But when she's not giving me deadline stress, this particular translator's howlers are a huge source of amusement. The crew in the graphics department - all native Hebrew speakers - have printed out her Top 10 Bloopers on paper banners and taped them to the walls above the Mac computers. (Don't worry, she'll never see them - she works from home and sends the translations via email). Our favourite blooper is "husbands' rights." Allow me to explain: the Hebrew phrase for "copyright" is "ba'alei zkhuyot". The first word means, depending on the context, "husbands," "masters" or "owners". The second word means "rights." And of course our somewhat challenged translator once decided that a certain publishing house had "husbands' rights" over its books.
So now whenever we're concerned about whether we can use a photograph taken from the archives for an article, we ask each other with mock concern, "Does anyone else have husbands' rights on this photo?"
I guess we're being a bit mean to the poor woman. We laugh at her because she's the type of American-born, very religious woman that Israelis find so amusing: even after 20 years in this country she still speaks Hebrew with an accent so thick that listening to her is like reading Hebrew prose written in Latin characters. When you ask her how she is she doesn't say "fine, thanks - and you?"; she says "Thank God, thank God," like a mantra. Once when I told her I had to spend most of the weekend working she said, "Oh but you won't work on shabbos, will you?!" In response I asked if she read the paper on Sunday mornings and if so when did she think the articles had been written and copyedited for her reading pleasure?
And whoosh! My catty question went right over her head.
More on the gap between secular Israeli and Jewish diaspora cultural attitudes can be seen in this article about the current American tour of Israeli hip hop group Hadag Nachash. The description of the group's reaction to its audience of Jewish frat members at George Washington University says it all:
They are plainly out of place, and they can sense it. Some of the band members have never been to America, and have certainly never been inside a college frat house. "They look a little nerdy to me," comments bassist Yaya Cohen Harounoff, referring to his hosts.
Oh well, the group will probably feel more at home when they perform at my old haunt in New York, the Knitting Factory. It's definitely much more their scene, and there'll probably be a few Israeli denizens of Williamsburg in the audience to make them feel at home.
I met a few of the guys from Hadag Nachash once - in India, actually, four years ago. I was hanging out in a Himalayan village called Baghsu, located about twenty minutes' walk above McLeod Ghanj, home of the Dalai Lama and a mixed population of Indians and Tibetans. Baghsu is a sleepy little town that is positively overrun with Israelis during the summer months before the monsoon comes sweeping in - and drives all the tourists out. I stayed in a farmhouse that was a good half hour walk up from the village, reached by a nearly vertical mountain path that had me gasping for the first week - until I got used to it. I paid $1 per day for my room, and an additional 25 cents for chai (spicy Indian milk tea) in the morning and dinner - dahl, rice, vegetables and chappati cooked by the lady of the house over the open fire built into the kitchen floor.
I loved it there. In the mornings I'd wake up to watch the sunrise from my balcony and wait for Shusha, the owners' 12 year-old daughter, to call up to me, "Lisa, you want chai now?" I'd sip my tea from a large glass while looking down at the dark-and-light-green checkerboard of fields spread out below, at the spread-out farmhouses that clung to the mountainside and at the cluster of buildings that was McLeod Ganj. There was no telephone or radio and only intermittent electricity (at night I read in bed by candlelight); I washed my clothes at the cold water tap outside, using a block of laundry soap and a scrub brush; when I wanted to bathe I paid 5 cents for a bucket of water heated on the fire. Let's not talk about the toilet - I think Ashley has that subject covered.
Down in the village there was a guesthouse, owned by a guy named Anil, that was very popular with Israelis. Anil was popular for two reasons: he sold very high quality hashish, and he served the ultimate cure for the munchies - banafu pie (AKA diabetes on a plate). This stunningly sweet and hyper-calorific delicacy consisted of a graham cracker crust filled with a mixture of dolce de leche, sliced bananas and dried coconut. It was sudden death by dessert, and totally irresistible. And the only reason I didn't gain a ton of weight from my near-daily indulgence was that mountain path I climbed at least four times per day. And also possibly the stubborn case of dysentery that clutched my gut for nearly 6 months.
And it was over banafu pie, consumed at a big communal table in the guesthouse courtyard, that a friend pointed to a group of scruffy-looking Israeli guys at the other end of the table and told me they were members of an Israeli hip hop group I'd never heard of. I think they were eating banafu pie too. We talked a bit, but I can't remember what was said - just tourist chat, I guess.
If my description of Anil's internationally famous dessert has whetted your appetite, but you have no plans to go to India in the near future and you live in Israel, fear not: banafu pie has come to Tel Aviv. It can be had at the Israeli version of an Indian tali restaurant called 24 Rupee, at 14-16 Shocken Street (above the motorcycle shop). Just follow the smell of Indian cooking and Sai Baba incense up one flight of stairs, plunk yourself down on a cushion in front of one of the low tables, and it shall be brought to you. And the tali is really good, too. The restaurant owners imported a couple of young Indian guys to do the cooking.
