American-Israeli and Israeli-American

I read Bayle's post :"I want to be there" where she writes about being in Israel 35 or so years, but still doesn't feel totally integrated into the Israeli culture, and it gave me a lot of food for thought together with a good bellylaugh!

I've been in Israel almost 4o years, but to Israelis I'm American and to Americans I'm Israeli. When I go to the States (which is very rarely) I get "Oh, how well you speak English - where do you come from!!".
They say I have an accent. But the Israelis also say I have an accent, and it's certainly not Israeli with the way I say the letter "r" - especially "Drora",and "Zaharira"!

I can't begin to tell you the amount of people who start to speak to me in broken English because they think people who have an American accent don't know Hebrew. Do people speak French to people who come from Morocco, or Tunisia, or Algeria and have accents, or speak Arabic to people who come from Yemen? Then why in the world do they think that people who have an Anglo-Saxon accent are illiterate and can't speak Hebrew?

My conversations with other "Anglos" take place in the "Hingloo" language. For those of you who have not heard of this language, it is half English and half Hebrew depending on the person I'm speaking with and which language I started out in in the first place! I find it very difficult to speak a full sentence in either language without running to the dictionary in the middle to find out how to say such and such a word, yet I know the word perfectly well in both languages! ! And of course there are words in Hebrew which are just not translatable in English and visa versa.


I'll close by referring again to Bayle's post, especially the clip from YouTube - "Here is there and there is here" from the Muppets because that pretty much sums up my situation as an Israeli American and American Israeli!