I loved hearing stories from my dad about growing up in Hungary before coming to the US at age eleven. In fact, I was about eleven when he shocked me by telling me that he knew no English at the time, and had to learn it — fast — to cope at school.
At that age, I was going to Hebrew school in the late afternoons, after my regular school day, in order to start preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, two years later. Struggling with Hebrew pronunciation and vocabulary, I couldn’t begin to imagine how hard it must have been for my dad at that same age to learn a foreign language just to try to survive living in a foreign land 5,000 miles west of everything he’d known since birth.
As dad pointed out, the worst thing about English was that words were not spelled exactly as they were pronounced, as they always were in Hungarian. And, worse, the exact same letter pairings could be pronounced in many different ways.
His biggest nightmare, in this regard, were words that ended in -OUGH. First he learned that they were pronounced UFF as in ”rough and tough”, or OFF as in “cough.” But then he discovered they could also be pronounced OW as in “bough”, OH as in “dough”, or EW as in “through.”
He told me that on one particularly bad day, it was all he could do not to beg his parents to drive to New York so they could all get on a ship heading back to Europe. What bad day was that? The day he found out -OUGH could even be pronounced UP, as in “hiccough”!
Oh, English, we native speakers love you, but please give us grace when foreigners are trying to learn and want to throw up their hands and wail, “ENOUGH!” (not E-NOFF, E-NOW, E-NOH, E-NEW, nor E-NUP — just good old “EEE-NUFF!”).
Being a super curious pre-teen (shocker!), I asked Dad to write out a Hungarian word so I could try to pronounce it properly by just looking at it. First I conquered “Nem” (Hungarian for “no”), and then “Karem” (“please”) and “Eszem” (I eat). I was on a roll.
But Dad had a comedian’s soul, God bless him, and so with a sly grin he then wrote out — and kept writing and kept writing — this word, the longest one in Hungarian:
Megszentsegtelenithetetlnsegeskedeseitekert.
And, by golly, he showed me syllable by syllable how even it was pronounced exactly as it was spelled. When I told him that I’d love to show off (again, shocker) and use it one day in a conversation with my Hungarian aunt or uncles, he pointed out that the word meant “behaving in an obnoxious way, as if your reputation could never be sullied.” I had to admit that it’d be tough (as in “tuff”) to casually work it into a conversation.
And speaking of casually working something in, since I mentioned my Hebrew school experience above, I figure this is the only time I can ever end an essay by casually working in my favorite Hebrew school joke, very popular with my classmates back in 1960. It not only hits the mark about having to attend Hebrew school but also is a bulls-eye on Jewish mothers:
MOTHER: Abe, wake up. You’ll be late for Hebrew school.
ABE: I don’t wanna go. The teachers hate me, and the kids all make fun of me.
MOM: Too bad. You still have to go.
ABE: Give me one good reason why I should go.
MOM: I’ll give you two. You’re 56 years old, and you’re the Rabbi!
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here