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May 24, 2013
This month’s word: Fadicha
Embarrassments in varying degrees are just part of immigrant life.
EMILY SINGER
Fadicha: an extremely embarrassing situation. Origin: Arabic. Classic immigrant Israeli fadichas include walking into a store out of the rain and asking for a noodle (itriya) instead of an umbrella (mitriya), and spitting up on the waitress after ordering an exotic sounding Mediterranean dish and discovering you have just bitten into ox testicles.
If you consult our Isra-slang Dictionary (which has not yet been written but is already starting to look like a Singer-family photo album), you will find my husband Ross, a few years back when we lived in Jerusalem, trying to take our kids to gan (kindergarten).
It’s a rainy winter Jerusalem day. Ross steps outside with the kids, and the rain is coming down in buckets. It’s not like buckets are being dumped on their heads. The rain is flying sideways, rendering their “noodles” nearly useless.
We have no car, and they are looking at what would be a 20-minute walk in good weather. The boys beg Ross to hail a taxi. They go down to the nearby main road, and wait at the side with their hands out in Israeli fashion. In North America, when you hitchhike it’s common practice to make a thumbs-up gesture and point in the direction you’d like to go. In Israel, you point straight down at the road with your forefinger, as if to say, “You must stop right here right now.”
No cabs are stopping. They are all full of soaking wet passengers who had the same idea as Ross. Finally, he gives up and starts to dial a private cab company. As he dials, a car pulls up next to him with a sweet-looking older couple inside.
The woman leans out the window and says, “Talpiot?”
Ross cannot believe his luck. “Yes, we are going to Talpiot! I am trying to get my kids to gan. Thank you so much!”
He proceeds to close up the useless umbrellas and pile the dripping wet kids into these nice people’s car. He climbs in after them and starts to direct the driver. The directions are not simple because, as a family of pedestrians without a car, he forgets to take into account the one-way streets. After a very complicated detour, he manages to send our first little guy off to school. He gets back in the car and begins to direct the Nices to the next stop, just down the street. As they start to pull away, the husband points across the street and asks, “Excuse me, is that Talpiot?”
Ross’ jaw drops, because, as we say in Hebrew, “nafal ha’assimon,” which means quite literally, “the assimon dropped.” This expression is a reference to the old Israeli phone tokens with the hole in the middle that you would insert into public pay phones, often several at one time if you were dialing long distance or planning a long conversation. You would put in the coin, and then wait for it to fall with a loud clink. Today, the expression refers to the dropping of the assimon in our brain. It’s like when you tell someone a joke and they stare at you blankly. Sometimes, if you wait, you can see the precise moment when the guy gets it and starts to laugh (or groan, depending on the joke). This moment is called “nafal ha’assimon.”
So Ross is sitting there in the soaking wet car with this lovely couple, when “nafal ha’assimon.” He suddenly realizes what he’s done. He says, “Um ... you weren’t offering us a ride, were you? You were just asking directions.”
Classic fadicha.
We had a fun little international fadicha here just before this last Passover, when President Barack Obama came for his first visit to Israel as leader of the free world. Things started great, with Obama thanking Israelis for their warm welcome, and delivering in Hebrew the message, “Atem lo lavad” (“You are not alone”). He followed this with other choice Hebrew phrases such as, “I’d like a falafel please.” Just kidding, but he really did work very hard to ingratiate himself to the skeptical Israeli public. And how did we, as a nation, thank the president for his warm embrace? We put the wrong kind of gas in his limousine.
I was in my kitchen listening to the news when I heard that the presidential limo had broken down on the road. I had a vision of Obama stepping out, popping open the hood and having a little look around inside. They were interviewing the mechanic who received the emergency call. The reporter asked him, “So how long did it take you to get there: a few hours?” The mechanic laughed and said that no, they arrived right away. Still, the car needed to be fixed, so they brought in a new limo from Jordan. Apparently Israel doesn’t have any sufficiently secure vehicles for the job. Perhaps Jordan’s limo stocked a better wet bar.
As it turns out, Obama wasn’t even in the limo at the time. It was just being brought to the spot where his helicopter would be landing.
Some Israelis felt the whole presidential visit was a big fadicha. I heard several people express embarrassment at how the country fell over itself trying to please this politician who some thought had been giving them the cold shoulder for four years. It was his first trip to the country as president, and we were acting like Princess Diana had arrived.
