We speak English, don't we?

The other day I started up a new WhatsApp group: Lloyds English. I announced it to my close family: Israeli-born offspring and Israeli-born wife, and stipulated that it would serve as a place where we'd communicate only in English. The immediate response to my announcement was: "What are you drinking and are you already drunk?" And then silence. The last words uttered in Lloyds English. So there was nothing left to do but fade back into the linguistic woodwork.

A friend of  mine asked me the other day, over a pint of Guinness, what I regret in life. Normally, my response to such a question is that I regret nothing. I believe in learning from mistakes, rather than dwelling in regret. But this time, whether it be the result of my increasing age or growing egocentricity, I admitted to having one regret: that I did not speak English with my children.

Now, in an earlier blog posting: Curiouser and curiouser, I defended my reasoning for not speaking English to my children, and in doing so, robbing them of a golden opportunity for becoming bilingual. If you haven't read that posting, or have forgotten what it is about, it would be a good idea to read it first. There I explained why my entrance and acceptance into Israeli society was not a simple one, and why much of it was dependent upon my acquiring a working competence in Hebrew. Speaking only English at home, at that time, would have prevented me from reaching the linguistic competence required to meet that goal and would have sent a wrong message - both to those in Israel and in Canada back home, who were waiting for me to come back to my senses and leave Israel - about how serious I was in my endeavour to fully adapt into Israeli society. So, I put my linguistic competence first, above that of my children. I thought that they would have ample opportunity for picking up English  on the way. Wasn't this a small price to pay for not having a father who was a social outcast?

The irony is that, in the long run, all of my effort really didn't make much of a difference. True, I took university classes in Hebrew, wrote papers in Hebrew, gave lectures in Hebrew, carried on correspondence in Hebrew - but in the end I was still the odd man out. I would never really fit in. Not because of the language, but because of me. I am simply meant to be an outcast, whether I live in Israel, Canada, or on the moon. I reached the point where I felt that I had adapted as well as possible to Israeli society and had nothing left to prove. And it was then, that I began to regress. At times, I felt like I was speaking with stones in my mouth, and Hebrew was often like a hot blanket, under which I lay smothered on a hot summer day.  Words only flowed in that ancient language when I felt emotion, and such moments became less and less frequent over time. My adult identity was slowly beginning to crumble. I needed to find a way to slip back into something which was perhaps lost forever: slip back into me.

Would speaking to my children in English help in any way? Or had that ship sailed forever? It's not that my children don't know English. They did pick it up along the way. A daughter who now speaks mostly English in her work. A son who is writing a 100+ page MA thesis in English on a very technical subject. And another son who decided one day, through his own volition, to speak to me only in English (and was the only one to applaud the creation of Lloyds English and not question my sobriety).

It seems that I never know when to stop chasing windmills. Don Quixote. It is my battle alone. And in the meantime, Lloyds English still lies there, ignored, like an unwanted orphan. Why should I expect anything more?

Curiouser and curiouser

I think I have become somewhat of a curiosity to my children. Perhaps this is a part of losing relevance as we grow old. Or perhaps it is also linked to circumstance. A close childhood friend of mine - same age as me - started having children much later in life. His oldest child is in her mid-teens and he still plays a very relevant role in her life. But my children are all grown up and have flown the coop. When is it that we feel less responsible for our children and they begin to feel responsibility for us?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that my children view me somewhat as a curiosity. Most people do. It just took my children a while to catch up, perhaps. And I suppose I am to blame. I left them partly on the outside most of their lives, beginning first and foremost with the language.

"So, you didn't speak English with them at home."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Adva and I spoke Hebrew at home."
"But Adva knows English."
"Yes."
"And the English language is the greatest gift you could give them."
"I thought that giving them life was."
"That too."
I sighed into the darkness.
"Anyway," I said, in a meagre attempt to defend myself, "I was fighting an uphill battle. I was changing country, language and culture. It was very important for me to adapt."
"Most new immigrants go through the very same thing."
"Yes, but with a significant difference."
"Which is?"
"They are confident in their right to be here, and in others recognizing this right."
"And you aren't?"
"Not necessarily."
"Why not?"
I looked nervously around me to see if anyone was listening.
"I'm not Jewish," I whispered.
"Oh."
"Is that all you have to say?"
"Maybe I should go."
"You can't go, you are my muse."
"Yes, but wasn't there an escape clause about misinformation?"
"When did I ever feed you false information?"
"I don't know. I will have to have my lawyers look at this."
"Lawyers?"
"Okay, you've got me. One of the problems of living in Cyberspace."
"Are you going to help me with this or not?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"No."
"Okay, then I guess I am."
Silence. She always liked the dramatic effect of silence.
"So," she said, "you speak Hebrew at home, but with a Canadian accent. You are not Jewish, but your children are, because there mother is Jewish. They probably have no idea why you came to Israel in the first place and why you are still here... am I on track, so far?"
"Knock yourself out," I said.
"And you wonder why they consider you as a curiosity."
"You are missing the point."
"Am I?"

