Educational Media Reviews Online

From Language to Language, a beautiful film about Israeli non-native speakers coming to terms with Hebrew, does every thing it does so well it astonishes, instructs, and delights, and engages eye, ear, mind, and (yes) heart along the way. The basic setup is deceptively simple. Nine Israelis of diverse backgrounds, some native-, some foreign-born, all of whom first spoke a language other than Hebrew, talk about their respective experiences learning the language of the land. It’s that deceptively simple setup – a camera that doesn’t move much, the speaker for the most part returning our gaze – that seems to allow for nine deeply affecting, intimate cinematic self-portraits to emerge. Writer-director Nurith Aviv has chosen some articulate, personable subjects to interview – four poets, a novelist (the celebrated writer Aharon Appelfeld, perhaps the best known among the interviewees), two musicians, an actress, and a philosopher. Not surprisingly, all are marvelously fluent in their acquired language. The native languages are variously Russian, Hungarian, German, Moroccan, French, and, for three of the subjects, Arabic (the language of two Israeli Palestinians and a woman whose parents emigrated from Iraq). It’s no exaggeration to say that language is the figurative fingerprint, the DNA of essential identity. The interviews – better, monologues (no questions asked on camera, the speakers go it alone) – last perhaps five, ten minutes apiece. The stories told involve predictable (though no less painful) hardships – the prejudices greeting foreigners, the embarrassment of possessing a socially demeaned accent, the loss of a mother tongue, the palpable disdain for Arabic (a related Semitic language) in a land where it had always been spoken. But there is clearly triumph as well – all the speakers, whatever they say, seem very much at home in their adopted language (and apparently have achieved successful careers as well). Interestingly, three speakers mention the language they dream in – one dreams in two languages; one had only one dream in Hebrew, the rest take place in her native Russian. On the other hand Mr. Appelfeld dreams only in Hebrew now, referring to it as his new mother tongue, but occasionally he awakens terrified he’ll have forgotten the language entirely! The poet Meir Wieseltier talks of having needed to kill his native Russian in order to write in Hebrew, only to discover later on all the Russian influences – rhythm, meter, etc. – present in his Hebrew verse. Mr. Appelfeld talks about the difficulties of speaking Hebrew – “It’s not a language that flows out of you, it’s more like shoveling gravel into your mouth.” The Palestinian musician Amal Murkus doesn’t mind learning and performing the Israeli repertoire, but she’d be happier if her Israeli audiences would be more receptive to her Palestinian one. The film speaks, as it were, in its silences as well – as though to remind us of the difference. In some cases the gestures the speakers make speak as loudly as their words. The pans between interviews take us from location to location in Israel over a varied landscape, sometimes urban, sometimes rural. During the pans, the soundtrack is conspicuously music free except for the occasional traffic noise or bird twitter. For the interviews themselves the camera movements are, as mentioned, pretty much static – a single focus on the speaker, artfully composed, maybe a glance at a bookshelf, the room’s décor, plants and trees outside the home (roots?). In fact everything, but everything, is so very beautifully photographed. And, lest we forget, unless we are Hebrew speakers ourselves, we’re watching the film at another remove – a translator’s subtitles…. The last words are given to Daniel Epstein, a Swiss-born French Israeli rabbi and philosopher – he’s the person who regularly dreams in both French and Hebrew. While awake, he also dreams – of passing on “… an impossible message from language to language, from one world to another.”