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Tel Aviv Journal

Learning Hebrew on the Streets, With Walls as Assigned Reading

Graffiti in the Florentin neighborhood of Tel Aviv of road signs pointing one way to Tel Aviv and the other to Jerusalem.Credit...Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

TEL AVIV — The texts, written on metal grates, stone walls and neon signs, sometimes disappear from one class to the next. The themes are pluralism, economic justice and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and grammar, always a little grammar thrown in.

Guy Sharett’s Hebrew lessons are taught in a walking classroom, on the streets and alleys of Florentin, his neighborhood here, where new vocabulary words are mixed into an ever-changing curriculum.

“Get out from the TV, start to live,” Mr. Sharett translated one scrawled Hebrew slogan at the start of class one recent evening, trailed by a dozen students thirsty to understand the life of the Tel Aviv street as much as the revived ancient language spoken on it.

He pulled out a little white board to break down the graffiti before him. The first part of the slogan, “Tzay mayhatelevizia,” used the imperative — get out — while “tatchil lichayot,” start to live, was in the future tense. “It sounds to us too pompous and too archaic,” he explained, “so we just use the future.”

A few minutes earlier, they had analyzed a sign exhorting dog owners not to permit their animals to relieve themselves near a certain building. Next, a picture of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, with his famous mantra, “If you will it, it is no dream,” twisted into “If you don’t want, you don’t need.” Here, a verse by the street artist and poet Nitzan Mintz. There, the iconic image of a forlorn child from the Warsaw ghetto, captioned “Don’t Deport Me,” repurposed to the current crisis of migrant workers from Africa flooding south Tel Aviv.

“They depend on a cultural knowledge that you don’t necessarily have,” said one of the students, Marcela Sulak, who has been here two years as director of the creative writing program at Bar-Ilan University. “He teaches you the tools so you can figure it out on your own. You’re learning the Hebrew you need every single day by looking at the neighborhood.”

The hourlong classes, which cost 50 shekels, or about $12, are organized on Facebook. They grew out of last summer’s protests, when Mr. Sharett’s traditional Hebrew students were mystified by the signs at the encampment along Rothschild Boulevard, so he started taking them — and his little white board — outside for lessons. After the protest tents came down, he decided to make the graffiti-pocked walls of his gentrifying neighborhood the new syllabus.

“It’s not only to teach language, it’s also to teach the culture,” Mr. Sharett explained. “Someone took a line from a song we all know and changed one word; it’s very hard to understand that if you don’t have someone local to explain, ‘That’s a take on...’ ”

Mr. Sharett, 40, has a day job at a television company, but has been giving private Hebrew lessons for several years. Besides the graffiti course, he offers one-offs touring the city’s spice market (“Wake up and smell the Zatar”); shopping and cooking with a famous chef (“While chopping, we learn the names of the vegetables”); and watching the local version of “American Idol,” with frequent use of the pause button to translate slang and jokes (“This is Israeliness 101,” he said).

The son of an artist and a tugboat skipper whose home in Ashdod was “like a French salon,” Mr. Sharett is something of a language savant. “There was a Turkish neighbor, so I started learning Turkish; there was a German au pair, so I started learning German,” he said. At 16, he got a job in the control tower of the port, “so I was able to talk on the radio with captains in different languages and tell them to heave up the anchor — but only maritime terms that I can’t really use in regular life.”

The students on his tours want terms they can use in everyday life; many are dropouts from ulpan, the immersion classes that are free for new immigrants. A recent graffiti tour included a Chinese postdoctoral fellow; a 28-year-old Google employee from Rhode Island; a financial analyst and poet who is married to an Israeli; a British teacher who has lived here 20 years; Ms. Sulak, whose 5-year-old daughter slept the entire hour in her stroller; and a Middle Eastern politics professor at the City University of New York who is on sabbatical.

“Street politics is where it’s happening,” said the professor, Dov Waxman, 37. “Most places, graffiti is tagging or art. Here, you can really read the politics. I wander around and look at it myself, but I don’t always understand it all.”

Xiaoyun Wu, the postdoctoral fellow, has been studying Hebrew with Mr. Sharett for three months, and was the first to answer most of his grammar questions. “You get more contextualized memory,” she said of on-the-street learning. “The good thing is I can come back to review any time.”

Here, one finds a lesson on how easy it is to make up words — a tattoo parlor called, essentially, “tattooism,” using the Hebrew letters yud, zayin, mem to add “ism.” There, a black door features the ubiquitous road signs pointing one way to Tel Aviv and the other to Jerusalem, only the Jerusalem arrow leads to an ultra-Orthodox man at prayer. A tag declares “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” A sign uses the word “agudah,” association, which Mr. Sharett pointed out has the same root as the Israeli bus company, Egged, because buses link places together.

Then there is a new ampm convenience store, one of many chains now dotting the once-gritty streets of Florentin. “We pronounce it Ahm-Pahm,” Mr. Sharett told the group. “If you want to impress your Israeli friends, say, ‘Ani holech l’ahm pahm,’ ” which means “I’m going to the ampm.”

A correction was made on 
June 27, 2012

The Tel Aviv Journal article on Friday, about Hebrew lessons that are taught on the streets of a gentrifying neighborhood using the graffiti on buildings, metal gates and stone walls, misspelled the given name of a postdoctoral fellow who has taken the lessons for three months and said they provided “more contextualized memory” than traditional lessons. She is Xiaoyun Wu, not Xioayan.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Learning Hebrew on the Streets, With Walls as Assigned Reading. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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