“Why do you want to learn Arabic?”  someone asked me when I presented some of the translations of my poems to Arabic in a reading.  “Because people speak Arabic around me.  I have to understand.”  

Well, I’ve been trying to learn for years, and today, as Jereis and Maison were translating a poem of mine, I began to feel that it is beginning to work.  That I can understand here and there, that I can read the letters.  Wow.  It is hard! But my Hebrew has improved in the past few years as well.  And at my age, that’s amazing!

Unfortunately, even though Marek has been busy translating some poems into Polish, my Polish has almost totally disappeared.  And only occasionally does a word come to the surface, even though I was surrounded by Polish and Russian in my youth, with all the refugees.  Last night, as we were admiring the round challot our friend had baked, the conversation turned to the little black spots garnishing the challah.  Ketsach (nigella) the specialists around the table told me, is a new addition to the Israeli cuisine in the past twenty years.  And I said suddenly, tschernishkes, the Russian word for little black things.  That meant, I realized, that the “novel” ingredient had been known to me as a child.  Then I remember that tscherni is black and that my mother always sang the song “Black Eyes” ochi tschornya to me as a child.  “As much as I love them, so I am afraid of them.”  Kak lliblov yavas…

My eyes are now green.