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At some point in the (hopefully near) future, readers of my blog (and I am suprised to find that I have already gained two - I still do not know where from) will find a essay that I have written on the subject of terrorist-attack-survival. Most Buenos Aires blogs are preoccupied mainly with meditations on tango, the ever-fluctuating economy, and the finer points of the empanada...so I do realise that some justification is necessary. And so...
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For much of my time at University, I lived with the assumption that I would make aliyah the moment I graduated. In my mind, I went through all that would happen after I arrived. I would learn the language. I would integrate into society. I would live happily ever after...
But as my time at Uni drew to a close, I began to see the flaws in this vision. My time as a language-teacher trainee had made it only too clear that the only way to really learn a language is to speak it, to make mistakes, repeatedly, until slowly, slowly, you learn to communicate. I began to realise what it would really be like; spending my first year or two in the country as an incoherent foreigner, desperately mouthing half-comprehensible gibberish to an impatient public in an attempt to improve my language skills. It would be something of a dream-killer, all right. There is enough to put off a first-time oleh without that.
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If only there was a place where I could practice and perfect my Ivrit, I thought, a place where the people would be understanding and patient, and where I would not be making them late for work with my linguistic incompetence. I had already heard of the hordes of Israeli tourists ploughing through South America and India. I had been on the road before, and knew what it would be like. That comedaraderie of the road that allows you to chat to complete strangers. The fact that after a few weeks you are well used to only understanding half of what anyone is saying. The way that you can spend an entire morning just chatting about nothing. It seemed ideal to the point of being compulsory. And so I bought a ticket for Argentina.
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Among the Israelis who I hang out with in Buenos Aires, I am known as the only guy ever to arrive in South America with a Spanish-English dictionary in one coat pocket and an Ivrit-English dictionary in the other. But that's not the half of it. To make aliyah via South America is to be caught up in two separate processes of integration. When I’m not learning how to pronounce the Spanish “drrrr”, I’m practicing my Hebrew “(g)resh”. When I’m not wondering how anyone can possibly enjoy mate, I’m wondering how anyone can possibly enjoy “Goldstar”. When I’m not discussing the precise differences between a chafafnic, a chababnic and a chardalnic, I’m learning what differentiates Flogers from Cumbias and Glams.
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The only time that both my Israelification and Argent-initiation have come directly in contact is when I found myself considering the above issue from those dual perspectives; How exactly does one go about surviving a terrorist attack? The question was raised as follows...
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My plan on arriving in Buenos Aires for the first time had been to teach for a year, and then, after a brief tour of Bolivia and possibly Peru, to head off home to England before making aliyah. My plans changed slightly when I found myself, only a week after arriving, going down to Bariloche with some Israelis I had met. When a week in Cordoba and two weeks in Salta were added to my impromptu itinerary, I figured I might as well make a go of it, and so headed up into Bolivia and Brazil and stayed for over three months. None of which did anything to help my finances, of course. Back in Buenos Aires, I took one look at my bank balance and decided that I had better start researching the possibilities of making aliyah directly from Argentina. The Israeli government pays for the ticket of anyone emigrating to Israel, and whilst it had once looked like I would be able to afford my own ticket back to England, this no longer seemed so certain. So one day, just as spring was turning into summer, I made my way to “AMIA”, the Argentine Jewish cultural centre, and asked to speak to the aliyah people.
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The man at the door was not forthcoming. Carefully herding me away from the building, he told me that one needed an appointment to be allowed in. After delivering this statement, he proceeded to cross his arms across his chest and look at me with the clear expectation that I would turn around and trot off home. If I had been in any other situation, I would have been less surprised by his official tone, but that just isn’t the way that things work in the Jewish world.
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In my experience, the Jewish traveller’s contact with his foreign compatriots goes something like this; You are in a foreign city, and you decide to pop into a kosher bakery or synagogue. The shop-owner or supervisor asks where you are from.
“England” you tell him.
“England? Really?” He tells you that his great uncle knew someone from England once.
“No kidding?”
No kidding. Deciding that this common factor gives him something of a claim to you, he offers you a biscuit or a tour of the synagogue. He then gives you a brief account of the Jewish history of the place, and a comprehensive list of every kosher restaurant and store within a fifty-mile radius. It then occurs to him that you need somewhere to stay. He wonders aloud if that old sofa in the front-room pulls out. You assure him that you are safely ensconced in a comfortable hostel, and really should get back to your sight seeing, but it is only after he has enquired after your next destination, given you his phone-number “just in case”, and offered you several of the eligible young maidens of the vicinity that you are allowed to flee. So, in this case, I was surprised.
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Discussing the episode with some friends later that afternoon, I was given some background information that put it all into perspective. Around ten years ago, the AMIA building was subject to an enormous suicide attack that totally destroyed it, killing eighty-five and injuring hundreds. The fact that the organisers of the whole affair were never caught has given the Argentine Jewish community something of a paranoid feel, and this is not helped by the fact that it is very much justified. Argentina holds one of the worlds most dangerously porous borders at the triple frontier between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, and Paraguay alone is known to be packed with Islamic militants.
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Bearing all this in mind, I began to understand the both the doorman’s initial inhospitability, and the way it deepened into downright aggresiveness when I insisted that surely, surely, there must be some way I could come in without an appointment. After all, I had come all this way...
“Do you speak Hebrew?” he had asked.
“More or less” .
Some of his unfriendliness had melted away, and he began to ask me a rapid series of questions. But. This was Hebrew all right, but not as we know it. His strange Argentine accent rendered it foreign, blunting the consonants or reducing them to barely perceptible shadows of their former selves.
“I thought you spoke Hebrew!” he barked, in response to my obvious incomprehension.
“I do, but-”
“Let me see your passport!”
He flipped it open, to reveal, on the first page, two stamps in flowing Arabic... souvenirs of the time I had popped over into Egypt on a visit to Eilat. His suspicion deepened.
“You must go away” he said.
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I had gone away.
But the episode had set me thinking.
If terrorism was that much of a threat over here, I had better start preparing for the homeland.
After all, I could learn to pronounce my “resh” like a true sabra, quaff Goldstar for breakfast, lunch and supper , and be able to spot a chababnic at fifty yards. But until I had figured out how to survive a terrorist attack, I was not prepared for life in Israel...