How to survive the shock of moving and become your own in a foreign country
'18.02.2019'
Source: Ekaterinburg Online
“The first night we shook from disgust”: Ekatrzhenburgka Aya Saffron went to live in the Israeli desert. On the portal Ekaterinburg Online Aya told how to survive the shock of moving and become her in a foreign country.
"Whether bevakasha ... uh-uh ... Sakit." As if from the side, I hear my uncertain voice at the checkout in the supermarket. “Packet? Adin? ”- clarifies the cashier sympathetically. Two months ago I was a Ural journalist, and hundreds of people read the words coming out from under my fingers. Now I cannot connect two words and I feel myself to those for whom in Hebrew there is an easily recognizable word “idiot”. I am “ola khadash”, a new repatriate in Israel, recently my family and I moved to the sunny (not even believe how sunny) city of Beersheba - the capital of the Israeli desert.
How to become an Israeli
We decided to go to another country after my husband, a pilot of civil aviation, tried to defend his right to fly for a year. After the next court made an unbelievable and even absurd decision, it finally became clear that we will now continue to defend our rights from afar. That is why we carefully unearthed our Jewish roots and told the Israeli consulate that we want to return. The return is a move to Israel of a person who has at least 1 / 8 of Jewish blood. It is believed that he is returning to his historic homeland, even if neither he nor his ancestors before the seventh generation had ever been there.
Whether you have the right to become a citizen of Israel, decides the consul. At the meeting with him, we brought a suitcase of documents - birth, marriage and divorce certificates, military IDs, employment records, diplomas of all our Jewish relatives. “Why is your birth certificate reapplied?” The consul asked sternly, looking at me suspiciously. Alas, the present has long since been lost, I did not have any other documents from the Soviet Union, so I had to come again. With a family photo archive, where I slowly grow on black and white photographs. And with dad. The evidence worked, and I got a cherished visa in my passport, which directly at the Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv is given Israeli citizenship.
Generous Israel bought us plane tickets and promised half a year not to let them die of hunger by paying a “basket” - a set of benefits for new immigrants.
July 12 morning in Koltsovo was cool and foggy. I had not been abroad before, and at the airport it seemed to me that our plane would just fly over the edge of a flat Earth into a void, like in the movie “Langolera”. However, after five hours we landed at the beautiful Tel Aviv airport. Together with other future Israelis, we were picked up by a pipeline, on which we acquired new documents, local SIM cards and a small bundle of new shekels. Past the planted fields and trees strewn with flowers, a taxi took us along the ideal asphalt to Beersheba, the capital of the Negev region.
Beer-Sheva is a small town, only 300 thousands of people live here. Basically it is built up with houses, which, according to Russian habit, we call Khrushchev houses. From the carpet of similar five-story buildings in some places stick up higher. On lawns, if it is permissible to call it so areas of bare clay, aloe, flowering trees and cacti are rampant (the largest ones in an attempt to raise their status began to wallow). Modest streets at every step stumble upon a roundabout, which further pacifies the already slow pace of life in the town.
We began our acquaintance with Beer-Sheva from a place that we later began to gently call “GATE”. Kleta Yelim's merkaz is the center of absorption of new Israelis, from here hundreds of people from Russia, Argentina, Ethiopia started their way in the Promised Land ... Students, singles and whole families, someone a month, and some years, live in small apartments. We were given shelter in “Kalitochka” for two weeks, during which we should have found an apartment.
The wise leadership of the center spread out different groups of immigrants in different parts of the building. In the same wing live mostly religious, including Falashi - the Jews from Ethiopia. In long robes, with facets and bales, only dark-skinned, they do not know why they have been stuck in Clythe for years. In another part we were surrounded by immigrants from the CIS. My children immediately made friends with children from Ukraine and Belarus. An unexpected member of the company was only a boy from Peru, who knows how to find a common language with Vlad, Left and Yegor.
When to learn Hebrew
What will prevent the Urals from dreaming and forgetting that he is on Israeli soil? Of course, the heat! If in a dream I have a desire to cover myself with a bed sheet, I am such a cool night. In the daytime, we consider moderate temperatures to be 30 degrees Celsius, usually the thermometer shows 35 – 36. And so every day - no cyclones and fronts. Old-timers said that we could hardly see rain before December. During the day there are almost no people on the streets: if someone needs to move somewhere, he will not go on foot, even 10 minutes, and go on an air-conditioned bus. By evening, the passers-by gets a little more, especially crowded in the parks.
