Second Thoughts

Please Leave Me A Note: The Language Of Personal Notes

My husband and I were the kind of people who left notes to each other, they were short, often purposeful, but full with attention and love. By the time our first daughter was born, we have been writing notes for almost 8 years.

At that time we lived in the US but, of course, we always corresponded in Hebrew. I never thought about the complex meaning of English versus Hebrew until it was time to read to our daughter. It was clear that she would learn English school, so we read to her mostly in Hebrew.

But reading is never enough, and I started wondering about the language of her future notes. As a personal note is such an intimate form of communication, I felt that it was crucial for my two daughters to be able to write them in Hebrew.

Thus, I decided to teach the girls to read and write in Hebrew, I explained my rationale, and they agreed to make an effort. We created our own Sunday school and every week they wrote letters in Hebrew to the family and invented stories which they wrote in their special note books.

Around us there were many Israeli friends who spoke English with their children. The strong Hebrew accent in English is very noticeable for me, and I always felt sorry for them. Somehow it seemed that this choice of language reflected something about the relationship between parents and children and weakened the position of the parent in the new country.

normally to become fluent in the language much faster than their parents and grandparents. A friend of mine told me that when she was 11 in the late 1960s she used to accompany her grandmother everywhere, especially to places like the local hospital and different government offices. She was the interpreter for her grandmother who knew no Hebrew. This is a typical story, those children who became the mouth piece for the whole family were put in an awkward position. On the one hand, they gained a special status in the family because of their responsible role.On the other hand, this reversal of roles, in which the child is the ambassador to the outside world, was also a source of confusion for everybody within that family

Our Israeli friends in the US were young professionals whose English was good enough and they didn't need an interpreter. But still they lived in a foreign country where their children had a better mastery of the English language. I felt that speaking to my daughters in my native tongue was a better way to preserve the traditional roles in our family.

And as for the personal notes, my daughters, who spent most of their life in the US, prefer to read and write in English. But whenever I come home to find a note from one of my daughters, it is always written in Hebrew.