The media coverage of Obama’s visit was around the clock. They didn’t want to miss anything. When the president first landed, he gave a speech at the airport. The press was there. I was listening to Army Radio, and they couldn’t contain their excitement. As Obama stepped out of Air Force One, the commentary went something like this (the names have been changed to cover up the fact that I don’t remember their real names):
Yossi: “OK, Hadas. What do you see?”
Hadas: “The president is just stepping off the plane! I can’t really see him because he’s surrounded by thousands of security personnel and media with better connections than we seem to have, but I’m sure he’s in there somewhere.”
Yossi: “What’s happening now?”
Hadas: “Well, they’re headed to a special secure room from where we are told Obama will give a short speech before heading to Jerusalem.”
Yossi: “Now what’s happening?”
Hadas: “It’s just more of the same. Perhaps you should play a song or something.”
Yossi: “No, Hadas, that’s OK. I think we’ll stay with you so we won’t miss anything. What can you see now?”
Hadas: “Well, Yossi, Obama is headed into the room, so let me see if I can get in so our listeners can hear his speech. Hang on just a minute. One more sec.... Ouch! Sorry, Yossi, I didn’t make it into the room, but they are letting us look in through this glass wall here, so I can report what I see.”
Yossi: “Nu?! What can you see?”
Hadas: “He’s signing the guest book that important visitors sign.”
Yossi: “Can you see what he’s writing?”
Hadas: “No. Not quite. But I can see what kind of pen he is using.”
Yossi: “Well, Hadas? Don’t keep us waiting. What kind of pen is he using?”
Hadas: “It looks from here like a Cross MIB limited-edition pen.”
Yossi: “Wow! That’s quite a pen!”
Hadas: “Yes, Yossi, it is the choice of many American presidents....”
My favorite Israeli entertainment personality also got swept up in the hype. For those of you who have read my earlier work, you may recall Beni Ba’Radio, a DJ with a daily show on which he provides such entertainment as “humming with famous personalities” and inviting callers to guess what song he is singing silently in his head. The only political thing I ever heard him do was when he tried to convince all 120 members of Knesset to participate in a group hug. But when he heard Obama was driving in his limo from the airport to Jerusalem during his show, he was beside himself.
He said in Hebrew something like this: “You mean President Barack Obama, the president of the United States, is sitting in the car right now? Maybe he has turned on the radio. He might be listening to this show. Oh my gosh! Wow! Wait a minute – hold everything! I’m sorry to my listeners, but for the next four and a half minutes, until President Obama arrives at his destination, I will switch to speak only in English, because....”
The he switched to English and continued: “President Barack Obama is maybe listening to this program right now. He may have tuned into Beni Ba’Radio, and now he can hear us here. Wow, wow, wow! What a great honor, Mr. President, to have you maybe listening to our show. My show. Beni on the Radio. It is such a terrific, wonderful honor. For the next four minutes, I may have your undivided attention. I may have the undivided attention of the president of the United States! So now is my chance to say whatever I want to the president. And Mr. President, I have ... nothing to say. I don’t know what I want to say! What shall I say?...”
Somehow Beni carried on this monologue until the news reported that Obama had exited from his limo and was heading to the Israel Museum. Then Beni switched back to Hebrew and said something like: “Whew. That’s it. It’s over. President Obama is no longer listening to us anymore. Now we can speak however we want. We can say dirty and terrible things. Like stupid and blech and, I don’t know ... mud and things like this....”
Some Israelis would have found Beni’s display of excitement distasteful. It took Obama more than four years to visit us here, and we are acting like bumbling idiots trying to please him – to make him feel welcome so he will want to come back. Fadicha. All said, I thought it was a lot of fun. It felt like the whole country was a big rock concert, and I was there too. Just my seats were really bad.
Emily Singer is a teacher, social worker and freelance writer. Singer and her husband, Ross, were rebbetzin and rabbi of Vancouver’s Shaarey Tefilah congregation until 2004. The Singers spent two years in Jerusalem and then moved to Baltimore, Md., where Ross was rabbi at Congregation Beth Tfiloh and Emily taught Judaic studies at Beth Tfiloh High School, until they moved to Israel in 2010. They have four children.
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