"Was it as simple as that?" I thought to myself. What about the whole thing of getting old? Or was I trying to blame everything on getting old?

There are very few constants in life, things that I can state with certainty. But one is my children. They are the greatest part of my life. I would not take anything back. And now we have our first grandchild. And that is a real bonus to having children. They say that when your children are young, and they still don't know better, you are a superhero to them. But later they begin to see the flaws, and in their teens they wonder how anyone can be that stupid. Yet, in their early twenties, they are amazed at how much you have learnt in the past few years. And while you still have a very good relationship with them, you can never get back the magic. For they go on to create their own magic, through their own marriage and children.

And just when you are about to write yourself away, there is a grandchild. And you rediscover the magic through his/her eyes, letting you into a world you have almost forgotten. And I know that some day my grandchild will view me as a curiosity. But that doesn't disturb me. In the meantime, I will enjoy every moment.

The Nothingness of Being

Ronald Green, in his book Nothing Matters, makes a distinction between nothing and nothingness. Nothing, he claims, is the absence of everything, whereas nothingness is the absence of something. An important distinction. But how do we distinguish, then, between something and nothingness?

 How much room is there in the human consciousness? For everything added, must something else be erased? How much love are we capable of giving? Can we have multiple relationships without one coming at the expense of another? Can we spread our love evenly between our children, without one receiving more, and the other less? When we learn things, must we forget others? Is consciousness the something and the sub-consciousness the nothingness? Whereas nothing appears to be absolute, nothingness is not. We appear able to slip in and out of nothingness. But what comes first - something or nothingness, the chicken or the egg? Can we only conceive of nothingness after we have conceived of something and recognized its absence?

As an example of slipping in and out of nothingness, I’ll take you back to an earlier blog entry - Why Guinness always tastes better in Tel Aviv. There I told you about how Ronald and I would reach great moments of enlightenment over pints of Guinness at Molly Blooms only to have these amazing revelations quickly evaporate into nothingness on our separate ways home. At the time, I thought they were gone for good, but I was mistaken. They resurfaced somehow in two separate books: Ronald’s Nothing Matters which delves deep into the concept of nothing, offering a clear, comprehensive and in-depth study of non-fiction; and my As I Died Laughing which sets out in a dysfunctional and fragmented exploration into the distinction between something and nothingness, supposedly a work of fiction.

It seems as if we are constantly moving back and forth into nothingness and the something which generated it. In leaving country, language and culture behind, my new Israeli identity has erased many parts of the Canadian identity which preceded it. The longer I have lived here in Israel, the further back into nothingness one would expect the exile of my Canadian self to be. But this hasn’t been the case. Recently I have found parts of my Canadian identity, which I thought were lost, fighting their way back into consciousness. I hear that this is not a phenomenon unique to my own personal expatriate existence. Apparently many people find themselves on a curve in their acclimatization to a new country and culture. They struggle to adapt to their new country, and just when they reach  the pinnacle of feeling almost native to the new language and culture, they enter into a period of recession - their former identity subtly reappearing out of their nothingness. And the main difference is that they no longer feel the need to apologize for, or try to stifle, this something that had apparently never gone away.

Which brings us to the concept of being. What does all this matter if we are going to die? And then everything becomes nothing - earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust - from nothing we came, and into nothing we return. But can we refer the concept of nothing to the concept of being? If nothing is absolute - the absence of everything - then how could anything be created out of it? If our being was nothing before our conception in birth, how could we have ever come about? And if nothing is the absence of everything, how can we enter into the state of nothing after we die. Something surely cannot become a part of nothing. This is probably unexpectedly comforting to many - linking our being to nothingness rather than nothing - believing that by slipping into nothingness, we can slip back into something again. All religions seem to have built their basic premise on this belief, although they all label it differently. For me, personally, I have no room in my vocabulary for an omnipotent being. I have enough of a problem trying to come to terms with my own being. Rather, at this point, it is simply a matter of logic; albeit human logic.

