Another Alphabet Makes Five: Arabic

 

Alif, Baa, Ta, Tha...the beginning of the Arabic Alphabet

Growing up I was mono-lingual. I still am mono-lingual if fluency is the measure language.  My father spoke Yiddish, but had no interest in teaching me the language of his home.  Except for a crash course in Hebrew six months before my Bar Mitzvah, I had no language training growing up. 

During my second enlistment, I lived in West Germany for three years, from 1976-79.  During that time I tried to learn German, but never got very far.  I also began to learn Ancient Greek, a language I studied on and off right up to the present moment. In the past two decades I have take six semesters of Ancient Greek.  

The Alpha to Omega of Ancient Greek

Somewhere in the nineties, I started to learn French.  It became very useful when I got a job with the American branch of a French chemical company.  I made a dozen trips to France and could carry on a simple conversation and read some documents.  

Although our ability to learn language is greatest when we are very young, my interest in language got deeper in the past decade.  I had always loved Russian literature since my first Russian lit. class in college.  Around 2013 I decided I wanted to go to Russia, riding south to north from Odessa to Finland.  The trip never happened, but I took three semesters of Russian and practice what I know several times each week.  Now I had three alphabets floating in my head.  

The Russian alphabet has 33 characters

In 2017, Nazis marched in America chanting "Jews will not replace us."  I joined a synagogue.  It had been fifty years since I had read or said any Hebrew, but I started to learn.  Now I have four alphabets.  My best friend Cliff also decided to learn Hebrew so we commiserate  about the difficulties of learning language at our advanced ages.  

Hebrew reads right to left and has script characters

that are really different from block characters. 

And now Arabic.  I probably should have tried to learn Arabic when I deployed to Iraq in 2009.  But I have been to Israel three times since 2017 and hope to return sometime in the next couple of years.  I saw a lot of Arabic and decided I should at least be able to read the signs.  

My language practice app is Duolingo.  They just added an alphabet feature for alphabets other than the one for western  languages.  So I decided I could start from nothing and see if I could get to some basic phrases with just Duolingo and some writing.   

Last month when I was in Germany for two weeks, I could order food in a restaurant in German. Language rests in strange places in my head.  

So I will keep struggling with five alphabets and six languages (there is always more to learn in English) and possibly read Arabic signs on my next trip to Israel.

Terezin: "Model" Concentration Camp and Death Camp for "Mosaic" Christians

The ironic lie at the gate of many concentration camps, including Terezin

Two weeks ago I visited the Terezin concentration camp west of Prague in the Czech Republic. Terezin is variously classed as a ghetto or a concentration camp.  Tens of thousands died in the camp both from execution and disease, but it was not an extermination camp with gas chambers.  

Dozens of people slept in these bunks

Terezin was used a "model" camp. It was the camp the Red Cross was allowed to visit in February 1944 to show that the camps were not as bad as the reports coming out as the Nazi Army retreated.  The Nazis gave the Jews in the camp some autonomy. Many Jewish children were sent to Terezin and not made into slave laborers or murdered, at least for a while.  

A memorial to Jews tortured and murdered in the small fortress at Terezin

Another group sent to Terzin was professing German Christians who had even one Jewish great-grandparent.  Christians with Jewish backgrounds were removed from Church leadership in 1933. All Jewish or "Mosaic" Christians were expelled from Churches in 1935. Many were sent there to be enslaved and eventually murdered at Terezin or sent to Auschwitz to be enslaved or murdered.

A memorial near the fortress wall that served as an execution site

After my first visit to Auschwitz in 2017, I began to see the area controlled by the Nazis, between the Pyrenees and the Ural mountains, as a place where 400 million people with a Christian identity lived and possibly one in a thousand acted like Jesus. All those Christians were living normal lives until the Nazis took over, then the trial came and 999 of 1,000 murdered and dispossessed their Jewish neighbors or averted their eyes.

The history of Terezin and the attempt to make it a "model" camp makes clear that even the worst of the Nazis knew that their actions were evil. 

Walking My Bike in a Grocery Store

 

Bike path??

Yesterday I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from the afternoon ride. I was on my racing bike so I did not have a lock and was not going to leave a bike with $2,000 wheels outside a store, so I walked my bike through the store.

As I walked to the back, a woman said, "I've never seen that before."

I remembered I needed coffee cream so I walked over to the dairy section. After I picked up the carton, a man in his mid-40s looking at the milk display said, "You look like someone who stayed trim later in.....as you got older. What kind of milk do you drink? I could slim down some. Do you drink almond milk?"

When he took a breath I said, "I drink Lactaid. I tried almond milk. I don't like it. But you could try it."

He thanked me and said he should exercise more. I waved and clicked away (bike cleats) toward the cash register.

Only once did I have someone tell me I could not walk my bike in a grocery store. I pointed out that my bike took up less space than a shopping cart.

Have you ever walked a bike through a store?