Rescuing the Mother Tongue

Words that connect and soothe, generation to generation.


By Herbert Hadad

Near the end, sweet Aunt Bessie, age ninety and alone, her face shrunken and scarlet with anger, sat still in her bed in a West Roxbury, Massachusetts, nursing home, declining to visit the Jewish chapel and refusing her favorite food, chocolate kisses.

But when I murmured words she first heard in her mother’s arms—“Ya habibti, sabah al Khair. Entee helweh”—her face became soft and alive. I had told her, in Arabic, “My dearest, good morning. You are beautiful.”

At her funeral in a decrepit Melrose cemetery hard by a gravel plant, a small group, including Aunt Bessie’s nurse, gathered to hear a rabbi in scuffed black shoes intone the traditional prayers. A usually staid relative indulged her graveyard grief, sobbing that she and Aunt Bessie had become close and shared many wonderful conversations.

The kind nurse seemed to feel only truth should follow Aunt Bessie into the ground. She leaned toward us and said, “Aunt Bessie didn’t utter one word in any language during her last three months.”

One of my enduring ties to Aunt Bessie had been the remarkable resemblance between her striking young portrait in the Old World photos and my daughter, Sara Jameel. But my last visits to my aunt—born Bahiyah Hadad in either Beirut, Lebanon, or Aleppo, Syria—demonstrated anew a bond far more irresistible: the Arabic language.

Its power and mystery had seized me as a boy at my father’s knee and never let go. The same forces compelled me to urge my children toward the elusive, wonderful pursuit of our mother tongue.

The strange part was my father had never once called me into our Dorchester living room, put down the evening newspaper, and said, “Son, the Arabic language is essential to our culture and history. It would please me very much if you began its study.”

Rather, this message had been conveyed by the joy I saw in his face when he spoke with Aunt Bessie and Uncle Charlie, or the Syrian merchants who owned the Middle Eastern grocery stores where we shopped in Boston’s South End. It was a joy I equated with the quiet religious bliss he radiated after an arduous day of prayer in the shul.

In a household where the father but not the mother spoke Arabic, the task of learning the language seemed overwhelming. My mother not only didn’t speak Arabic, she was suspicious of it, convinced Dad spoke it when he was hiding something.

In response, she’d do a funny, wicked imitation, producing a range of gargling noises while flailing her arms. Their fights ended humorously, at least to a child’s ears, with him resorting to laments in Arabic—about which she knew nothing—and her to complaints in Yiddish—which escaped his comprehension.

For several years, I chose to forgo the study of written Arabic and tried instead to memorize a repertoire of words and phrases. Then, at Northeastern, I was obliged to take “Survey of Western Civilization,” with Dr. Elmer Cutts.

Freshmen uttered his name with dread. He was blunt in both stature and manner, and his pointy-toothed smile suggested not good humor so much as the pleasure that he, like Hannibal Lecter, would derive from your imminent execution.

After a while, I managed to ignore his bearing and became captivated by his teaching. Dr. Cutts made the glories of Middle Eastern history come alive, igniting a pride in my ancestry. Although he didn’t teach Arabic, he stoked its flame in me.

As a new father, I took up the quest in earnest. I didn’t hear the voice of the muezzin in the minaret calling the faithful to prayer—still, I brought my own kind of zeal to the discipline. I left my wife, Evelyn, asleep and rose every weekday morning at 4 to study Arabic for two hours in our spare bedroom, before preparing for a day’s work in Manhattan.

On Saturdays, I studied formally at a local college, poring over texts, listening to tapes, writing the alphabet. I practiced the sounds that seemed to begin as harsh, grainy noises at the roof of the mouth or the back of the throat, yet arrive on the tongue as smooth and rich as honey.

Once, I brought my father, who was visiting from Boston, to class. He sat curious but bored as we students tried to master first-grade written and spoken Arabic. His observation only broadened my sense of the mystery. “The professor’s teaching you Baghdadi Arabic with a Romanian accent,” reported my father, who himself knew nine languages.

I played my language tapes at home, hoping to immerse the children in the sounds, lure them into asking for instruction. The boys, Edward Salim and Charles Aram, made desultory efforts to please Dad, but Sara Jameel, the youngest, not yet five years old, seemed genuinely to heed the call. Under my tutelage, she began to learn how to count in Arabic.

