|
|
Introduction
Chimeras
Found in Translation
More than one-sixth of the population of Israel today speaks Russian. Instead of being called Zippi or Dvora, traditional Israeli names, the cashier in the local supermarket wears a nametag with Svetlana or Lyuba on it. Russian-language newspapers spill from kiosk counters, with the Maariv or Yedioth Achronoth, the leading Hebrew dailies, shamefacedly peeping from under the Cyrillic flood. In the 1980s when my mother and I did not want to be understood by passersby, we spoke Russian in the street. Nowadays, there are places in the country where we have to switch to Hebrew for the same purpose.
There are around 1.2 million Russian immigrants in Israel, out of the total population of 7.2 million. Around 900,000 of them are Jews. The rest are people who are legal citizens of Israel but are not Jews according to the Halakhah, the Jewish religious law that defines a Jew as a person whose mother is Jewish. There are also some illegal workers who have come from the former Soviet Union, perhaps as many as 70,000.1