The Best of Both Worlds?
by Sarah Toib
What’s your mother tongue? For Americans living in Eretz Yisrael, it’s sometimes hard to say. I’ve lived in Eretz Yisrael for almost 20 years, and I often come across women who grew up here but speak fluent English. So much so that I am sometimes surprised when I find out that they did not come from an English-speaking country. Their command of English is complete; they even have just the right accent, the right nuances, and often even the mentality of their parents’ home country. I wonder, how do they do it? How did their parents raise them to be so perfectly bilingual?
What a gift! How I wish that all of my children had the gift of two languages. When I mentioned this to my oldest daughter, the one of my children who speaks a fairly fluent English, she emphatically disagreed. She said that growing up in a home of foreigners (referred to here as “chutznikim” because they come from chutz la’aretz) “feels like I’m a really skinny person trying to sit on two chairs; in the end I fall between them.” The cultural part of that statement needs an article of its own, but the bilingual aspect interested me. And so I decided to ask around, speak with others in the situation, and find out for myself: Do chutznikim growing up in Eretz Yisrael in a strong English-language environment have the best of both worlds? Or are they straddling the fence and have neither? What are the pros and cons of being raised in a bilingual setting?