One day, she went all the way to ten—“a-sha-ra.” A few days later, I asked her to say “ten” in Arabic again. She grinned and scrunched her shoulder. “Try,” I said. She looked up at me and said, “Osh-kosh b-gosh.” I laughed, but I was hurt. Still, though she did not ask again to see the Arabic text or hear the tapes, I took comfort that the seed had been planted.

On a Saturday morning weeks later, as I lay in bed getting the first luxurious rest of the week, the door burst open. The children had been taught to knock, so the noise and the rudeness angered me. “What’s going on here?” I hollered. “Ashara, Daddy. Ashara,” said a soft, sweet voice. Sara had just remembered her word.

When I recounted Sara Jameel’s efforts in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, readers around the world responded with calls and letters supporting my mission. Was the early instruction only skin-deep? Well, yes and no.

Fifteen years later, during one of Sara’s visits home from college, I noticed a mark on her left inner ankle. I looked more closely: It was a tattoo that spelled “ashara” in classic Arabic script. “Do you like it, Dad? I researched it on the Internet,” she said.

Soon after that, I ran the Marine Corps marathon in Washington, D.C. The day before the event, not quite certain why, I added an audiotape to my duffel bag before I kissed my family good-bye and took the train to the capital. I ate a pasta dinner with a longtime friend, Michael Hornberger, and went back to his house for a good night’s sleep.

But I was not ready for sleep. I was seized by the notion that, barring a disaster in my conventional life, running the marathon was as close as I would get to challenging death.

I reached for the audiotape and listened to Um Kalthoum, a famous Egyptian singer I first heard with Dad, listening to The Arabic Hour on a Quincy radio station. Though I understood maybe one word in ten or twenty from the ballads of longing and love, the incredible voice enveloped me in comfort. Maybe too much comfort, for the next day I ran too fast, too bold, too soon, and both my body and my will quit at mile sixteen. But I returned to my family, safe and at peace.

Though Sara Jameel’s interest in Arabic had waned, we spoke of how she might one day develop a mastery and pass it back to me. Once, as we drove to her freshman dormitory at Syracuse University, we spotted a masjid, or cultural center, near the campus. I urged her to visit, to see about taking up the study of Arabic there.

She called me one night, but not with the news I had hoped for: “I went to the masjid with a girlfriend, and a very nice man listened to why we had come, and when we finished, he said, ‘I understand. You wish to begin preparations to become a Muslim.’”

I exhorted her to visit the head of the languages department at the university. She called afterward. “He said Syracuse offers five courses in Hindi but not one in Arabic. It’s going to take time to correct that oversight, and he’s sorry.”

So it seemed she would not surpass even my modest accomplishments in the language. But hope comes in many forms, and Arabic has powers all its own.

Two years later, Sara Jameel invited Evelyn and me to spend a weekend with her at school. After we settled in and met her six housemates, Sara surprised me by asking to go to a store she had heard about but never patronized.

When we arrived at Samir’s Middle Eastern Foods, we entered a bazaar, a souk, a whole new world filled with exotic-looking brass ladles and water pipes, and the smells of intermingled bouquets both pungent and subtle.

We ducked into narrow aisles, studied curious labels on cans, guessed at contents, sampled olives out of barrels and nuts from enormous glass jars, bit into coffee beans, tested spices on our fingertips, picked out honey-covered pastries.

Almost two hours had passed when Sara Jameel said, “Dad, teach me how to make hummos.” We found Samir, a gregarious, wavy-haired Syrian, for help with locating the ingredients.

“Here,” said Samir, “don’t forget the olive oil, and lemon juice to make it perfect. And to decorate, take the fresh diced parsley and a little paprika.”

Samir kneaded my shoulder to show his pleasure in helping. He turned to Sara Jameel. “I want to teach you,” he said, “to say it right. The delicious bread for scooping in Arabic is ‘qubs,’ and the full name for hummos is ‘hummos bi tahini,’ chickpeas with sesame sauce.” He translated all the ingredients into Arabic. “With this dish you can take ‘qahwa,’ or ‘shai,’ or ‘haleeb’—coffee, tea, or milk,” he said.

I whispered to my daughter. “Shukran, Sayyid Samir” (“Thank you, Mr. Samir”), she told him, vowing to return. “Ahlan, habibti” (“You’re welcome, dear”), he said, and wished us good-bye with “ma’a-el salameh”—“go in peace.” We returned to the house, and Sara Jameel began making her new dish and practicing her new words.

I slept exceedingly well that night, as did my father, and his father before him.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate, is an award-winning writer who lives outside New York City.