WHY LEARN RUSSIAN?

WHY LEARN RUSSIAN?

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After learning Arabic for the third or fourth time, I decided to learn Russian for the second time (the first one was in 1967), I graduated from the teach yourself "university" with all the discs and accessories, and I started immediately to read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina , but there I got stuck at page 52. The problem is that with the difficult languages – Arabic, Russian and Greek, I can read a page or two in an hour, even with a translation, because the alphabet is so different and the language is so far from the languages I already know. Still, I learned by heart Anna Karenina 's first sentence and I boast with it to every Russian born Israeli that I meet, but unfortunately most of the young students don't know the sentence, not because of my awful accent but because they never read the book. Finally, I discovered that the old doorman at college knew the sentence!

English: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

Russian: "Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему."

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So, I read the Anthology of Russian Stories and there I was more successful because the stories are shorter and I managed to read until page 91 – Pushkin's The Stationmaster and Gogol's The Nose. Yet, when I visited Russia for the first time in a cruise to St Petersburg in 2014, the city and the language looked so familiar that I thought I am at home. Well, there are more than a million Russian Israelis and the language is heard at every street corner in Israel. Furthermore, most of the earlier Israeli folk songs have Russian melodies with Hebrew lyrics, as the first settlers were Russians and they brought with them their culture and folklore. There are many Russian words in Hebrew and of course in its slang. As a matter of fact, every Jew who came from one of the 100 countries of the Diaspora brought with him something of his culture, his language and his mentality, from Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Iran, India, Ethiopia, Russia, Poland, Germany, France, England, US, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, South Africa, Australia, Canada, etc. The hit parade of the Israeli radio when I was young had songs from England, US, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, Argentina, Italy, Greece, Portugal, most of the intellectual Jews spoke at least five languages, but nowadays I am very sorry that the young generation speaks only Hebrew and English. They don't read the classics anymore, of course not in their original language. They are excellent in High Tech, but have a very limited scope of interests. Where have all the cosmopolitans vanished? In Europe, I found in the young generation many intellectuals, who spoke fluently at least 3 languages, but not in other countries and not in Israel, sic transit gloria mundi… (sorry, is it Chinese?)

The Russian "teachers" in the Teach Yourself books were kind enough to teach the Russian learners also children songs, as the following "May there always be sunshine", Пусть Всегда Будет Солнце, (1962), which is one of the most beautiful children songs ever written.

Many Russian songs were adapted from Russian to Hebrew, French or English. We bring here the famous song Those were the days , sung by Mary Hopkin with Lyrics in English and Russian. The song was adapted from Russian by Eugene Raskin . The original song in Russian was composed by Boris Fomin, with Lyrics by Konstantin Podrevskii, and was called:

"Dorogoi dlinnoyu" ("Дорогой длинною ", lit. "By the long road"). It deals with reminiscence upon youth and romantic idealism. The song was recorded in over 20 languages, including Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Hebrew… On Christmas 1975, the President of Equatorial Guinea , Francisco Macías Nguema , had 150 alleged coup plotters executed in the national stadium while Hopkin's cover of 'Those Were the Days' was played over the PA system.

Finally, the Hebrew song Ruthy, like my wife's name, one of the loveliest Hebrew folk songs was an adaptation of the Russian folk song Вот мчится тройка почтовая. The Hebrew words were written by Haim Hefer and tell about the longing to a girl who waits for me in a distant shore. When I'll meet her I'll know what is the meaning of love, she will laugh and the wind will move her hair. Well, this describes exactly my longing to my girl Ruthy who waited for me at a distant shore of Naharya, she taught me what is love, with her laugh and unkempt hair. We bring here the song in Chinese , one more in Chinese , in Russian , one more in Russian, and one more , one more also , a Russian choir , another choir , with an orchestra , by a Romanian singer like my Ruthy who was born in Romania, a cartoon , in metal version , with balalaikas , and even more . With Russian subtitles , in a film 100 years old (1915), a karaoke version . In Hebrew - Nehama Hendel , Arik Lavie , Dudu Zakay , Arik Einstein – in memoriam, Lehakat Hel Hayam , etc.

I thought that I will feel myself estranged in my first visit to Russia in the Baltic Cruise. I heard such awful stories about crime, the Russian Mafia, but I liked the country and the people at first sight. Saint Pertersburg is a beautiful city, the palaces are wonderful, the people friendly, and I felt himself at home, bearing in mind that more than a million Russians reside in Israel. In Saint Petersburg I wanted to visit at least for a few hours the Hermitage Museum. My friends who have already been in this cruise gave me the email of a local guide charging half of the price of the American Cruise Ship and adapting himself to your wishes, but I opted to go with the ship organized tour that charged a few hundred dollars for a one day tour to the city. They are experienced, safe, they will bring you back on time, they can't cheat you… But I forgot that probably the ship belonged to a corporation that had only one target: maximize profits according to Milton Friedman's neoliberal precepts, and the hell with ethics and the customers, charging the maximum and paying to the poor "Soviet" guide the minimum, squeezing an extra dollar wherever they can. The tour left the ship early in the morning and the guide took us, the tourists, first of all to visit the underground – you walk for miles and it costs pennies, the rationale – feel yourself as a local citizen. After that the guide took us to a souvenir shop, of his friends (?), where we stayed for an hour…, because it was too early to visit the other sites. Well, the poor guide who got a few rubles for his working day had to earn some extra money… Then, we visited a couple of churches, with rudimentary explanations by the guide in a broken English, and at noon we were brought to a public garden (it was cold and raining) where we were given a lunch box comprising of a sandwitch, an apple and a bottle of water (the price of the tour for a couple was about $500)… Probably, there is no end to greed, but this time it was too much!

After that we went to visit the house were Rasputin was murdered (all the entrance fees amounted to a few dollars), and then we were taken once again to the souvenir shop, because one of the tourists wanted to buy some more souvenirs, at least that is what we were told. An hour before the scheduled return to the ship (we have to get back on time – Ordnung muss sein/there must be order, according to the Russian/German/Swiss saying), the poor tourists were taken to the Hermitage Museum au pas de course/at a run, leaving a few minutes to visit the wonderful impressionist exhibition which I loved so much. But this is not the catch! The catch was in what ensued. I decided that I will never cruise with this American company anymore and told this story to all my friends and the people that I met at the cruise. Yet, I wanted to leave them an opportunity to apologize and I complained to the CEO of the company, stating that I will never take another cruise with them. After a few days I received an answer from the special assistant of the CEO, stating very politely that they were sorry for the inconvenience and wanted to compensate me by giving me a voucher for upgrade at a ship restaurant (worth $10…) if and when I'll take another cruise with the company. To this we say in Italian – campa cavallo che l'erba cresce… wait horse until the grass will grow! And we conclude with the wisest of all, the neoliberal, friend/counsellor of Chilean dictator Pinochet - Milton Friedman, who said: "Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests." In this case we got a combined Russian/American excessive greed…

A Russian friend told me when we found a complaint box, called "tear box", in a former communist country of the Balkans, what an awful history those boxes had in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where at one time there were a hundred millions complaints, almost everyone complaining on the others, mostly anonymously, that they were against the regime, that they spoke against Stalin, that they were Zionists wanting to emigrate to Israel, (my forefathers in Spain and Portugal suffered probably from similar informers to the Inquisition), and every complaint was scrutinized, and were the basis for sending people to Siberia, sometimes also because they dared to complain overtly like Solzhenitsyn… Nowadays, when you complaint in a neoliberal regime like the US or even recently in Israel by our ministers, you are not sent to Siberia like in the USSR, but just sent to hell…