. His sole reason: so the children should learn gender.
          The question of the current state of Hebrew elicited -- predictably -- diametric responses. Max was enraged at the rampant Americanization; Dola's eyes sparkled. "Ben-Yehuda" -- that was how she referred to him -- "would have been delighted to walk around Jerusalem, hearing all the children speaking Hebrew. That was his dream." Childless herself, Dola spoke softly, tenderly: "I love being in the streets, hearing these thousands of youngsters speaking it. That is his ultimate success."
          Were they irritated to hear the persecution I inflicted on their beloved language? Again, Dola was kindly and forgiving, at least giving me credit for trying. Max harrumphed.
          When they were younger, sprier, sometimes they would take a stroll from their home in the Sheraton Jerusalem Plaza a few blocks down King -- excuse me, Hamelech George.
          They would pause, this elderly, anonymous couple, when they came to Ben-Yehuda Street. Under the street-name sign honoring her father for his singleminded mission, they would revel in the music of the language of the crowds around them. No one in these throngs knew, no one stopped to say "chen-chen" in gratitude for her influence on their lives. But Max and Dola were happy enough knowing that, if anyone had said a word of thanks, it would have been in Hebrew.