About the love of Israelis for children are legends. We saw the material embodiment of these legends in the playgrounds of Beersheba. In the courtyards there are real towns, and in the parks there are huge cities, the realm of climbing, crawling and circling. In a rare Israeli family there are fewer than three children, while in religious families there are also ten sons and daughters, so the playgrounds are always full of little visitors. We often meet young Shoshan and David who speak Hebrew with their parents and listen to their answers in ordinary Russian.
Beersheba is an emigre city. I don’t know why, but this is where many immigrants from Russia and the CIS settle. On the one hand, it makes me happy: when my supply of Hebrew words dries out in the bank, the clerk just calls for a colleague Khan, brought to Israel by his parents at the age of three, and she patiently explains to me how to get a checkbook. On the other hand, the abundance of Russian-speaking saddens.
Only I want to test a new beautiful phrase learned in an ulpan (this is the name of Hebrew courses), as pitiful sellers in the store suggest that I do not suffer and go to Russian. This is partly why the lump in my throat does not go away at all, and things are tough with communication. Friends even came up with a special tag that reflects my current state - Aya Safran was made from Aya Saffron.
My husband and I learn the language every weekday from 8: 30 to 13: 00. By the way, Sunday is also among the weekdays, but Friday in Israel is a day off. On Friday, religious Jews are preparing for the Sabbath, when you can neither cook food, wash clothes, nor even turn on the light — just read, pray and rejoice. Our teacher Ronit 30 has taught Hebrew visitors for years, most of whom were Russian speakers. So, giving lessons, she learned Russian well. Ronit with amazing accent translates new words for us, rolls his “p” in a throaty voice (“Where was he like that, A'gtiom?”) And trolls us in the spirit of dialogue: “What did you drink in the morning before class?” “My friends and I drank a bottle of vodka.”
How to fight insects
In the "Gate" we now just learn, and live in a three-room apartment nearby. In Russia, the four of us lived in a two-room apartment, like many ordinary families with children, in Israel this turned out to be problematic. The fact is that one room here is always a living room, it has not only a door, but even a wall. You go into the apartment - and immediately find yourself in the hall, in principle, there are no hallways here. The rest of the rooms are tiny, they fit only a bed and a wardrobe. The philosophy of housing in Israel dictates a way of life in which family members spend a lot of time together, and separately they only sleep.
Another feature of Israeli apartments is a technical balcony. In fact, this is a small half-open room near the kitchen, there is a washing machine and all sorts of mops are stored. The windows in the bedrooms are small so that the sun does not heat up the air inside, but in the hall we have a glass door with an entire wall imitating an outdoor patio. We keep the door open around the clock, enjoying the draft. The Israelis cannot understand us: wherever possible, they create an analogue of Russian October with the help of air conditioners - and they get high.
Hot water in our home comes directly from the roof, where there are tanks. The sun glows them well, and even in the morning the water flows almost burning. There is no central hot water supply in Israel, nor is there heating. In winter, the temperature outside will drop to + 13 ° C. The walls in our house are thin, the windows do not fit tightly, so we are already preparing warm blankets and wool socks so as not to freeze in hot Israel.
Our apartment is on the fifth floor, but it is believed that on the fourth: the first is marked with the number 0 and is called “Karka”. I don’t know why, but at home in Beersheba they are building “legged”. As if there was permafrost here, although there is never temporary permafrost.
Once I was told that on the first floors people do not like to live because of insects that creep from the street. How happy we were that we found housing high, and how we squealed when we first met the native population of the apartment.
The first with the cockroach elder honored to meet my 10-year-old daughter. The appearance in the middle of the room mustache monsters the size of a matchbox (this is not counting the mustache), we learned from the reference cry from a horror movie. Behind the first cockroach came the second, third, tenth, fiftieth ... The lower the sun was setting, the bolder the insects behaved.
