Flying by Flapping My Arms

The other morning, my wife, who generally looks at the obituary section before she turns to the rest of the Times, read to me from the eight paid notices for Fred Stein, who died at the age of 84. A retired partner in Neuberger Berman, an asset management firm, he began his career by handwriting price quotes on the stock exchange chalk board. He became rich, but what struck my wife and me were the comments of his friends on the occasion of his 80^th birthday. “If anyone who knows Fred were in trouble and could make just one call for help, he would call Fred.” Another said, “the day was always better if one got to spend a part of it with Fred.”

My 80^th birthday is scheduled to arrive in only a few weeks, so it will be too late to earn encomia like those. Fortunately, no party is planned, so no one will have to dissemble. It’s probably already too late to earn such praise for my tombstone. Never mind, long ago I had determined what would be written on my tombstone, were I to have one:

He Lectured in Hebrew

What’s so remarkable about that? It’s remarkable because I had a vocabulary of only a few thousand words. I lectured in what might be called basic Hebrew, but my students, whose English was far better than my Hebrew, preferred fractured Hebrew to beautiful English.

I was forty when we arrived in Jerusalem, expecting to remain for only two years. Still, I needed enough Hebrew for transactions with the grocer, the dry cleaner, the florist, and so forth, so I enrolled in an intensive Hebrew language course. After six weeks, I dropped out so that I could concentrate on my work. After a few months, though, it became clear that my Hebrew was inadequate for even the modest demands placed upon it, so I enrolled in a part-time course. After two years, we decided to prolong our stay, by which time I had been appointed a lecturer at the university, which required that lecturers use Hebrew after they had been in the country for three years. So the summer before I was to begin lecturing in Hebrew I took an intensive summer course.

Even so, I was unprepared to lecture in Hebrew. So for the first semester of lecturing in Hebrew, I would write, for each lecture, an outline in English (I couldn’t read Hebrew fast enough to write it in Hebrew) and then I would rehearse the lecture with a teacher, who corrected me as I went along. Over the appropriate places on the English outline I would write in ink the needed Hebrew term or phrase.

It’s not clear who was more tortured by my first lectures in Hebrew, the students or the lecturer. Sweat would roll down my cheeks as I went along. I felt as if I were trying to fly by flapping my arms, working very hard but not getting off the ground. Every now and then suppressed laughter would ripple around the hall, but I never stopped the lecture to find out what solecism I had committed – it would have taken too much time.

I could prepare my lectures in Hebrew but I couldn’t prepare the students’ questions or comments, which were often – and in the beginning almost always – incomprehensible. I would ask for a paraphrase, and when I didn’t understand that, I would ask for a slow, easy Hebrew paraphrase, and when that didn’t clear up the mystery, an exasperated student would call out an English translation.

One thing I learned by lecturing in Hebrew. What seemed to me to be a reasonable notion when expressed in elevated English, sometimes proved to be nonsense when reduced to simple, uncomplicated language. This was a valuable lesson, one that I wish more social scientists would learn.

Lecturing in Hebrew was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and it’s a shame that all that effort produced such meager results. Still, I managed to do it, and it seems to me that “He Lectured in Hebrew” wouldn’t be such a bad epitaph, although I must admit I was not entirely serious when I proposed it. “Beloved father, grandfather, uncle, and friend,” the beginning of the first obituary notice for Fred Stein, would be even better, if “husband” and “brother” were added to that list.

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