I meant to write about this two years ago, when it first appeared in Haaretz, but I didn’t, so sue me: Thou shalt not be a freier. This is a profoundly important article, notwithstanding its brevity, for explaining one of the most basic parts of the Israeli culture and ethos.
As I’ve written before, I was first introduced to the concept of freier a short time after I made Aliyah. My roommate at the time was doing me the huge favor of driving me somewhere, and some other driver cut him off needlessly and dangerously. I tried to get him to honk his car’s horn, because I saw the horn as an important means of nonviolent expression. But he declined to make use of the horn, explaining that the jerk who’d cut him off would actually appreciate being informed of his success. That is, the jerk would take it as an affirmation of his jerkness, as a slap on the back instead of one on the wrist.
Something changed in me that day, about the way I see other people and about the way I see how people’s interactions can help raise each other up or degrade each other, how they can energize us or numb us. There are two types of people in this society: the degraded and the numb. The degraded are the freiers, the animals who treat the numb like garbage, and do so because the numb ask for it. As I learned at the time, the most important thing to every Israeli is not to be a freier. And the absolute best way to ensure that you’re not a freier is to turn someone else into a freier (sort of like the game “smear the queer,” which I used to play with the neighborhood kids before any of us learned that “queer” was a derogatory term for homosexuals).
Anyway, read the freier article. Bookmark it. Print it out and distribute it to your coworkers. Leave copies of it on the bus and in government ministries.
One more thing: I see that the Vaad HaLashon’s Keren Dubnov considers “freier” to have entered the Hebrew language via Yiddish. I beg to differ. Even though the word is obviously of Germanic origin, I believe it entered Hebrew through Russian and did so at the time of the Second or Third Aliyot, both of which were comprised mostly of Jews from the Russian empire. To support my contention, I cite Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, volume one, page 619 (translator’s notes):
The language of the Russian thieves is used in this work to refer to much more than themselves.
Thus a nonthief in thief language is a “fráyer.” By virtue of being a nonthief, he is also naturally “a mark,” “a cull,” “a pigeon,” “an innocent,” “a sucker.” In this translation, “fráyer” has been rendered throughout as “sucker.”
I believe that the Israeli ethos is essentially Russian, not from the most recent immigration of a million and a half Russian-speakers from the former USSR, but Russian from way back, from the agrarian-socialist and social-democrat Jews who left Russia for this country in the first quarter of the last century, who are responsible for almost everything negative about this society and precious little of the positive.
Tags: Aliyah · freier · haaretz · hebrew · israel · russia · yiddishComments