The first night we spent almost without sleep, shuddering with disgust. The next day, the children washed the dishes together: one was standing on the shukher, looking for cockroaches while the second was working with a sponge. Finally, the adults dragged poison from the store, and the busty army began to retreat. Every morning we went out into the kitchen and counted the bodies of our enemies, who gave up their breath overnight. Now we have almost defeated cockroaches: they have become much smaller, and the giants among them are no longer caught.
How to survive the shock of prices
When we drove into the apartment, there was almost nothing in it - only a pseudo-leather sofa, an old chest of drawers and a table. A week later, our house was fully furnished. I still can not believe what happened, because the plot seems stolen from a fairy tale about Cinderella. But it was like this: we wrote in the Russian-speaking group of the city on the social network that we are very wonderful, but not very rich guys from Russia, we came recently and ask us to give us furniture and household items that we have nowhere to put, but it’s a shame to throw it away.
What started here! There were comments in which the inhabitants of Beersheba invited us to pick up a bed, a wardrobe, a bicycle, a microwave, and so on.
Most of the people from the CIS came here in the middle of the 90's and experienced all the difficulties of emigration. Perhaps, therefore, there were many who wanted to do us a favor. Or maybe people in Beersheba just love helping others and have the opportunity to do so.
On the day of the move, my husband drove around the city in a rented car with a trailer and picked up furniture for us, and in the meantime several people came by themselves and brought bags of things. The fact is that on departure we did not take pans and old sheets, considering that we would buy the necessary things for life upon arrival. On the spot it turned out that prices differ from Russian by two or three times, so a liter of milk, for example, costs about one hundred rubles. Now I am trying not to convert prices to rubles, in order not to experience the state of shock in the store anymore.
So, having seen the prices, we also asked for unnecessary plates, saucepans and towels. Some people responded, and during the day the entire floor in the living room was filled with bags with all sorts of useful trifles. In the evening we got to the bags and found in them, among other things, food, a bottle of wine and two glasses. From such care was extremely warm and joyful, I wanted to sing like the heroine of a Disney cartoon. Perhaps rats and cockroaches would dance around and scrub the floors, but I restrained myself. A few days later we brought the apartment in order and made a housewarming party.
Who is going to work
For more than a month now we have been living in Beersheba. Now I know that it is necessary to buy food on Friday afternoon: a wild sale begins at the market, you can buy mangoes and grenades for a penny. The stores also have a stir, because they will close until 16 hours: Shabbat, that is, Holy Saturday, begins on Friday evening, and you also need to get ready ... Shuttle buses also do not go. However, it is also possible to take profit from Saturday: a classmate from an ulpan told how once a company of religious young people invited him to turn on the air conditioner - religion forbids pressing a button. The reward was the packaging of beer.
I also know that you need to lay a couple of hours to visit a bank: in Beersheba no one is in a hurry, and in line for a credit card in Leumi you have time to remember Sberbank with nostalgia. In general, I was warned about Israeli banks even at the airport: there are no good ones here, don’t hope for much. Indeed, it turned out that there is such a thing as anti-kashback here: I pay with a card, and at the end of the month a commission is charged for each operation. It is difficult to come to terms with this, so for the first time in many years I again use a cash wallet.
But I have a real checkbook with my name, like the rich characters of a Hollywood movie. I gave the landlady 12 checks, which she would gradually cash over the course of the year. Great reason not to meet!
I still have three months of an ulpan, a language test, and then professional courses. Newly arrived Russian-speaking journalists in Israel are not in high demand, so I plan to learn a new profession. Fortunately, the state will pay most of the courses. As long as there is no specialty, you can earn money - the work of a “meta-plane” (a person who cares for elderly or sick people) or a simple janitor in Israel is no less respected than the work of a doctor or teacher. On the salary of a loader or dishwasher you can live quite decently, but not exist. Of course, I consider this option as temporary.
Children also learn the language slowly: they will soon have to go to school, where all subjects are taught in Hebrew. This year there will be no studies in September due to the many holidays that have fallen for this month, so the lessons will begin in October. In the meantime, Yuna and Egor are roller-skating, going to visit friends in “Kalitochka” and slowly mastering the city.
Evening. I look out the window at the cacti, at the kids with paces and in piles, at the air-conditioned studded wall of the neighboring house. I look and I think, will Beer-Sheva ever be even a tenth as expensive as Yekaterinburg? How to know.
