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Oct. 26, 2012
For today’s lesson: pro-tek-tzia
Hebrew language skills might get you a job, but Israeli slang will help you survive.
EMILY SINGER
To survive in Israel, you’ve got to know the language. I don’t just mean Hebrew. In fact, there are entire sections of the country where you can bear and raise all your children and they will have little need for the local tongue. When my husband Ross was in yeshivah in Efrat, he went into the post office and asked in carefully rehearsed Hebrew, “Bulim b’vakasha?” (“Stamps please?”). The woman behind the counter replied in a heavy New York accent, “What kwind of styamps do you waant?”
No, the language you need to know in Israel is not Hebrew. What you need is the language of slang. There are certain essential words and phrases without which you may find yourselves lost, homeless or looking like an idiot. For those of you who may be visiting the Holy Land sometime soon, I present to you a mini-course on Israeli slang. For our first lesson, I will teach the indispensable term “protektzia.”
Protektzia is defined in the Israslang Dictionary (which I hope to write one day) as “the only way to ever get anything accomplished.” Protektzia is the art of getting things done by knowing the right people. It’s getting the Great Synagogue for your son’s bar mitzvah because your cousin is the secretary. Or getting to use the bathroom in the bank because your old army officer is the security guard.
There is a popular joke in Israel: What do you do in Israel when your house is on fire? Answer: You call your neighbor and ask if he has protektzia with the fire department.
As you can imagine, protektzia is not easy to come by for us new immigrants. I don’t have any family in Israel except the ones I brought with me, and I have never served in the Israeli army. Thankfully, someone with tremendous business savvy has recently created a business called (I swear I am not making this up) Anglo-protektzia. They help the poor English-speaking “friarim” (a term for a future lesson that I will loosely define here as “fools”) who don’t have protektzia to find the best deals on goods and services.
As a recent immigrant, the best way I can offer a personal object lesson on protektzia is to share what happens when you don’t have it.
My youngest son was born in the Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital on a particularly busy night for surgical births. Giving birth by emergency C-section, I found myself in an overflow recovery room designated for what obviously was the Screaming and Howling Incoherently All Night Long Ward. When the doctor finally made his way to my bed, he looked at my card, looked at the nurse and asked, “What on earth is she doing here?”
After a night’s sleep laced with morphine but peppered with the random shouts of fellow patients, I was feeling the pain of my delivery returning and I rang the button to ask for more medication. I was informed by a smiling nurse that I was at my prescribed morphine limit and that they had no other pain killers that were deemed safe for new mothers on the Screaming and Howling Ward. I would have to wait until a bed became available for me in the New Mothers Ward.
A bed finally opened up and they moved me down to join the other moms. I was settled into my new room, and greeted by the nurse who we have since come to affectionately refer to as “Nurse Stalin.”
Apparently, Ein Karem has a strict policy of not permitting surgical wounds to rest and heal. All new moms must be up and doing pilates before the blood clots. We receive our first meal in bed but then, if we ever want to eat again, we must stand up and make our way to the cafeteria. And within the first 12 hours after surgery, all patients must shower.
Nurse Stalin entered my room and announced, “Your surgery was 10 hours ago. Up you go!” Between blinding pangs of searing pain, I asked in the most polite voice I could muster, “Could we please wait until I get my medication?” Stalin replied, “No! You must shower now!” In tears, I tried to explain about the pain medication and my lack thereof. Stalin repeated, “It is after 10 hours. You must get up and walk … or you will die of blood clots!”
The doctor on shift was standing outside my room, listening in on our conversation. She quietly called the nurse out into the hall, gave the nurse my medication and sternly instructed her to give the pain killer time to kick in. Stalin dropped the pills onto my tray and stormed out of the room.
An hour later, my friend Cigal came for a visit. She took three buses in the middle of her work day to spend the hospital’s one visiting hour with me. Just as she arrived, Nurse Stalin reappeared. She removed my catheter and declared, “Now, we shower!”
“But my good friend has just arrived from the city. Could I visit with her a bit first please?” I pleaded.
“You shower now, or I don’t come back!”
I begrudgingly allowed Ms. Stalin to help me with my shower. She reluctantly refrained from dropping me on my butt along the way. After she accomplished her mission, she had had enough of me. I was in the hospital for five more days, during which I received no help at all whenever Stalin was on duty. For my last two days, I was moved into a renovated broom closet in Siberia, in the back corner of the hospital with no windows and no room service at all (though the occasional janitor popped a head in looking for a mop).
Before I was banished to Siberia, when I still had a view of passersby, I would watch longingly from my door as one of the cafeteria workers would bring lunch to a new mom down the hall who happened to be her cousin. At those moments, I wished that I had a cousin who was a cafeteria worker. Or perhaps a brother in charge of distributing morphine.
The day I went into the hospital to give birth was the same day Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had his second stroke. We were neighboring patients in adjoining buildings. Upon Sharon’s arrival, they erected a tent city, with hundreds of reporters camped by the hospital entrance. When my family came to visit and, after I was discharged and I had to come back every day to visit my baby in the NicU, we had to park far away because of the tightened security. When Sharon’s visitors arrived, they were escorted in by army jeeps. Now, that guy had protektzia.
I really shouldn’t complain (though it doesn’t seem to stop me). As it happens, that birth was complicated for many reasons, and p’tu p’tu p’tu (see Israslang Dictionary for definition), our youngest son was born healthy and adorable. And, in the end, we had our own experience of protektzia.
Ross and I had resigned ourselves to the unanticipated cost of tens of thousands of dollars in extra medical expenses (a small fraction of which was covered by my husband’s fellowship program). We didn’t have the money, but if we spent the rest of our lives paying it off, every penny was worth it for our outstanding medical care – Nurse Stalin excluded. As it turned out, however, someone from the fellowship had a talk with a hospital administrator (perhaps they were tennis partners?) and, between the two of them, they miraculously worked out an agreement to cover all outstanding expenses.
As immigrants, we may never enjoy the full advantages of protektzia available to Sabras. Still, we are excited to prepare the way for the next generation. When our friends’ kids want to get into the yeshivah where my husband works and there’s only one spot left, it will be with great pride and joy that we will tell them, “Sorry, the last spot is reserved for our son.”
Emily Singer is a teacher, social worker and freelance writer. She is currently working on two books. 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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