Understanding being, even without taking into account the state of being before our conception and after our death, has puzzled thinkers throughout the ages. A child cannot differentiate between itself and a separate world at first. It goes through a cognitive development where it suddenly becomes aware of objects separate from itself. And then later, it is also able to differentiate between these objects. Is this something that the child is taught, or acquires through experimentation in this new world? Or is it a part of our cognitive programming? And if so, why does it take time for this programming to be activated? Is our cognitive programming the nothingness through which all somethings are recognized? Does this help us understand which comes first - the chicken or the egg?

If something came from nothingness, then the process could hypothetically be reversed. Under special circumstances, we might find ourselves returning to a womb like state. Let us consider the example of Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier who has been held in captivity for the last five years by the Hamas, and who will apparently be released in a few days. Gilad has had no real human contact in the last five years. He has been confined to a solitary cell where his only reality is the things inside these four walls that he can see, hear, touch and smell. Over time, the construct of this reality must have slowly filled his consciousness, pushing back everything he had known before then into nothingness. And in Gilad’s case, we must ask ourselves if there is a point of no return, where something is pushed so far back into nothingness that it is lost forever. For Gilad has come as close as possible to nothing - the absence of everything - as appears humanly possible. Upon his release, will he capable of recognizing a world he once new? Or will this once again become a learning experience? For Gilad, his being hasn’t changed. But for his family and closest friends, they will search for a being that they recognize,and they may have to come to the realization that he is now a stranger. Must we then divide being into two? Who we know ourselves to be and how others see us? After we die, if we do still exist in nothingness or in something, the recognition of our present being is in our eyes only. Others still recognize our being, even after our death, but they only recognize what they remember of us.

Life is frail. There is no doubt about that. And it is finite - no matter what we do. Yet we never give up on our search for meaning. Maybe we just have to learn that meaning can come out of nothingness, just as much as it can come out of something. Or maybe we need to take one step further and come to the realization that there isn’t any real difference between the two.

How to write Canadian

Hello everybody. This is Tom Chambers, from Expats Anonymous.  Today we are interviewing David Lloyd, a Canadian Expat, whose first novel - As I Died Laughing - has been published as an e-book. We thank David for allowing us to reprint this interview on his blog.

Tom:  From looking at your personal history, I see that you grew up in Canada but spent most of your adult life in Israel. Do you consider yourself, then, a Canadian author or an Israeli author?

David:  That’s a tough one. First of all, it’s strange to even think of myself as an author.

Tom:  Why is that?

David:  I’ve been writing bits and pieces all of my life. I think there was a time when I was young that I thought of becoming a writer. Actually, is there a difference in being called a writer or an author?

Tom: Well, I guess you are only called an author when you get a book published.

David:  I suppose so. Which still doesn’t necessarily make you a writer. I guess that depends on the reviews.

Tom:  Are  you trying to evade my original question?

David:  That obvious, eh? No, I’ll give it a go. I don’t think I could ever call myself an Israeli writer, or author. First of all, the book is written in English, not Hebrew.

Tom:  And that is important?

David:  Yes. The language that we speak is a part of the person we are, or who we are at that moment. I think I am two different people at times, when I speak Hebrew or English. But the more important point, I think, is that my formative years were spent in Canada. Writers always return to their childhood at some time in their writing.

Tom:  Have you done so in this book?

David:  I wouldn’t say that I have gone back that far. But it is there, nonetheless, in my writing. Israel is my adopted country. In a way, it is something like your in-laws. They are now family, but not the family you were born into.

Tom:  And you can always divorce your in-laws, but not your genetic family.

David:  Yes. Canada will never go away, even though I have been living on the other side of the world for more than 30 years. So, I guess if I had to choose, I would call myself a Canadian author / writer. I don’t know what Margaret Atwood would have to say about that.

Tom:  I suppose the irony, then, is that your book was not published in either Canada or Israel, but in England.

David:  Actually, it was published in cyberspace, since it is an e-book. But yes, it was published by a UK publisher. And you can get it on Amazon and Smashwords. Sorry, I couldn't help but give it a bit of an advertisement.

Tom:  Fair enough. Tell me, without my mentioning your age, why is it that you came out with your first novel at such a later age.

David:  I guess I had not much to offer until now.

Tom: Really?

David: No. I think I always had a lot to say. But for a long time it was enough for me to just write for myself and the people around me. Getting published really wasn’t on my mind. But at some point, things changed. 

Tom:  What was the cause of the change?

David: I realized my own mortality, and felt the sudden and urgent need to leave something of myself behind.

Tom:  And this is  your legacy.

David:  A part of it, at least.

Tom:  Do you see the book as something of a self-biography?

David:  God no. If I admitted to that I would have to constantly worry about dodging silver bullets. Of course there is a mixture of fact and fiction, and as the author, I have the luxury of not saying where the fiction begins and ends.

Tom:  Much like the theme of your book.

David:  I see that you have read it.

Tom:  Does that surprise you?

David:  I’m still getting used to the idea of it being out there.

Tom:  What about the people in the book. Are any of them real?


Tom:  I take it by your silence that you aren’t comfortable with this question.

David:  Well, you have to understand that certain characters will always be inspired, in some way, by real people and real circumstances. However, once they enter into the book, they take on a life of their own.

Tom: Nobody threatening class action?

David:  Not yet.

Tom: I have been looking at the book cover.

David:  You don't like it.

Tom:  Well, it is a bit strange. The guy that is sitting there and the things surrounding him.

David:  Believe it or not, the cover was meticulously thought out. The positioning, the way each item is displayed and depicted, has a direct connection to the underlying themes in the book. The problem is that you usually see a downsized copy of the cover on the book sites, and don't get the full detail. I could talk about this at great length, but it would be too much of a spoiler.

Tom:  The interaction between the various plots in the book is quite complex.

David:  Yes.

Tom:  Aren't you afraid that people won't get the book. That they won't understand what you are trying to say?

David: They will get what they will get. The main thing is that they get something. I guess that the success of the book depends on that.  I still discover new things in the book even after ten rewrites and reading it over endless times.

Tom:  Things that you didn’t see when you wrote them in the beginning?

David:  Things that I discovered in retrospect. Some which turned out to be quite clever. But then, I am not your most objective reader.

Tom:  How will you feel if people interpret your book quite differently than you do yourself?

David:  I have no problem with that. I believe that once a writer has released his work, his work no longer belongs to him. Who am I to say what interpretation is right and what is wrong. As an English teacher, I told my students that they could present whatever interpretation they wanted of a piece of literature, just as long as they built a conclusive argument using examples from the text. I informed them that the highest mark would go to the interpretations that surprised me the most, as long as they backed it up.

Tom: And did they? Surprise you?

David:  A few did. Not an easy thing to do. I remember writing a paper about Wuthering Heights, while studying English Lit at university. I set out to prove that Nelly was evil, and that most of the things that went wrong in the novel were the result of her subtle and misguided intervention. The professor had MA assistants who marked the papers. Mine came back as an 86, and with all types of comments in red expressing astonishment at my claims, but not relating specifically to what I wrote. Normally I would have let such things pass, but I really did think that my paper was a masterpiece and that the assistant couldn’t see past her own traditional concept of the book. So I went straight to the professor and asked him to read my paper.

Tom:  And what did he say?.

David:  He crossed out her mark and gave me a 98.

Tom:  Why not a 100?

David:  Now you sound like my mother.

Tom:  Getting back to authors and their works, how do you think Emily Bronte would have felt about your analysis of Nelly in her book?

David:  I hope she would have learnt to let go of her book, just as I have mine.

Tom:  Have you really? It has only been a few days since it came out.

David:  That long?

Tom:  And on that note, it looks like our time is almost up. Is there anything you’d like to add before signing off?

David:  Only that I have set up a facebook group for people to post comments about the book. I’d like to say that the writing of the book was satisfying in itself, and that I really don’t need anything more, but I do feel the need to hear what people think. Not simply whether they like the book or not, but how they relate to different parts of the book, no matter how harsh their criticism. Especially after the second or third reading.

Tom:  Do you think a second or third reading would help?

David:  It certainly wouldn’t hurt.